Unite to Defend Our Members

Below is the text of my speech to the NUT Special Conference on 5th November 2016, seconding the motion that NUT should endorse, and put to a ballot of members, the proposal to amalgamate with ATL to form the National Eduation Union.

On 25th June 1870, the National Union of Elementary Teachers was formed, through the amalgamation of a number of local, regional and sectional associations. It was formed in the context of the fight against performance-related pay and the controversy surrounding the 1870 Education Act.

Cuba Day 1

After some delays at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle due to fog over Paris, we set off this morning on our ten hour flight to Havana. Given the connections with Cuba's innovative literacy campaign, I thought it would be a useful opportunity to re-read Education for Critical Consciousness by Paulo Freire.

In these two essays (Education as the Practice of Freedom and Extension or Communication written in 1965 and 1968 respectively), Freire is concerned with the liberatory potential of education but also the necessity for education to be critical and democratic if it is to realise this potential.

Cuba Day 0

So, I'm sat in the hotel at heathrow airport, ready to board a flight tomorrow to Havana to find out more about education in Cuba, a country which defies all the supposed wisdom of the global education  'reform' movement. Cuba has one of the highest standards of education in the world, despite spending a fraction of the amount the UK or US do, resisting the market reform mania that has gripped the rest of the world, and still being subjet to a comprehensive economic blockade by the world's most powerful country.

What Cuba has achieved is nothing short of a miracle.