Education International Research
There is a teacher recruitment and retention crisis that government policies are failing to address. The NEU’s current priority campaigns focus on pay, funding and workload —since 2015, there has been an increase in shortages of teacher and education support personnel, attrition rates, casualisation of the workforce and teacher workloads. According to a 2018 survey of NASUWT’s members, 56% of teachers felt that their job satisfaction had declined over the past 12 months.58 In 2017, a total of 35,800 teachers left the profession for reasons other than retirement or death, the highest year on record. In the same year, there was a lack of trainee teachers recruited for the majority of school subjects, with only 47% of the target met for physics teachers, and only 25% for design and technology.59 Privatisation processes within public education increase exclusion of the most marginalised students, and research shows that in the UK, the best schools covertly select fewer disadvantaged students.60 Official data show that students with special educational needs are six times more likely to be permanently excluded than their peers.61 Commercialisation of education impacts on the cost of education, and parents are asked to pay increasing costs for trips, uniforms and other expenses. Nearly a quarter of respondents (24%) to the NASUWT’s Cost of Education survey (unpublished) reported that they had been discouraged from sending their child to a school due to the potential costs of sending their child there.
Abroad, DFID’s support for education privatization undermines target 4.1 Both unions recognise that DFID is a key donor for the education sector internationally. However, they are concerned by some of DFID’s policy choices. According to NEU, the SDGs are used in rhetoric to frame much of DFID’s work, but they have not adequately guided DFID’s policy strategy. For example, though teachers are one of DFID’s policy areas of focus, DFID’s policy 62 does not include strategies to increase the attractiveness of the profession, which are vital to increase the supply of qualified teachers and achieve SGD 4.c. In addition, DFID’s policy related to privatisation directly undermines target 4.1’s commitment to free education for all — DFID argues that low cost private schools play an important role in delivering education in low- and middle-income countries and that they should be supported.63
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British tax money is used to enhance private education markets, such as through the DEEPEN (Developing Effective Private Education) project64 in Nigeria, 2013–19. DFID directly funds commercial low fee private schools, including controversial providers Bridge International Academies (Bridge), whose operations were declared illegal in Uganda and Kenya for failure to meet government standards. The UK International Development Committee, upon reviewing DFID’s work to leave no one behind, questioned the investment in Bridge and concluded that “it is imperative the Department [DFID] fully review available evidence when considering future support for [low fee private schools]”.65 DFID also promotes and supports public-private partnerships in education in developing countries, such as supporting non-state provision in Pakistan through the Punjab Education Foundation. In Uganda, Ark EPG66, PEAS67 and Cambridge Education are delivering components of a DFID programme in Uganda.68 Their work strengthens private sector involvement in education, even though the first annual review of the programme reports that locals had concerns about PPPs and wanted to phase them out. There is no ethical framework to ensure to hold who design and deliver education in Uganda democratically accountable to the people of Uganda in the long run, and to ensure that decisions about how the Ugandan education system is developed and delivered serve the interests of the people of Uganda rather than the interests of those companies and their subsidiaries.
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58 NASUWT. 2018. The Big Question Survey. Retrieved from: www.nasuwt.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/6c7508a4-9051-4d1d-8cdedb297ed7170a.pdf. 59 Department for Education (DfE) 2019. Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Census for the academic year 2018 to 2019, England. Retrieved from: www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/initial-teacher-training-trainee-number-census-2018-to-2019). 60 Sutton Trust. March 2019. Selective Comprehensives: Great Britain — Access to top performing schools for disadvantaged pupils in Scotland, Wales and England. Retrieved from: www.suttontrust.com/research-paper/selective-comprehensives-great-britain/. Andrews, J. 2019. Fair access to schools? Education Policy Institute. Retrieved from: https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/appeals-and-waitinglists/. 61 See National Statistics on Permanent and fixed period exclusions in England 2016–2017, published 19 July 2018: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/726741/text_exc1617.pdf 62 DFID. 2018. DFID Education Policy 2018: Get Children Learning. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfid-education-policy2018-get-children-learning 63 DFID. 2018. DFID Education Policy 2018: Get Children Learning. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfid-education-policy2018-get-children-learning p. 22 64 Developing Effective Private Education – Nigeria (DEEPEN). See: https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-202678/ 65 House of Commons International Development Committee. 2017. DFID’s work on Education: Leaving No-one Behind? Retrieved from: https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmintdev/367/367.pdf 66 Education Partnerships Group. See: https://epg.org.uk/ 67 Promoting Equality in African Schools. See: https://www.peas.org.uk/ 68 The “Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Learning” programme. See: https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-204641
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