Striking or not, the reality is that school leaders and teachers are united in their frustration and anger with a government that is still not listening. And parents are standing with us too. Geoff Barton's message to the government could not be clearer...
On the day of the National Education Union’s teacher strikes, a blog from the Department for Education stated that 90.7% of schools remained open to some or all pupils (DfE, 2023a).
It was a determinedly positive gloss on statistics which, in reality, are bleak (DfE, 2023b).
For example, only 17.4% of secondary schools were estimated to be fully open, with 73.6% open but restricting attendance, and 9% closed. We recorded a pattern which was not far off these figures in our own snapshot survey on the day of the strike (ASCL, 2023).
And, of course, in many of the schools which were open with restricted attendance, the number of students on site was very low.
