Education’s tectonic plates are shifting again. The moving parts that come together to decide schools policy and the wider schools landscape are once again on the move.
These include the Department for Education and its No 10 overseers, as well as Ofsted and the education unions. Others are the exam boards, Ofqual, the larger multi-academy trusts, thinktanks and university schools of education. In some areas, local authorities still play a role, too.
The most important one, most of the time, is the Department for Education: it steers accountability, qualifications, funding (to some degree) and pay.
This is the reason that the appointment of a new education secretary can be important. Even within the same government, it can signal a change in policy and emphasis. Just look at how the DfE was transformed after Nicky Morgan replaced Michael Gove. Suddenly, it was all about teacher-love (but to little avail).
It is now becoming clear that education secretary Damian Hinds could represent another shift.
I understand that recruitment and retention has fast become the number-one priority in Hinds’s DfE. Downing Street has realised that teacher supply is political dynamite: growing class sizes have the potential to lose elections.
Whether Hinds or schools minister Nick Gibb will ever explicitly admit that the crisis is genuinely a crisis is another thing altogether, but their people are now very receptive to any idea that might stop the sector haemorrhaging teachers - and encourage more young people to choose ITT.
As a result, certain issues are being dragged to the front of ministerial minds. Central to these is teachers’ working hours. Pay is also under consideration. Ofsted is now publicly admitting it can be a problem for workload. Even funding cuts can be seen through the prism of the teacher supply crisis: who wants to work in a sector that is so lacking in respect that the school roof is leaking?
The mood music is changing in wider government too. It won’t have escaped most teachers’ notice - as they deal with a 12 per cent real terms pay cut - that NHS staff have just secured a whacking great 6.5 per cent raise. There are also a log of noises about big increases in healthcare spending. If them, why not us, teachers ask - and not unreasonably.
Another of the tectonic plates comes in the form of the merger of the NUT and ATL to form the vast NEU teaching union, which represents a big majority of teaching professionals. The NUT and ATL “sections” are this spring holding their last separate conferences (NUT’s starts tomorrow in Brighton) but you can be certain there are some issues both will discuss: pay, workload, funding, inspection. The self-same issues that are now prominently positioned in Hinds’s in-tray.
The big question is, can the NEU manoeuvre itself to take advantage of this overlap? For the first time in a good few years, ministers and mandarins may be willing to have a proper, open and honest conversation about their demands and their concerns.
But this is less likely to be the case if the vibe and the body-language from the classroom unions is permanently confrontational.
The strategy chosen will tell us a great deal about the future of the NEU. Will it truly be a New Union?
Ed Dorrell is head of content at Tes. He tweets @Ed_Dorrell
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