From school places to behaviour to teacher training, the teaching unions have excelled themselves with their doom and gloom pronouncements at their conferences this weekend about the state of our schools.
We shouldn’t be surprised, there is, afterall, an election coming up and we all know where the union leaderships’ loyalty lies. But these conferences have simply served to highlight one thing - that the gulf between the leadership of the classroom unions and their members is wider than ever before.
Because the unions' depressing portrait isn’t what I see when I look at England’s schools today. The first commitment I made as Education Secretary was to get out of Westminster and into classrooms. Since then I’ve spent a day a week visiting schools and spoken directly to over 900 teachers - from St Ives, to Morley, to Newcastle. What those teachers have told me is very different to what you hear from their unions.
Rather than banging a rhetorical drum, or setting themselves against change, most teachers have got on and set about making our plan for education a reality. They’ve risen to the challenge wherever we’ve raised the bar and used the new freedoms we’ve given them to meet the needs of their pupils.
It is entirely down to them that we have a million more pupils in good or outstanding schools compared to 2010, though you won’t hear that from the NASUWT, NUT or ATL. It’s down to the determination of primary school teachers that levels of literacy and numeracy among seven year olds are at a record high, but the union leaders won’t mention that. It’s down to the commitment of secondary school teachers that 70 per cent more young people are studying the core academic subjects they need to get on in life but you won’t hear that either.
It's because the work of schools is so important that we protected their budget over the course of this Parliament, something that was only possible because of the difficult decisions we made elsewhere. The success of our long-term economic plan will allow us to go further in the next Parliament, enabling us to commit to investing £590 million more than the Labour Party on schools.
We haven’t yet got everything right, in particular there’s more to do to build on my workload challenge and make sure teachers aren’t working unsustainable hours. But rather than sniping from the sidelines like the unions or Tristram Hunt, I want to work with teachers to get these things right.
Because ultimately, you respect teachers by entrusting them with the freedom to get the best out of every child; through encouraging the best graduates into the profession and through our multimillion pound funding to kick-start the creation of a college of teaching.
The past week has shown that, like the Labour Party, the classroom unions aren’t interested in acknowledging the monumental achievements their members have made over the past five years. Instead, they’d rather do our schools down, scare parents and undermine the very people they’re supposed to fight for. And for what? To try to help Tristram Hunt become Education Secretary?
I think that’s wrong. I suspect their members do as well.
Nicky Morgan is Education Secretary.