Early morning sees J30 Strike action unfold across Chester city centre as offices and schools remain closed. Picture Frances Laing.
The Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency (DVLA) offices in Chester were shut down from early this morning due to strike action. Local grass roots support was solidly in evidence – I was told the postman didn’t cross the picket line.
Strikers and those in solidarity including NUT members and supporters from the general public will rally on Chester Town Square at 12.30 p.m. see map under the Cheshire West Against the Cuts coalition umbrella. The rally is the first of it’s kind for twenty years. Children, teachers, carers, parents and grandparents will be gathering there too – together with people with disabilities, their communities and families – those campaigning to save the NHS and turn the tide on the devastating cuts to disability and welfare benefits (see previous post).
Most schools in Cheshire are closing due to NUT strike action.
PCS picket shuts down DVLA offices Chester. Picture by Frances Laing.
All 17 PCS members went on strike at the DVLA offices with a focus on the pensions issue. In concrete terms one employee told me government proposals would mean she would be paying £45 a month more for her pension and that she would have to work longer – to get it – an extra eight years.
The last time PCS members went on strike at this DVLA office in March of last year – the dispute on the civil service compensation scheme ended in a High Court Action which changed the law.
Meanwhile across town at the Job Centre near Chester Railway Station – PCS members manned another early morning picket (see picture below).
PCS strike Job Centre Chester. Picture Frances Laing.
Cheshire West Against the Cuts rally meet in Chester Town Centre from 12.30. Children, families, parents, teachers, grandparents, neighbours, carers – those with paid work and without – ALL welcome.
Cheshire West and Cheshire Council has helpfully compiled a list of schools due to close in the J30 Strike. Interestingly – many more than the thirteen cited in the local Evening Leader. Find the updated list at this link: Cheshire Schools close in industrial action J30.
The following hot-off-the-press flier text of interest to people with and without disabilities, families with disabilities/children with disabilities who may be joining with others in support of the strike action this Thursday. The writer Richard Atkinson works full-time – has multiple sclerosis and offers some answers to the question: “Why is it important for disabled people, their families and friends to support and be supported by the nationwide rallies on Thursday?” – (Town Hall Chester 12.30 p.m. and DVLA office picket 8.00 a.m see map) Richard’s initial copy (which may be updated as new information comes to light) follows here:
“CHESHIRE WEST AGAINST THE CUTS – SAVE OUR WELFARE STATE!
The Coalition government is systematically dismantling our welfare state. Since 1948 everyone has assumed that help and support would be available for the elderly and for disabled people, for people who become sick or disabled for children and for people who become unemployed. The new welfare state was rightly heralded as An End to Fear – basic security for all in return for national insurance payments.
By 2014 all this will be gone. The only help and support available will be:
strictly means tested
strictly policed, with spot fines for any errors you make in your claim, privatised medical assessments imposing impossible criteria and privatised ‘work for your benefit’ programmes
at much lower levels than at present in many cases, especially for the most severely disabled and for people in work.
From April 2011 levels of tax credits for families and disabled people in low paid work have been cut back – with more to come. Housing Benefit, for rent, and help with mortgage interest payments having also been cut back making decent housing unaffordable for many.
From April 2012 hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to leave work by long term health conditions will lose all their benefit payments (incapacity benefit and contributory employment support allowance). People with a working partner or with any other significant income or savings will get no extra help after their first 12 months illness.
From April 2013 disabled people claiming Disability Living Allowance will face privatised medical assessments (by ATOS) applying new criteria which will offer help only with very basic functions like dressing and eating. Even people who are blind, deaf or paralysed will qualify for reduced, if any, help.
Even emergency payments (crisis loans) and payments to people leaving residential care (community care grants) are being abolished.
All that will be left is a miserly system, administered distantly without human contact, and working on the assumption that anyone who tries to claim state benefits is a potential criminal. And tens of thousands of jobs in the present system are under threat. Overall, the coalition government is planning to reduce expenditure on benefits and tax credits for people aged 16-65 by over one-fifth by 2014.
Meanwhile the rich grow richer: top executive pay and bankers’ bonuses are rising without restriction, companies get away with billion pound tax dodges.
COPY ENDS. Written by Richard Atkinson in an individual capacity.
For more information on the Cheshire West Against the Cuts Coalition – which includes people in paid work and out, trades union members, parents, members of political parties and none – join the cheshire west against the cuts facebook group.
Update: for further analysis of what is happening in the special needs jungle right now – check out Guerilla Mum’s blog at this link: http://guerrillamum.wordpress.com/
June 30th. Strike action closes schools in Cheshire. Picture Frances Laing.
Note in our school bag yesterday confirming our school will be closing next week for the June 30th. NUT strike action. Many parents will be supporting the strike and there are already offers to take tea and flapjacks along to local pickets.
There will also be a rally in Chester Town Centre, supported by Chester Trades Council and Cheshire West Against the Cuts. The extent of strike, picket and occupation action across the U.K. is being mapped on the J30 strike site see this link: http://www.j30strike.org/
Updates on the Cheshire West Against the Cuts Facebook Group.
The Chester and District Standard front page today featured a story on “Parent’s nursery closure fury”. According to the Standard “Bosses at West Cheshire College have confirmed the ABC nursery in Handbridge will cease to exist in July. The Ellesmere Port campus closed on Friday”. Some 80 families have been affected.
Local parents said: “There was no letter, no notice or anything”. Mum Gretta a social work student is quoted as saying: “(My son) is really upset – he has lost all of his friends and I don’t have contact details for anyone to see where they are taking their children…now not only do I have research proposals to get on with, but I’ve got to find a new nursery and sort out where my student finance is going to. It’s a nightmare”.
Felicity Dowling. National Union of Teachers. Public Meeting Northwich Cheshire West Against the Cuts. May 24th, 2011. Photograph: Frances Laing.
The phrase ideological assault may help us understand what is happening to and in our society. For understanding is half the battle. To begin, readers I’m offering two single word definitions from a rather elderly edition of the New Shorter Oxford English dictionary for your consideration:
Ideological: A system of ideas or way of thinking pertaining to a class or individual, esp. as a basis of some economic or political theory or system, regarded as justifying actions and esp. to be maintained irrespective of events.
Assault: 2. An attack by spiritual enemies; temptation to evil.
Public Meeting Cheshire West Against the Cuts. Northwich, England, 24th. May, 2011. Speakers Felicity Dowling. National Union of Teachers and Andy Ford member of Unison union regional committee and NHS employee (speaking in an individual capacity). Photo: F.Laing
The context is not simply the public meeting against the cuts which took place in Northwich, Cheshire, last month. The context is our whole lives. The entirety of this blog, since I began writing it two years ago and certainly the chapter of the book I have just completed – fellow contributors to the book include members of Parliament and Early Years Experts across the planet. The book, soon to be published will be called: “Dissent and the English Early Years Education System”. For without dissent there is no democracy. AND I’m not just mentioning this book for a publicity plug – I’m mentioning it because every one of the issues mentioned in this blog post – and the book – directly affect every young child in this country.
Young children need health care and until and unless that provision is made secure – the huge proposed investments in Phonics programmes and School League Tables – which have already been called into question by international researchers and academics – should again be called into question too. Joined up thinking.
I say: the ideological assault we are facing is Orwellian in nature. War is Peace. In a response to campaigning constituents in a letter dated 20th. May (see previous post) – elected representative Conservative M.P. for Chester Stephen Moseley declared: “…there are no cuts in the National Health Service and in fact NHS funding has been increased by the coalition government”.
Watch the video featured at the end of this post and Dr. Ron Singer who clearly states: “There are going to be huge reductions in what the NHS provides…not only are we facing the biggest reorganisation in the history of the NHS (the NHS and Social Care Bill) but at the same time we are also being asked to save or create ‘efficiencies’ of twenty billion pounds over four years (about twenty per cent of the total budget and for England about twenty-five per cent of the total budget”).
War is Peace.
Thirty five people were present at the public meeting in Northwich, Cheshire – some of them NHS employees. Amongst them Felicity Dowling of the National Union of Teachers and Andy Ford, member of Unison Trade Union Regional Committee.Felicity Dowling, who works with children in the field of Special Education Needs (SEN) described a barrage of cuts on the battle field:
Early Years Consultants privatised and cut from 17 to 12 in her area. An overall reduction in special educational needs funding, affecting play areas, toddler groups, access arrangements, cuts in basic provision such as the lack of special chairs – a three year staff pay freeze in schools – along with cuts of pay and weekend work.
Felicity stressed the importance of talking for small children – and how cuts in the ‘Every Child a Talker’ (see this link for similar cuts elsewhere) grant will impede their progess. Cuts in Sure Start provision…disability provision all gone. People not being able to pay for child care. “Who is going to pay for a specialist teacher?” she asked.Felicity also spoke in some detail about the pending National Union of Teachers ballot for strike action on the issue of pay, conditions and pensions and deconstructed some popular myths about the cuts;
MYTH ONE: The cuts exist to save money (academies and ‘free’ school cost vast amounts and in the long run will be more expensive to maintain – the cuts Felicity said ‘are not about money they are about politics and the way the government sees the public sector’).
MYTH TWO: “We are all in this together” – (72 per cent of the cuts described by Felicity impact on women and small children).
MYTH THREE: “Nothing we can do will make a difference” – (when soldiers came back from the Second World War they wanted a better world – Felicity refers to the letters written by her own father – they had the determination to build a better world and many of their generation pushed to found the NHS – a system free at the point of need).
Felicity urged the audience: “Don’t think things will stay the same – if they get away with this – they will come back for more – Cameron will come back for the forests too”.
Andy Ford, member of Unison Trade Union Regional Committee and speaker on the panel is an employee of the NHS national blood transfusion service and highlighted the need for the general public to support NHS workers – if blood transfusion support workers didn’t work for three days then ‘a lot of people would die’.
Andy stressed the proposed ‘reforms’ in the NHS were firstly, the ‘wrong reforms at the wrong time’ and secondly ‘bad for patients’. ‘Bad for patients’ because the principal of universal health care – free at the point of need – is due to be abolished with the proposed reforms.
We are facing a ‘privatisation like never before’ even Thatcher ‘did not attack the NHS’ he said.Andy described a lack of public accountability where ‘any willing provider can provide healthcare’ – the trade union position was ‘a clear defence of social medicine rather than the market’.And the market was a huge and lucrative one – the NHS budget in Rochdale alone was 300 million.
Andy spoke about how prices and tariffs for operations are not true prices, for example for children’s heart surgery. A surgeon from the John Radcliffe hospital surgeon said to him “What am I supposed to do – turn these people away?, I can’t do it…” – there would be a tendency for privatised companies to pick easy operations. Without the NHS people with cancer would bankrupt themselves.
Andy Ford, Unison Regional Trade Union Representative addresses the public Meeting in Northwich May 24th, 2011- organised by the coalition "Cheshire West Against the Cuts". Photograph: Frances Laing.
Private finance initiatives were unsustainable – locally in Whiston debt servicing of the PFI cannot be met from the market. If the market were a true market then PFIS would be allowed to go bankrupt. The first duty of a PFI is to service and pay debts…By contrast in Scotland there is no market for services. MRSA was unknown before Thatcher and deregulation. Regular cleaners had always been present. In Wales Plaid Cymru took cleaning services back in house and this led to improved standards.
Discussion at the meeting kicked off with a few voices saying that some people were in ignorance of the extent of the cuts – but by the end of the meeting – an impressive and detailed list emerged and the recognition that we can’t wait until 2015 and a general election to take action.
One union delegate’s summary of cuts in West Cheshire included those made in Children’s Centres and home care facilities – together with an assault on staff terms and conditions summed up by the motto: “keep council tax down and screw the staff”.
I gave a short account of attendance at the Multiple Sclerosis Society Regional Meeting in Preston last month – and the week of action against assessors ATOS. The M.S society is currently in the forefront of the ‘Hardest Hit’ campaign which highlights how people with disabilities are being detrimentally affected by the proposed Welfare Reform Bill.
As promised at the beginning of this blog post here is Dr. Ron Singer with the clearest account of the ideological assault I’ve heard so far:
Several years since I heard Karen Reissman speak at the radical National Union of Journalists Conference at the Quaker Meeting House in Manchester. Now it seems even here in middle England there is an organised movement against the cuts.
Tonight’s Meeting’s focus: “Defending the National Health Service” and it starts at 7.30 p.m. Guildhall Watergate Street, Chester CH1 2LA .
I’m hoping to get some video footage of Karen’s talk – relevant to us all. Here is Karen with some historical background – with analysis of the links between health, education and the cuts:
Cheshire West Against the Cuts: Public Meeting – TONIGHT – Wednesday April 20th, 2011 7.30 p.m. Guildhall, Watergate Street, Chester, England CH1 2LA.
Demonstration Against the Cuts. Saturday 26th. March, London.
The results of the Early Years Foundation Stage Review have been announced today. Rest assured readers, I do intend to share my thoughts with you all on this front – as soon as I can. However, in the meantime – I’m sharing this photograph – sized up so that you can see the detail of it.
We were three of the (four hundred thousand) people on the demonstration on Saturday, travelling in a Unison coach. My daughter wore this waistcoat with an important message on the back. We mingled with the NUT contingent on the demonstration and hundreds of people read the message, photographed it, commented on it and talked to us about it. One teacher on the demonstration liked the message so much that she gave my daughter an NUT banner as a present. The banner reads: NUT: Education Cuts Never Heal.
Later that week my daughter took the banner and some photographs into school. Taking part in the demonstration, talking to people and being with friends – was very motivating for her. She especially enjoyed reading all the marvellous and colourful banners from everywhere in the country.
It was a day about making the connections. The people reading our message made the connections straight away, especially the teachers and the many nursery assistants and classroom staff at the demonstration. And the accompanying messages were very simple: that the league table plan was, and is – ridiculous and far too costly – that with people power – we can achieve change and bring the coalition government down – that we don’t need more league tables, more testing and more bureaucracy – that our coalition government has no mandate from the people to do what it is currently doing and what the government is doing is not backed up by common sense or research evidence – despite what they are trying to tell us with their patronising, slick, media machines.
And we were there on Saturday and saw the demonstration with our own eyes. Nowhere did we see any hint of aggression or violence from the crowd. But for my daughter it was an illustration of the police state we are living in. We saw the helicopter overhead which accompanied us along the entire route. We saw the police (sharpshooters?) – craning their necks from the Westminster windows. We noticed how our mobile phone signals were interfered with for at least two hours in the vicinity of Westminster – how we were herded off along the embankment and how the nearest tube station to Westminster was closed to us at very short notice by the police.
And because it is important and highly relevant in terms of accessibility and equality – I’d like to thank one kind person from the coach who waited for us at the tube station and indeed on every corner helping us with our trolley on the demonstration. With multiple sclerosis in the family and a small child – we experience attending such events as a huge challenge and without some solidarity from those around us it is very difficult – and four hours walking is a long stretch for little legs too.
And so the issues stay remote for the Eton school boys that say they are ‘governing’ this country – but they come together in our lives. They are real for us. We made a splash on Saturday. And now the TUC needs to listen to the membership – the majority are clearly ready for radical action – not just another demonstration.
From UK Uncut – message received on Facebook twenty minutes ago : “It just got real – roughly 20 women are locked together in arm tubes at all the main entrances of Downing Street to block the budget.”
The Cambridge Primary Review “Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations” was published today. It’s the result of several years work and it’s available as a press release, a short version (useful for tired parents and teachers…?) and the full version (608 pages). See these links:
Key findings include the following (of particular interest to blog readers).
Matching Ages, stages and structures.
“The English insistence on the earliest possible start to formal schooling, against the grain of international evidence and practice, is educationally counterproductive. The Early Years Foundation Stage should be renamed and extended to age six, and early years provision should be strengthened in its quality and staffing so that children are properly prepared – socially, linguistically and experientially for formal learning. The Key Stage 1/2 division should be replaced by a single primary phase, yielding a seamless journey through Foundation (0-6) and Primary (6-11). The feasibility of raising the school starting age in line with these changes should be examined”.
Here are my initial comments:
As the parent of a four year old child who started school this September I encountered the Cambridge Primary Review this morning with interest and anger.
I recently applied for a parental exemption to the sixty-nine compulsory Learning and Development Requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage on ‘moral, educational, spiritual, religious, philosophical and political grounds’ for my child.
The application was refused. The local authority and the school could not argue that we were morally wrong to insist that our child be exempt from these compulsory targets (responses can be viewed on this blog) . In their heart of hearts I believe the people who dealt with this matter knew we were right all along – and as we (as parents), the members of the Cambridge Review team and countless other expert Early Years Practitioners have shown – some of the best educationalists in the land support our position.
It is significant that there is no right of appeal in this parental exemptions process. I imagine our local authority advised our school on the formulation of the letter which they sent to us regarding the rejection of our exemption request. In their consultation with the school I would also imagine the local authority sought legal advice.
I believe the reason why they did not dispute the moral and philosophical and educational grounds for our exemption request is that they simply couldn’t and if they had tried to do that as part of a legal challenge they wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on.
But ultimately we’ll never know. If the government does not bring about changes the only other way to change the law (that is to make the sixty-nine learning and development targets non-compulsory) is to launch a judicial review.
I recently asked an experienced solicitor what this would entail. On the telephone I heard them estimate costs: “between £60-£80,000” I couldn’t help react accordingly with a raucous and cynical laugh.
“Democracy?” I said, still laughing “That’s not democracy – it’s beyond the reach of most parents”.
So where does that leave our children? Of course, we’ve seen government foolishness before and no doubt we’ll see it again. What do they think parents are for, exactly…? Make the tea, do the school-run, generally pick up the fall-out from government incompetence…(as if we didn’t have enough to do).
My name is Frances Laing. I'm a writer, blogger and journalist. I'm also the mother of one child now aged six. This blog started with an analysis of the English Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum.
The (EYFS) is a compulsory curriculum for children from birth to five. The compulsory nature of the EYFS means it's the first time the government has imposed such an extensive compulsory legal framework on early years settings.
We were the first parents in the U.K. to our knowledge to have requested a parental exemption from the EYFS statutory Learning and Development Requirements on "moral, educational, religious, philosophical,ethical and political" grounds in a state-funded school. It was refused. The process, together with much of the paperwork has been published on this blog. You can find it by selecting the 'documenting the exemption process' category in the archive.
Under the Data Protection Act - parents have the right to view their child's records at school or nursery.
This blog charts our progress and provides information about how and why the Early Years Foundation framework exists and the wider context: the government's increasingly devastating bureaucratic stranglehold on our children's futures. Join in the debate. Look for the 'leave your comments' link in bold which you will find at the beginning of each post.
A parent's guide to the early years foundation stage. 