SARAH VINE: Yes, there's one group of teachers who deserve more money

2023-01-28

SARAH VINE: Yes, there’s one group of teachers who deserve more money… Perhaps the most sensible thing I’ve read recently on the school strikes are the views of Katharine Birbalsingh

Every time I write about striking teachers, I’m inundated with messages from interested parties. They range from proud parents of teachers, who write in moving and insightful detail about their offspring’s dedication and the many classroom challenges they face, to angry diatribes from ideologues who consider schools to be their personal political playground.

But perhaps the most sensible thing I’ve read recently on the subject are the views of Katharine Birbalsingh, founder and headteacher of Michaela Community School in London’s Wembley Park.

‘I feel for teachers, as life can be very hard in the classroom because of poor behaviour, insane amounts of bureaucracy and because they can work very hard and feel a lack of purpose as they’re not necessarily seeing the impact of their work,’ she said.

‘It is the bureaucracy and the behaviour that we need to fix. But, as usual, we think the solution is more money, and that’s what we should be striking about. People strike when they’re unhappy. And I think there is a lot for teachers to be unhappy about. And what’s going to fix things is not more money. It’s better ideas.’

EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley (left) and Jennifer Gaffney, South Lanarkshire Association secretary, join members of the EIS and SSTA unions, on the picket line at St Andrew’s and St Brides High School in South Lanarkshire, Scotland on January 11

Birbalsingh isn’t everyone’s cup of educational tea. Her methods are highly disciplinarian, and she can sometimes seem a little over-zealous. But she runs an outstanding school in a deprived area, and it is thanks to her that many children who otherwise would have had very few opportunities now find that the world is their oyster.

She’s right: money is not the main problem in schools. The problem is the overall environment in which teachers are not just expected to be educators but also nannies, counsellors, policemen, social workers, accountants and goodness knows what else.

For many, this is just too much to handle, not least because often – owing to an excess of wokery, which increasingly makes using common sense and discipline impossible – they don’t have the right tools. Inevitably, good teachers leave or get pushed out, saddened and worn out. Those who remain tend to be the troublemakers who protect their own interests or pursue their own narrow political agenda instead of focusing on how to secure a good future for their students.

Take, for example, Daniel Kebede, who’s standing to be the next general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), Britain’s biggest teaching union. A familiar face in hard-Left circles, he has described testing children as child abuse and once told a pro-Palestinian rally to ‘globalise the intifada’.

Colleagues were reported in The Times as saying that, if elected, Kebede would be distracted by the ‘petty politics of secretive socialist sects’.

Such attitudes have nothing to do with improving outcomes for children. As ever, caught in the middle are parents and children. Parents who had to home-school their children during lockdown as schools were seemingly delighted to use Covid as an excuse to close their doors. Meanwhile, countless children (those, that is, who have not fallen out of the system completely) are trying to catch up after Covid with a limited window in which to secure the exam results that’ll determine the direction of their lives.

Daniel Kebede, who’s standing to be the next general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), addresses the ‘Rally for Palestine’ outside Downing street on August 10 last year

Now, they find their studies being sabotaged by the very people who ought to be supporting them. The truth is that the ideologues who have infiltrated our education establishment don’t seem to care if pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed. They appear happy to see them worn down by poverty and lack of opportunity.

Because it means they can control and manipulate them into believing their own dead-end narrative of deprivation and class warfare. All the time, they pump the hateful politics of envy into them, encouraging them to despise anyone with even an ounce of ambition or who dares to dream of a better life.

My own son’s teachers are due to strike next Wednesday.

It’ll be the usual suspects on the picket line: people who make excuses for their own failures, who cast themselves as victims and who devote all their energy on their own obsessions. Meanwhile, that ever-dwindling pool of good teachers will do their best to keep the school open because – unlike hard-Left ideologues such as Kebede and his ilk – they recognise that their duty is to the welfare of their pupils.

It’s those teachers we should stand in solidarity with. They are the ones who deserve better pay and conditions, more recognition, more support and understanding. Not the screeching, spittle-flecked loons who are, slowly but surely, taking over this noble profession.

If you’d forgotten Macavity Meghan!

TOUR OF DUTY: The Duchess of Sussex in South Africa in 2019

When Prince Harry was busy promoting his book, I noted how odd it was that the Duchess of Sussex – normally surgically grafted to his side – was nowhere to be seen.

We’ve still not seen hide nor hair of her.

Until she resurfaces, here’s a picture of Meghan at her most fragrant – a reminder to all her fans of what we are missing.

Prince Charles has been offered the chance to sleep in the State Bed on the night before his coronation.

Ah, but the crucial question is: will Black Rod be available to squeeze his toothpaste for him?

Rod Stewart says that he’s fed up with the Conservatives and thinks it’s time Labour had a go.

Surely this cannot be the same Rod Stewart who fled Britain for LA in 1975 to avoid paying the tax rate of 83 per cent – set, of course, by a LABOUR government.

Theory doesn’t hold water

I appreciate that Ghislaine Maxwell’s (pictured) family want to help her fight what they see as a miscarriage of justice

I appreciate that Ghislaine Maxwell’s family want to help her fight what they see as a miscarriage of justice.

But I’m not convinced about their decision to stunt up a photo of two people in a bath the same size as the one in which Virginia Roberts alleges she engaged in sexual activity with Prince Andrew, in order to try to prove such activity was physically impossible.

Not least because the photocopied pictures of Andrew’s and Virginia’s faces the participants have stuck on their own look unintentionally hilarious.

Also, I’m afraid it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see that a degree of intimacy would have been possible.

Worst, though, the man impersonating Andrew unchivalrously allows the lady to sit at the tap end of the bath.

Sam Smith’s video for I’m Not Here to Make Friends

Sam Smith’s new video is quite something.

The singer, who identifies as non-binary, appears in a corset, pearls and a tiara, right, straddling a roomful of backing dancers as they waggle their pert posteriors in the air.

I don’t care if Smith is a trans icon: all I see is a self-indulgent, overweight singer cavorting with a troupe of dancers who wouldn’t come within ten feet were it not for the 30-year-old’s fame and power.

NIcola Sturgeon has doubled down on her self-identification bill by claiming that opponents of the new law are using women’s rights as a cover for transphobia.

But what about all those using trans rights to cover for rapists?

Only in America could the horrific killing of an innocent black man – Tyre Nichols – at the hands of five policemen, also black, be blamed on anti-black sentiment.

According to CNN’s Van Jones, ‘society’s message that black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive’.

He added that such ideas ‘can infiltrate black minds as well as white’.

So the fact that a 29-year-old man was killed in cold blood (the evidence is there on body-camera footage) by five black men is actually the fault of racist white people – and nothing to do with the fact that they are obviously just nasty, violent thugs.

Honestly, I give up.

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