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Must the media skew open professional debate?

The Professional Association of Teachers (and their sister organisation, the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses) met in Buxton during late July for their Annual Conference, with the focus on Learning for Life. Buxton is an attractive spot, set in the Derbyshire hills and reached by winding roads, and the Conference venue was the rather grand Palace Hotel.

Unusually, the Conference hit the national headlines in a big way, even getting coverage in a Sun editorial, as well as all the other national dailies. Admittedly, Sun editorials are only very short and tend to be written in pithy Anglo-Saxon, but it is rare that they pay attention to PAT.

So what earned all this interest? It was a debate in which the proposer suggested that children should not fail, but should have “deferred success”. This was dismissed in the press as ridiculous, with commentators suggesting that a bit of failure did children good, that standards should not be allowed to slip, and that the motion just showed what a lot of wet nellies the union membership were.

But the basic idea behind the wish to emphasise approval rather than criticism is sound. Research has shown that if children are to accept criticism and learn from it, they need to be praised in a ratio of four approvals to one criticism. Otherwise, they become defensive and reject the criticism.

Certainly criticism can do harm. We recall a boy who stole a bottle of milk on his way to junior school and when caught was paraded on the platform in assembly by the headmaster as a model to be avoided by the other children. Having been labelled a thief publicly he decided to live up to his label, and stole habitually, ending up in serious trouble. It is understandable that PAT should want to reject this type of condemnation.

What the press did not offer, for the most part, was a reasoned debate on the subject, considering the arguments for and against. People need to learn from both approval and correction. The way in which criticism is offered is the crucial point. Children should not be labelled as failures, but helped to do better. Where standards have to be applied, though, they will meaning nothing if those who fall short are not seen to have failed to meet them.

The PR problem for PAT is that this motion had not received Council support and had not even been debated before the newshounds were after them. Just as Neil Kinnock will for ever be remembered for falling in the sea at Brighton, PAT will be labelled the union which could not accept that children might fail, regardless of the union’s official position or the success (or deferred success) of the motion.

PAT is a well-intentioned organisations, with high ethical standards, known as the trade union for teachers who refuse to strike. Most of the debates at its Conference indicated the concerns of its members for good practice. They covered motions such as

- the mandatory registration of teachers,
- the assessment of pupils,
- happy slapping and bullying,
- children as carers,
- specialist schools,
- misbehaviour and discipline,
- diction in children’s TV programmes,
- the early identification of criminal tendencies in children,
- leadership by teachers, city academies, and
- the re-introduction of grammar schools.

Unfortunately, a lot of the most important issues covered make poor copy in the papers, and so tend to be ignored. The tabloids like to condemn, they sniff out possible failure, and they seize on anything they think is off-beam, slanting their stories to make their point, rather than seeking rational debate. Because PAT wants to encourage debate, there were inevitably items on the agenda which the media could seize on. (The LibDems suffered the same fate at the last election when they were mocked for policies which were not in their manifesto but had got through one of their annual conferences.)

The question for PAT and its press advisers therefore is how they can present themselves as up to date, at the cutting edge and vibrant, while remaining professional and concerned to maintain an ethical stance. It is a hard task, and it is even harder to get good coverage if all the motions are simply sound sense. That is not news.

At the Conference, Jean Gemmell, the General Secretary, gave her final Conference speech after five years on office. She outlined the work being done by the union on its members’ behalf – involvement in the wide range of consultations talking place at present, such as

- teacher workload issues,
- school workforce audits,
- the Workforce Agreement Remodelling Group (Wamgee),
- the Rewards and Incentive Group (RIG) – which was originally to be the Pay and Incentives Group,
- the problem of excessive bureaucracy,
- the empowerment of young people to learn,
- whole team challenges,
- classroom assistants,
- city academies,
- higher level teaching assistants,
- healthy eating and healthy schools,
- the need for seamlessness between academic and vocational awards,
- light touch evaluation,
- long-term budgeting,
- planning, preparation and assessment time,
- the implementation of the teaching and learning responsibilities structure,
- the Government’s five Year Plan,
- Every Child Matters, with its implications for extended school hours.

Jean Gemmell crammed a lot into her speech, and it indicated a heavy workload, and a lot of points at which PAT was working hard to be influential. It was a lively speech, larded with quotations. The one we liked best was perhaps Jean’s but may have been Estelle Morris’s, that “Action without vision is like flies rattling round in a paper bag”.

Jean also scored a first, in our experience, by closing her speech in a Sondheim song, Whistle for me. It could make an interesting precedent for General Secretaries in other organisations. Perhaps whole speeches could be set to music, and they could be treated as operatic arias. Essential attributes required of General Secretaries would then include sight-reading of music, perfect pitch ...... Perhaps not.

Between PAT and PANN, they cover “nursery to tertiary” workers. PANN continues to battle for recognition of its members – nursery nurses and nannies. A major problem facing this workforce at present is the loss of workers to other industries such as supermarkets and call centres, with people staying in the work typically eight or ten years. Clearly, the level of pay is the key factor, though unsocial hours can also affect nannies.

This has to be one of the main issues for the Children’s Workforce Council to address. The waste of resources in the continual recruitment and turnover of childcare staff is enormous – money invested in the recruitment process itself and in the training of staff, together with the loss of experience as longer-serving workers decide to make career changes.

The atmosphere in Buxton was friendly and, for those attending, the twin unions present an image of warmth and support, but if they are to have a wider impact, they will need more bite as well. It is a sad comment on today’s media that spin is so important, but to have impact, it is necessary to manage the message throughout. Free speech is important, but ways will need to be found to enable debate within PAT while preventing unhelpful tags to be attached to the union’s image in the national media.