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Here are some personal musings on today's lobby. Please add any other experiences, anecdotes, quotes and so on from a really good event (well the press probably won't so we may as well do it ourselves!) The ESOL Lobby 28th February 2007: a view from the queue It is only a couple of hours since the lobby of Parliament finished, so there is still time for it to appear on TV or in tomorrow’s papers. But at the moment it is conspicuous by its absence, which does give me a certain feeling of déjà vu… But whatever the media do or don’t report, hundreds of ESOL teachers, managers, principals, trade unionists, politicians and above all ESOL students from all parts of the country today queued for hours to express their opposition to cuts in ESOL funding. After a very long wet wait some colleagues from Greenwich Community College and I got into the Palace of Westminster to find it buzzing with groups of people talking to their MPs, waiting in the corridor for their MPs to arrive and filling in requests for meetings. There was a day long programme of talks organised by the UCU, with sympathetic politicians, (150 approx have signed early day motion 383 opposing the cuts) and representatives from organisations such as NATECLA, WEA etc. I happened to hear the MP for Croydon, home of the infamous Lunar House, accuse the government of basing some of these cuts on a myth; the myth that the Home Office will turn around asylum applications within 8 weeks. By the time we got in, the word was that Bill Rammell had announced some concessions, seemingly about making the means test easier to “pass” to qualify for fee remission. But as speaker after speaker said, this is simply not enough. We need free ESOL classes widely available to all who need them. My final thought on leaving Parliament was this: New Labour and the media have spent a huge amount of energy blaming migrants for an unwillingness to integrate. It has insisted they take a test and do voluntary work in the community before they can get a passport (the most recent preposterous suggestion), or even learn English before they come to the UK. But this very rhetoric and these very policies succeeded today in giving asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants the best possible lesson in active citizenship and participatory democracy, organising against the very policies that would wish to silence, slander and disempower them. I felt proud to be there, proud to be an ESOL teacher and proud to be a member of the UCU. Thanks to everyone who was there, and all who were there in spirit! -- Melanie Cooke [log in to unmask] *********************************** ESOL-Research is a forum for researchers and practitioners with an interest in research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James Simpson at the Centre for Language Education Research, School of Education, University of Leeds. To join or leave ESOL-Research, visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ESOL-RESEARCH.html A quick guide to using Jiscmail lists can be found at: http://jiscmail.ac.uk/help/using/quickuser.htm To contact the list owner, send an email to [log in to unmask]