ATL

Address by ATL president Andy Ballard to Annual Conference 2009

ATL president Andy Ballard celebrates ATL's success but warns of the tasks ahead

Despite huge progress in the education sector since he joined the union 25 years ago, ATL president Andy Ballard says ATL must now face up to its 21st-century responsibilities.

"I first came to Conference in 1995, and after nearly 20 years in the profession, I was quite cynical and jaded and indeed not far from walking away from teaching altogether," he said.

"I earned less than a Bristol airport baggage handler; steeply rising bureaucratic workload, frequent cover for absent colleagues, non-existent professional development and unsympathetic school managers who encouraged a 'long hours' culture, had worn me down.

"Fourteen years later and our pay is so very much better, the National Agreement has tackled workload issues, rarely cover is just around the corner and professional development is the cornerstone of our profession."

Andy described the role trade unionism played in his life, from learning of the Tolpuddle Martyrs from a charismatic history teacher to being a NUS college vice president and joining ATL in 1984. He said: "An education union is vitally important, not just for its members but for the education sector as a whole."

Andy went on to highlight the challenges ATL now faces: "I've spent most of my working life with children in a relatively deprived area of Somerset. I taught children from underprivileged homes. I am ashamed to say that some 30 years later, their children and even their grandchildren pass through the school still experiencing similar levels of deprivation."

He warned research shows that the greater the diversity of the state education system, the greater the inequalities within it. "Competition between schools in the state education system is an abomination and will do little to help lever up the poorest in society to better, more productive and satisfying life chances," he said.

The curriculum is more about data gathering than learning, is too tightly controlled by central government, is principally aimed at academic study and is too over-prescriptive, he concluded, adding: "It stifles enjoyment in favour of a diet of facts. It consigns four in 10 pupils who get GCSE grades below C as failures."

"We have a significant job to do in identifying and removing the causes of increasing workload and lobbying for a new curriculum for the 21st century that serves pupils' needs and will enable us to tackle the issue of pupil disaffection."

See the ATL Conference 2009 section of this website for full details of this speech and all the motions heard at Conference.

Photo by Duncan Robertson