The Importance of Teaching sets out the government’s proposals for schools reform with the stated aim of freeing schools from centralised bureaucracy and allowing teachers and school leaders to drive improvement.
But teaching unions have criticised the paper for creating contradictions including promoting a national curriculum but allowing academies to be exempt from it.
Voice general secretary Philip Parkin warned: "The Department for Education seems to be driven by competing and conflicting ideologies: centralise with inflexible targets yet undermine national pay and conditions for school staff; raise teaching standards but propose the employment of unqualified teachers in free schools; promote a traditional national curriculum but exempt its favourite type of school (academies) from following it; allow teachers freedom to teach but tell them how to do it – not so much a mass of contradictions but a mess of contradictions."
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