School support staff: We need unity and we need action

Sheila Caffrey, Louise Cuffaro and Dan Warrington

NEU National Executive members, personal capacity

Hundreds of National Education Union (NEU) members, both support staff and teachers, including 40% of the National Executive, have signed a statement calling for maximum unity between unions that organise support staff.

In advance of a special Executive meeting on 8 September to decide whether or not to go ahead with a ballot of support staff, the hundreds of signatories include 22 members of the Executive. 

The statement was published over the summer by executive members of three unions with support staff members: Unison, Unite and the NEU.

As we face both a cost-of-living crisis and a funding crisis in public services including schools, this summer Unison and Unite balloted local government workers, including school support staff, over pay. Unfortunately, despite an overwhelming vote for action, the ballots did not meet the 50% turnout threshold required by Tory anti-union legislation, disgracefully kept in place by a Labour government under Keir Starmer and now Andy Burnham.

The NEU plans to ballot both teachers and support staff in October. As the local government unions are accepting the employers’ pay offer for support staff, the NEU’s campaign will now be over teacher pay. But crucially for support staff, it will also be over funding – to cover any pay rise in order to stave off further redundancies, and to start to redress the massive funding gap inflicted on schools since 2011.

But at a time when we need maximum unity to defeat pay cuts and redundancies, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has threatened sanctions against the NEU, following complaints from other support staff unions. The complaints are due to the agreements originally signed up to by the NEU when it was first formed, in which it agreed not to recruit support staff.

However, since then, thousands of support staff have joined the NEU because they saw it as a fighting union, over Covid and then in the 2023 strikes. The NEU now has around 70,000 support staff members, making it the second biggest support staff union after Unison, and those members expect their union to fight for them. There are also around 300,000 support staff in no union at all. With a new school support staff-specific negotiating body being proposed by the government (the SSSNB), Socialist Party members argue that it is best for all unions that organise support staff to be recognised by that body and work together. 

Talks are currently taking place between the unions. We hope for a collaborative outcome that enables all the unions to fight together locally and nationally.

But even if that outcome is not achieved at this stage, Socialist Party members on the NEU Executive will be arguing at the 8 September meeting that the plan to ballot all members, including support staff, goes ahead. It is essential that unions stand up to low pay and the funding crisis and pile the pressure on Andy Burnham’s government.

We also argue that, if that decision means more sanctions are threatened by the TUC against the NEU, the NEU should reach out to all the other unions, not only in education, to appeal for a collaborative way forward. There should be no sanctions against a union which, under pressure from its members, is leading a fightback against low pay and austerity.