It is time for teachers to take back their profession so that they can focus on making a difference to the lives of children and young people, the new President of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union in the UK, has said.
In her Presidential Address to the NASUWT’s Annual Conference in Birmingham, NASUWT President Kathy Wallis argued that teachers must be empowered to focus on meeting the needs of the pupils they teach, rather than on paperwork and bureaucracy.
“How will your students remember you?” she asked the Conference. “Will they remember the teacher who sits up half the night deep marking in six different colours? Will they remember the teachers whose planning for a 30-minute lesson stretches to six or seven sides of A4 and who gives up every weekend and every holiday to plan lessons and write schemes of work?
“Or will they remember the teacher who showed they cared for each and every pupil and student, the teacher who had the confidence to believe in themselves and what they are doing and had the courage to build a connection with their students and to show them that they care.”
Ms Wallis, a special educational needs and pupil behaviour specialist from Cornwall, told the Conference that Governments and decision makers need to start valuing the profession and that teachers must stand up for their professionalism and achievements.
She said: “I am fed up with the problems of the world all being laid at the feet of some of the most talented and inspirational people in the UK. Well, colleagues, it’s about time we looked at what we really have done and started to shout out loud. It’s time to take back the classroom and take back our profession. This is what you have done and what you do on a daily basis. You take children’s lives and turn their dreams into reality.”
Ms Wallis paid tribute to the ‘giants’ who had supported and inspired her during her journey to becoming National President, including her grandmother Emma Davey, a suffragette.
“Which giant taught me about human rights and standing up for each other? An amazing woman who left me a huge legacy and a glass ceiling to break. A woman who demonstrated on the streets, who chained herself to railings and who defied those around her who said ‘women can’t and women shouldn’t’.
“That’s how our human rights were won. By ordinary people coming together. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
This legacy inspired her trade union activism; she told the Conference, urging members to celebrate the achievements of the movement in securing workers’ rights such as paid maternity leave, sick pay, workplace pensions and the minimum wage and to fight to continue to uphold the values of trade unionism.
The continuing attacks on teachers’ professionalism, workplace rights and morale means that belonging to a trade union has never been more important for the profession, she said, calling for teachers to show solidarity and strength to stand up for their collective rights.
“How many of us have seen colleagues who have lost confidence in themselves as teachers, who have been targeted for capability because of their age or gender, who have been made ill because of impossible targets imposed on them. This is why I am a trade unionist and why unions are, and must remain, relevant today” she said.
