NASUWT respond to publication of school banding scores
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
2:20 PM
Responding to the publication of the secondary school banding scores by the Welsh Government, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union in Wales, said:
“The NASUWT has been consistently arguing that the banding process would be divisive, crude and over simplistic ever since it was first mooted by ministers.
“As the NASUWT predicted, the banding system has simply enabled schools to be crudely ranked in a quasi league table without full consideration of their circumstances and the context in which they are working.
“The banding system fails to provide any genuinely meaningful information about how either schools or the education system as a whole in Wales is performing.
“While it is important that schools are held accountable for their performance and that there is a mechanism by which schools most in need of additional support can be identified, the NASUWT believes that banding does nothing to genuinely aid schools to improve.
“Schools and teachers are constantly striving to raise standards but are being met with constant criticism and denigration of their efforts.
“The publication of these banding scores will exacerbate the rapid decline in teacher morale and will deepen the sense of frustration and anger being felt by many teachers and school leaders.”
ENDS
Lena Davies
Press and Media Officer
Campaigns and Communications Team
NASUWT
0121 457 6250 / 07867 392 746
lena.davies@mail.nasuwt.org.uk
Disclaimer: Press releases published on this page are from key opinion formers
who promote their organisation's activities by subscribing to a campaign site within
politics.co.uk. politics.co.uk does not endorse, edit, or attempt to balance the
opinions expressed on this page. The content of press releases are wholly the responsibility
of the originating company or organisation.
Hundreds of teachers descended on Westminster today in a protest against the coalition government's plans to cut investment in Britain's schools infrastructure.
Michael Gove has triggered a dramatic wave of school reform by writing to every primary and secondary school in England to invite them to become academies.
A teachers union has called for fairer recruitment procedures for ethnic minorities.
The government has today named the 50 schools hoping to become self-governing trusts when the controversial education bill comes into force.
The education secretary has unveiled £2.7 million in new funding to get more pupils taking part in school trips.
Plans to upgrade school buildings have been dismissed as "mediocre" by the government's architecture watchdog.
The government's rhetoric on schools admissions is creating a "myth" of parental choice which does not exist, a teachers' union has said.
Reforms to make the school curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds more flexible and better tailored to pupils' needs have been published by the exams watchdog today.
It could take a decade for the government's reforms to improve standards in England's secondary schools, David Blunkett has argued.
Ed Balls has vowed to provide extra funding for school pupils for the next three years, despite the need to cut the deficit.
