Education

Education should be more than just the tired old metaphor attempting to fill a piggy bank with knowledge, an idea that only works when you remember that in order to actually use anything in the piggy bank, you have to smash it first. A focus on building connections and application, as part of a student-teacher dialogue, has been known to be the best practice for a long time, and The People's Movement will build the material conditions and culture for best practices to be enabled in our classroom, rather than pushed to one side in lieu of paperwork and constant monitoring.

• OFSTED is, as every teacher will testify, no longer viable as a way to examine the capability of a school, but instead merely a way to add stress and paperwork to one of the most important jobs of the country - more interested in notions of misnamed 'British Values' and results than the personal development that occurs through learning. The People's Movement will abolish OFSTED, in order to rebuild an inspections body that is not simply a burden to all.
• Constant assessment via exams is the fastest way to bring about misery upon learners, and it has been demonstrated to be an unfair method of assessing learning time and time again, focussed on 'gaming' the exam rather than gaining knowledge and skills. The People's Movement will end exam-based assessment of knowledge in our schools and other education providers, focussing on assessment methods that truly demonstrate a learner's growth.
• Teachers are the providers of our future, and yet we pay them so little that many are still dependent on NIT... and their jobs will only get more difficult as Pupil-Teacher ratios continue to swell upwards. We can and we should be doing better, and we are hence going to increase teacher pay by 10%, and unlike the Government that broke it's word, we'll begin to recruit the 55,000 teachers required to keep pupil-teacher ratios stable.
• For education to be liberating and empowering, we must recognise that even the setting is politically charged, that it doesn't go unnoticed by students when they're being taught in a school that's falling apart, that struggles with the basic amenities. In addition to the physical structures that require investment, there are social structures to consider. We can't ignore the impact that being taught in your second language has, and we know potential is being lost to this. The People's Movement will invest in alternative-media Education, including Welsh-, Cornish-, and Gaelic- language education.

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