This year’s Labour Party Conference runs from Sunday 23rd to Wednesday 26th September and is being held at the ACC in Liverpool.
SEA is holding a fringe meeting at conference. It will be at 6.00 pm on Sunday 23rd in Concourse Room 4 of the main conference centre. The theme of the meeting will be “The National Education Service – from Vision to Reality”. Our speakers will be John Bolt (SEA General Secretary), Melissa Benn (SEA Vice President), Emma Hardy MP and Louise Regan (former NUT President) (both members of the SEA). For those in need, refreshments will be served! We’d be delighted to see as many members and supporters there as possible.
We will be handing out flyers to advertise the meeting at the beginning of the afternoon session of Conference – any SEA members who can help in this would be very welcome. We will be meeting at the entrance to the conference centre at 1.30 pm.
You may also be interested to know that the SEA contemporary resolution has been accepted and will be included in the ballot (after compositing) for places on the conference agenda. Please, if you can, encourage CLP and union delegates to support it.
The full text of the resolution is:
Conference notes that:-
1. The report in the Times Educational Supplement of August 10th that Academy Heads in Kent are refusing to accept looked after children.
2. The report in the Guardian of August 31st outlining the rise in exclusions in secondary schools, showing 45 schools, mainly academies, had excluded 20% of their pupils.
3. The Panorama programme on 10th September exposed examples of corruption in the academies programme and the failure of the government to maintain proper control over public money.
It notes the above are the consequences of a semi-privatised, market-based education system where schools compete to boost their standing in the league tables, often at the expense of the more vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Conference welcomes Labour’s commitment to ensure that all schools will be democratically accountable to their communities. However, the principles of accountability and collaboration which are central to our NEC charter cannot be implemented whilst the current fragmented and semi-privatised school system persists. The Party is developing a strategy for the empowerment of communities. Our education policy must both reflect and contribute to this endeavour. The main task in education for a Labour government will be to recreate a coherent, planned and appropriately funded national public system which is accountable to its various stakeholders and communities: this task to include the reintegration of academies into the system.
Conference instructs the NEC to work with the teaching unions, the SEA, academics and others to take this policy forward as a matter of urgency.”
Socialist Educational Association 