Dan Warrington, NEU Executive member, personal capacity
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has instructed the School Teachers Review Body on pay (STRB) for the next three years instead of one year, as is usual. When the National Education Union (NEU) executive met in October, the government had released its evidence to the STRB, and the proposal is insultingly bad.
The government has proposed that teacher pay should ‘increase’ by just 6.5% spread over the next three years. At current inflation rates, that amounts to a real-terms pay cut of around 2% per year. Even if inflation were to reduce to the government’s target of 2% (which does not seem probable any time soon), 6.5% over three years will do nothing to alleviate the 23% erosion of real-terms pay since 2010.
Labour must know that this proposal is an insult to the teaching profession. Further decline in real-terms pay will worsen the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, driving up workload even further for everyone, and worsening the learning conditions of students.
The government will claim lack of affordability, but the reality is that the current expenditure on education in the UK is only 4.1% of GDP – well below that of our European neighbours or even the USA. Instead, Labour is choosing to prioritise preserving the wealth of the super-rich over proper funding of education.
Rather than wait for the STRB process to slowly unfold, education unions must begin to organise a dispute for fully funded teacher pay rises that move towards a restoration of lost pay. This begins with a rejection of the STRB and a call for direct negotiations over pay and conditions between the unions and the Education Secretary.
But the fight on funding must not be limited to the pay award. Workload is the issue members are most acutely suffering from and requires funding overall to be addressed. We must bring workload, funding and pay all together – and link that to demanding a route for academies to return to local authority control to end the drain on school finances by multi-academy trusts (MATS).
Sixth forms fragmentation only benefits bosses
Following a protracted battle with the Sixth Form College Association, NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede reported that sixth-form members would be consulted on accepting a 4% pay award, while continuing to pursue changes to conditions that would bring sixth-form college lecturers in line with schoolteachers.
That teachers and lecturers in sixth form colleges have had to fight to receive the same pay uplift as schoolteachers illustrates the need for direct bargaining with the government rather than through the fragmented system of different college CEOs. Any national pay campaign over the coming year must include sixth-form colleges and demand better for the whole education system.
Supply agency rip-off
One area where the privatisation of state education is keenly shown is that of supply teacher agencies. Underfunding of schools leads to overstretched staffing and a need for supply teachers to cover the gaps. Supply agencies charge schools extortionate fees, only a fraction of which are received by the supply teacher. The result is funds that schools should be spending on educating students are lining the pockets of supply agency bosses.
Kebede announced the launch of a Stop the Agency Rip-off campaign, to expose the extraordinary profits made by the supply agencies and lobby politicians to support the set-up of a publicly held national supply register. Socialist Party members have long demanded that supply is brought back in-house.
Lobbying of MPs would be stronger if the NEU was able to back parliamentary candidates whose policies align with NEU campaign aims. We want to see the back of privatisation in education – whether it is supply agencies, academies or exam boards – which would be much stronger if our rules allowed the union to endorse socialist candidates standing on anti-privatisation anti-austerity platforms. Socialist Party members are campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana and other pro-worker MPs to be invited to the NEU exec to discuss how this and all our other demands can be fought for politically.
Support staff
The most debate in this month’s executive meeting was around the arrangements for the Special Conference regarding support staff recruitment and organising planned for February 2026 – a point of continued tension between the NEU and other education unions following a second censure of the NEU for attempting to gain bargaining rights for support staff.
The Support Staff National Council (SSNC) within the NEU had put forward recommendations for how to ensure that support staff voices were heard at this special conference, most notably a requirement that 20% of district delegates to the conference be support staff members. These recommendations were opposed and overridden by the NEU Left faction, which holds a majority on the Executive Committee.
Annual conference has three years in a row passed motions calling on the union to begin actively recruiting support staff. Socialist Party members fight for all the education unions to become strong, democratic and combative unions, for them all to have negotiation rights, and to campaign for maximum collaboration in action.
TUC demo against austerity
As agreed at the previous executive meeting, the NEU delegates to the General Council of the TUC (Trades Union Congress) reported that they called for the TUC to name a date for a trade union-led demonstration against Labour austerity.
Daniel Kebede acknowledged the impact of the lobby outside the TUC, called by the National Shop Stewards Network and supported by Socialist Party members, and encouraged NEU members to continue to lobby for the TUC to fulfil policy passed at the Congress in September.
However, no date has been set for a demo yet. The NEU and the trades unions have to keep fighting for it. As the Budget looms, it is essential that the trade union movement steps up and opposes the imposition of yet more austerity on the public sector.
