“Hey, Teacher, leave them kids alone!’ When Pink Floyd penned the lyrics to Brick in the Wall, they can hardly have imagined their 1979 anthem to suffocating class-room orthodoxy would be taken quite so literally. However,
“Faced with a demand to wear masks all day in lessons, pupils are in revolt,” writes Juliet Samuel in today’s Telegraph.
“Given the stupidity of a rulebook that turns teachers into powerless enforcers of a bad policy, you might think the teaching unions would be the first to object.
Think again. The unions’ only problem with the amount of bunkum being chucked at our schools is that it doesn’t go far enough. What they want instead is a ratchet of Covid requirements that appears specifically designed to ensure as much disruption as possible.
The country’s biggest teaching union, the National Education Union, for example, is not content with the recommendation that teachers and pupils test for Covid twice a week. Testing, it states, should “ideally” be “daily”. Such a regime, it adds, would require “a staggered start for the new term”, which is another way of saying that schools should not fully reopen when they’re meant to.
Most teachers want to do a decent job in difficult circumstances and are trying to get on with it. Not so their unions. Page after page, their checklists and campaigns read like the work of obstructionist, selfish bureaucrats thinking up ways to make life more difficult for schools and all who rely on them for the sake of the lazy few and the political hacks who champion them."
Instead of pandering to every Union whim, the government
“should implement a clear policy of sending Britain back to school as normal immediately and then back schools and teachers to the hilt to implement it. Scrap excessive isolation periods, over-testing, masks and the endless procedural rigmarole and let teachers teach. If Boris Johnson is looking for his Thatcher moment, this is it. Does he have the guts to seize it?”
The full article can be read here with a link to the original beneath it:
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