Christine Blower, Baroness Blower

Explore about the Famous Trade Unionist Christine Blower, Baroness Blower, who was born in United Kingdom on April 20, 1951. Analyze Christine Blower, Baroness Blower’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Christine Blower, Baroness Blower dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Christine Blower, Baroness Blower?

Christine Blower, Baroness Blower Biography

Christine Blower, Baroness Blower (born 20 April 1951) was the eleventh General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, a trade union representing qualified teachers across England and Wales. In March 2018, she stood for election and was shortlisted for the position of the Labour Party’s General Secretary. She is the Vice Chair of the pressure group Unite Against Fascism.

In 1973, she took her first teaching post, at Holland Park School, a comprehensive in Kensington and Chelsea which was then part of the Inner London Education Authority, where she taught French. At the time, the school had changed from streamed teaching to mixed-ability teaching, a style of teaching she prefers as it does not “create the sheep and goats situation that comprehensives were set up to avoid”. Her daughter Sophie later attended the school.

In 1980, she became Head of Modern Languages at St Edmund’s Secondary School in Fulham, then Head of Department at Quintin Kynaston School in Westminster in 1983.

Blower joined the NUT at the start of her teaching career. Between 1986 and 2004 she held various posts in the West London association, including Secretary.

With the threatened break up of the ILEA, Blower moved back to Hammersmith and Fulham in 1990 and concentrated on working with young teenagers at risk of care or custody at Farm Lane Adolescent Resource Centre. After its closure, she was redeployed as a member of the local authority’s Behaviour Support Team. As she explained in 1997, “The brief of the team is to try and deal with the behaviour in order to calm the children down, get them focussed in on tasks so they can stay in the mainstream”.

She was elected to the National Executive of the NUT between 1992 and 2000.

Blower has aligned herself to long-standing NUT criticisms of the standard assessment tests (or SATs) in schools, including the national boycotts led by the union in 1993 and 2010.

This element of her speech was portrayed by some as an example of hard left militancy. Speaking before the May 1997 general election, she distanced herself from New Labour. Two years later, she told a journalist that she was “to the left of old Labour” and confirmed that she had no affiliation to any political party or group. However, in 2000, she was a member of the London Socialist Alliance, ahead of the Greater London Assembly Elections. She said at the time that it “was formed to prevent disillusionment with Labour giving a new birth to the far right as it did in the 1970s”. At this election, she ran for election as the party candidate in West Central and on the multi-member party list system; she was unsuccessful on both.

In her presidential address to NUT Conference on 29 March 1997, Blower reported that in the previous year her daughter Sophie had been withdrawn from the Key Stage 2 tests.

Other positions include national vice-president in 1996 and then the 125th national president of the NUT from 28 March 1997 to 10 April 1998, succeeding Carole Regan. Blower used this platform to argue for a greater role for teachers in the running of Pupil Referral Units and for “properly resourced nursery provision”. She was a critic of grammar schools, SATs and the schools regulator. Of the latter, she argued that “much of what people have to do for Ofsted is an utter waste of time”.

Blower failed in her bid to be elected as general secretary in 1999, with incumbent Doug McAvoy re-elected with a 17,000 majority. She was later elected Deputy general secretary on 28 January 2005 under his successor Steve Sinnott.

After the sudden death of Sinnott while in post, she became acting general secretary on 5 April 2008, and led the union’s first national strike in two decades – over teachers’ pay – a fortnight later.

Under Blower’s leadership, the NUT has published its proposals for alternative approaches to assessment, most recently in conjunction with the NAHT in 2009 and with ATL in 2010. A further document co-authored by the three unions was published in December 2010.

On 5 May 2009, she was elected unopposed as the first woman general secretary of the NUT.

In a cover story for The Spectator magazine in August 2010, it was claimed that NUT activists were “bullying” head teachers known to be considering academy conversion and, with it, a break from local authority control.

The NUT under Blower’s leadership has been a vocal critic of the Academies programme, both in its original New Labour model through to the expansions brought about by the Academies Act 2010 which favours schools rated “outstanding” by Ofsted.

In February 2013, in line with the NUT, Blower was among those who gave their support to the People’s Assembly in a letter published by The Guardian newspaper. She also gave a speech at the People’s Assembly Conference held at Westminster Central Hall on 22 June 2013.

Blower was nominated for a life peerage in the 2019 Prime Minister’s Resignation Honours. She was created Baroness Blower, of Starch Green in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, on 15 October 2019.

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