Commenting on a speech delivered this morning setting out a ‘new era’ on school standards, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said:
"There is an elephant in the room here.
"The Secretary of State is talking today about urging the education system to achieve more. At the same time, this Government is gearing up to make cuts to education, and to the other services which students need to remove barriers to their learning.
"Sir Keir Starmer will be the first Labour Prime Minister since James Callaghan to tell schools to make cuts. He fudges this by calling them ‘efficiencies’, but they amount to reducing what schools require to meet their students' needs properly.
"The Prime Minister's recommendation to the pay review body is an unfunded pay award that will also cut into already tight school budgets. It will undermine the pledge to attract more teachers and to retain the experience which our schools need, to be successful for every learner.
"Pigs don’t get fatter as a result of weighing them more often. It’s not inspection that delivers excellence - it's well supported, experienced leaders and education professionals - and it is investment. It's a motivated, well valued workforce with great CPD.
"Using negative, pejorative terms like ‘stuck schools’ is unhelpful and counter-productive. Collaboration and not ranking is what builds a good local school for every child.
"Quite simply you cannot have an improving school system whilst you are implementing austerity."