ACT - The Association of Christian Teachers

England’s largest teaching union will lobby the government to make teaching about LGBT+ relationships compulsory in all schools.

The National Education Union has today voted to campaign for a strengthening of new government guidance on relationships and sex education to force all primary and secondary schools to teach LGBT+ education.

The union will also demand that the government provides additional funded ring-fenced resources to councils to “enable them to develop a common approach and engage with parents and local communities”.

Although government reforms to relationships and sex education will make it compulsory for schools to teach pupils about relationships more generally from primary level, the guidance offers schools flexibility on when LGBT+ issues can be covered, meaning primary schools don’t have to cover the issues if their leaders don’t want to.

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More than 500 suspected illegal schools, educating thousands of pupils, have been identified in England over the past three years by the schools watchdog Ofsted, according to data published for the first time.

Some of the schools were in an appalling condition with rat traps, exposed wires and open sewers, Ofsted inspectors said. In one, pupils were left to play computer games all day, while in another inspectors found children in every classroom repeating religious texts with no other apparent education going on.

In some cases local authorities were unwittingly sending children to unlicensed alternative provision. In one case, a council paid £27,000 a year for one of its students to be educated in an unregistered setting. Elsewhere, students were found being taught by teachers who had been banned and untrained staff who had undergone no employment checks, in buildings where hygiene and facilities were poor.

The data, released by Ofsted on Friday and never published before, shows the illegal schools task force has investigated 521 settings, and inspected 259 since January 2016.

The centrepiece of his softly-softly approach is the abolition of Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), which were introduced in the 1990s following complaints that the previous system of individual appraisals by teachers was undermining national standards and leading to gross inconsistencies.

But Mr Corbyn, who made his announcement at the conference of the National Education Union yesterday, argues that SATs are unjust and cruel.

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Rising numbers of pupils in England are being taught in state schools that have been left to drift for months or even years without established management, according to figures obtained by Labour.

It estimated that more than 50,000 pupils are currently attending academies in England that have been unable to join a multi-academy trust or find a sponsor, leading the opposition to claim that the government’s flagship schools improvement policy is in tatters.

An academy is a state-funded school that is independently managed outside of local authority control. More than 8,000 schools have become academies since 2010.

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A new report launches today which explores the UK’s role in privatising education across the world

A new report from UK civil society organisation Global Justice Now and the National Education Union, the largest education union in Europe, launches today.

The report, titled In Whose Interest? The UK’s role in privatising education around the world, lays out the UK Department for International Development’s policies and programmes that are contributing to a privatisation agenda.

In Whose Interest? highlights how Official Development Assistance (ODA) has been supporting privatisation through grants to education businesses, support for pro-private research, and consultancy contracts with UK-based businesses, among other methods. The latter includes the Girls’ Education Challenge, which alone will see a £32.7 million consultancy fee paid to PWC.

In Whose Interest? also illustrates how privatisation is problematic in terms of equality, quality, and accountability in education, and how it is undermining public education systems. Fees, non-inclusive providers who don’t provide for children with additional needs, and unqualified teachers all contribute to a poorer and less equal learning experience for children relying on low-fee private schools.

Other systems, such as the proposed Education Outcomes Fund, could enable profit-making (through interest paid to investors) in education financing.

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