The Fair Education Manifesto - Fair Education Alliance
As a member of the Fair Education Alliance and participants in their wellbeing strand, we wanted to share the recently released Fair Education Manifesto with our community, and our Founder Lucy Stephens added calls to action, reflecting on the main points of the manifesto.
You can read the full manifesto on the Fair Education Alliance website.
The fair education manifesto urges policymakers to prioritise #education in the next election, and offers a cross-sector guide to exactly what they should focus on.
LS: A fair education includes all young people and centres their voice. Inclusion is meeting the needs of each child and adult in a school community, radical steps, but one size does not fit all – unless the goal is conformity.
The fair education manifesto asks policymakers to listen to the experiences of young people ahead of the next election.
LS: Do we have an attendance issue *just* because of young people’s mental health decline during the pandemic, or did young people experience the freedom of self-directing more of their learning, freedom from coercive policies and rigid systems, and are voting with their feet? We should be centering young people to really understand what is happening for them and cultivate a better response.
We must build an education system that equips the next generation to thrive in work and life. This manifesto brings together expertise from the FEA to guide policymakers on where they should focus ahead of the next election.
LS: What’s the point of education, if not this? Where are the out of the box thinkers going to come from, if we don’t build those skills throughout schooling?
Challenges beyond the school gates are posing barriers to a fair education system. This manifesto urges policymakers to address the join up of services around families ahead of the next election.
LS: This is crucial. And it’s crucial that schools shine a light on their own culture and attitudes, and review the way young people and families are treated in their school community, the way they’re listened to, and the way they’re supported because for a minimum of 30 hrs a week they are directly responsible for young people’s wellbeing.
Fair Education Manifesto: High-Level Summary
The Fair Education Manifesto urges politicians and policymakers to end the de-prioritisation of education that has gone on too long. It leverages the expertise of their 250 members to propose four areas for urgent attention:
1. Stabilise the school workforce. Recruitment into teaching and school leadership is at its lowest point in a decade, and attrition is at its highest point, with workload and pay being the primary causes (and the issues that drove last year’s strikes). Stabilising the workforce is foundational to any other solution and will need to be addressed not only through pay, but also through culture, conditions that are more inclusive and competitive, and easing the negative impacts of the accountability system.
LS: Absolutely – how are staff treated, what voice do they have in making decisions, what level of autonomy is thought about, how can we create the structures and conditions for staff to thrive and work as true professionals honing a craft, alongside each other and young people. An automated, payment by results system is not teaching.
2. Rebalance our systems to value skills and wellbeing alongside attainment. Our current system isn’t giving young people from all backgrounds the skills employers need, and it’s not giving them a positive experience of school either. However, change will need to be thoughtful and long-term, avoiding unintentional increase of disadvantage gaps and teacher workload.
LS: Agree, however change will only come when we decouple school funding and performance. Innovation funding pots are crucial in the sector to understand how to make change, to test new solutions and to explore scale. Education policy should prioritise innovation and the funding needed for that to happen.
3. Deliver a quality early years education for every child. Poorer children are more likely to be behind expected language and development levels when they start school. We must make high-quality early years education and care accessible to every child, so that they are able to build relationships and skills they’ll draw on for the rest of their lives. We need strategies for increasing supply to poorer communities and building a strong and sustained workforce.
LS: Absolutely, however early years education should be centred in child development – play, engagement with others, explorative activities – all of which is not currently aligned with our current system and the accountability push on outcomes. We fail our young people when we create policy that goes against child development .
4. Better fund and join-up the support around families. Rising child poverty and a lack of investment in the services that support families have led to schools filling gaps left by others. This is not sustainable for schools or the families they serve. We need better funding for social care, mental health, and housing; we also need clearer responsibilities, communication channels, and shared objectives between agencies. We also need funding restored to the streams intended to mitigate the impacts of poverty on education.