A SPECIAL needs teacher from the North-East has taken over as president of the largest teachers’ union in the UK.

Graham Dawson, 60, from Backworth, North Tyneside, became national president of the NASUWT at the union’s annual conference in Cardiff over Easter.

After teaching history and sociology in secondary schools, Mr Dawson retrained as a special needs teacher, working with children and young people in schools, colleges and alternative education providers in the North East.

As the first member of his family to attend university, Mr Dawson says he is passionate advocate for an education system which allows the talents of all children to thrive.

He has served as a member of the NASUWT’s national executive for 22 years, representing teachers in the North-East.

In his inaugural speech Mr Dawson complained that young people are being “diverted onto the dirt track of low-pay, zero-hours and dead-end jobs” as a result of the Coalition Government’s “narrow academic and elitist” education reforms.

He told the conference: “Education is more than five A to Cs. Education leads to worlds of wonder and opportunity. Not a narrow corridor, confining and restricting children. It is imperative to educate the whole child. It is time that those in charge of Government policy, and some of our school leaders, also realised this as well.”

Mr Dawson hit out at what he said was the economic and social barriers erected under the current Coalition Government which were restricting the life chances of children and young people, citing the trebling of university tuition fees, the undermining of vocational learning, the growth of unpaid internships and rising youth unemployment.

“No country can afford the waste and human cost of casting many of its young people aside with such casual abandon,” he said.