Our Manyfesto

Why does it take 18 months to get an EHCP assessment? Eighteen months. For a child.

I have been a primary school teacher for 14 years. The system isnt a bit broken. It is completely broken. Parents fight through paperwork and tribunal threats just to get a plan and even when they get one the school doesnt have the money to deliver it.

The funding needs to follow the child not the postcode. Every EHCP should come with ring-fenced money the school actually receives.

These are children. They dont have 18 months to wait while adults argue about budgets.

A child who has eaten a proper meal at lunchtime learns better in the afternoon. This isnt complicated and it isnt controversial and yet somehow we are still means-testing school dinners so that some families who need them dont apply because the process is confusing or because they feel ashamed. Extend free meals to all primary children. Every single one. No forms no thresholds no stigma. Yes it costs money but the amount we spend dealing with childhood hunger and poor concentration and health problems down the line costs more. Feed the kids. Work out the spreadsheet later.

Cap class sizes at 25. Everywhere. Primary and secondary. Yes it costs money. Its called investing in children.

Last week I spent more time filling in tracking spreadsheets than planning lessons. Audit every piece of admin teachers do. If it doesnt directly help a child learn, scrap it.

A poster saying its OK not to be OK is not mental health provision. It is a poster.

Every school should have a trained counsellor available at least 3 days a week. Not a teaching assistant who did a two day course. A qualified counsellor who knows what they are doing and has time to do it properly.

Children are waiting months for CAMHS referrals.

By the time they get seen what started as anxiety has become something much harder to treat. Schools are where the problems are first visible. Early support there could prevent half the crisis referrals further down the line.

This saves money. More importantly it saves children.

Four of my colleagues left the profession in the last two years. Two went into corporate training, one retrained as a data analyst, one just stopped.

None of them wanted to leave teaching. They loved it. They left because they couldnt afford to stay.

A starting teacher in England earns about 31k. An engineering graduate with a year less experience earns closer to 45k and doesnt get shouted at by a seven year old or wake up at 5am marking. There is no mystery here. There is no "recruitment crisis" that nobody can explain. There is just a salary gap that the government refuses to close and then expresses surprise every september when nobody applies.

Match teacher starting pay to the graduate median for STEM subjects. Index it properly. And for the love of god stop pretending a 1.5% pay rise is a "real terms increase".

I have watched ten year olds cry in the toilets before a SATs paper.

I have watched bright, curious kids start to hate school in year six because for months everything they do is either "practice" or "performance". I have watched schools restructure entire terms around boosting results for children who are already anxious enough about not being good enough.

What do SATs actually tell us? They tell us which children are good at a very specific kind of short, timed, written assessment under pressure. They tell us almost nothing about whether a child can think, reason, create, collaborate, or enjoy learning. And because they are high-stakes for schools, they warp everything around them — hours of "booster sessions", scripted teaching, creative subjects sidelined because "theres no time".

Here is the proposal. Abolish SATs at the end of primary school. Replace them with a light-touch teacher-moderated assessment that feeds into the secondary handover but isnt used for league tables. Keep some sample-based national testing for system monitoring, but take it away from individual schools so theres no incentive to drill.

Finland does this. They trust their teachers. Their children read better than ours by the end of primary school. This is not a radical experiment. It is what every country with a healthier education system does.

The last thing I will say is this. I have been teaching for fourteen years. I have never once met a parent who valued their childs SATs result over their childs wellbeing. The only people who value SATs are the people who use them to rank us.

A teaching assistant in my school earns £18,400 a year on the standard contract. That is term-time only, obviously, but even pro-rata that works out below the real living wage. We have TAs running small-group interventions, one-to-one support for SEN children, lunchtime supervision, playground duty, and the countless invisible tasks that keep a primary school running. The idea that this is an assistant role is a fiction the pay grade depends on.

I have lost three TAs in two years to Lidl. Lidl pays more, has consistent hours, and does not require you to be elbow-deep in sand trays while managing a child mid-meltdown and also logging a safeguarding concern.

Fund a national TA pay uplift to the real living wage as a minimum, with a proper pay scale above that reflecting qualifications and responsibility. It would cost in the low hundreds of millions. The alternative is watching primary schools lose experienced support staff to retail, which is roughly what has been happening for five years while successive governments pretend not to notice.

And please stop telling headteachers we cannot afford it. A society that cannot afford to pay the people who raise its children adequately is making choices about what matters. Those choices are visible.