immune to the venom of hatred to achieve the peace and prosperity that have eluded them through years of bloody ethnic conflicts. more news at the top of the hour. now it s time for political thinking with nick robinson. his guest this week as mary bousted, one of the teaching union leaders. hello and welcome to political thinking. it was another week when children and parents had to wait anxiously for an early morning text or an email to tell them whether their classroom or their school would open that day. thanks not to covid 19, not to a big dump of snow, but to strike action by members of the national education union this week on political thinking, a conversation with rather than an interrogation of someone in the news, my guest is the joint general secretary of that union, the neu, mary bousted. she is notjust the general secretary of the largest education union in europe, she has been a leader of a trade union for longer than almost anybody else in the country. she w
i have no vote in that and it s quite right that i should have no voice in that. let s turn to your agenda for schools. what s set out in your book and what has been your life s work in many ways. imagine i make you education secretary for a day. happy days. other than pay, we know what you d do on pay, what would you do? oh, well, i mean, the agenda would last longer than a day. but what i would do, i think, first of all is, well, i d tackle three things. first of all, a funding system, which means that schools in challenging areas with deprived pupils are getting less of a real terms increase over the next few years than schools in the leafy suburbs because money is being directed towards them. so i would fund that school budget. secondly, i would completely, from the top to the bottom reform the inspection system 0fsted. i think it s a dysfunctional regulator. it knows the price of everything and the value of nothing in education. it s inspection.
as tough enough to withstand calls for more and more public spending, tough enough to take the right decisions for the economy. one day, of course, someone will have to blink. thanks for watching. hello there. part two of the weekend looking much brighter than part one. we had a lot of cloud around on saturday. today feels very different. lots of sunshine around, but feeling a little bit chillier than what we ve been used to. in fact, temperatures will be closer to the seasonal norm for the next few days, in fact, for much of this upcoming week. high pressure sitting right on top of the uk, bringing all this fine and settled weather through the afternoon. a bit more of a breeze there for the far southeast, east anglia