'Show us the money' - NEU members on the picket line in Hastings. James front row centre
'Show us the money' - NEU members on the picket line in Hastings. James front row centre

James Ellis, Lead NEU rep, personal capacity

Schools and colleges have faced over a decade of cuts. Next year, schools budgets will hit a 15-year low in real terms, forcing further cuts to staffing and resources.

This crisis is made even worse by the academies programme. The top 50 multi-academy trusts (MATs) spend an average of £68 million a year on executive salaries, according to the analysis by Warwick Mansell and the Campaign for State Education (CASE) – seven times as much on salaries over £130,000 as local authority-controlled schools. Every penny spent on executive salaries is money that isn’t spent on frontline services.

National Education Union (NEU) members who work for schools in the University of Brighton Academy Trust (UBAT) have seen this firsthand. We have been in a dispute over the way UBAT has managed its finances, and the impact that has had on jobs and workload. On average, MATs retain between 5-7% of a school’s budget to pay for their central services. UBAT has been withholding an average of 14%, with some schools losing over 25% in some years!

Devastating impact

This has had a devastating impact on frontline services. We’ve seen increasing workload, cuts to budgets and essential services, and damaging restructures and redundancies. And where has the money gone? Towards a bloated central academy budget, with huge amounts spent on a large executive team, corporate marketing and outside consultants. This is public money that should be going towards the education of our students!

We held a very successful campaign. We won strike ballots in eight schools and have taken five days of coordinated strike action. We have won workload charters, halted redundancies, saved essential services, forced UBAT to agree to completely change its funding model, and contributed to some significant changes in trust leadership. 

However, it was revealed last week that the Department for Education has decided to step in and dissolve the trust and re-broker all of the schools, handing them to other MATs. NEU members are not surprised by this decision.

Future employers taking over UBAT schools will have a great deal of damage to repair. They must have an open, fair and transparent funding model that gives schools the resources they need. They will need to provide cast-iron assurances on members’ pay, terms and conditions, including retaining recent workload agreements, and formally recognising the NEU for collective bargaining. Any failure to honour such terms would make a further industrial action ballot likely.

Democratic control

However, it is deeply frustrating that after having achieved so much in our strike campaign we might just be handed to a different MAT, facing potentially similar problems. We want all UBAT schools to be returned to local authority control and for the wider school community, including all unions, to be included in the discussions about the future direction of these schools.

The long-term solution does not lie with any academy trust. The problems faced in UBAT reflect deeper problems with academisation. Academies lack local accountability, spend huge amounts of public money on their central teams and executive pay, and treat education like a business. Our members are all too aware that there are many more ‘UBATs’ out there that haven’t yet been exposed.

The NEU wants all schools to return to local authority control. The government must fully fund local councils to allow them to provide the kind of education services that our students deserve.

Our campaign has had an impact. The leader of Hastings Borough Council has come out in support of the NEU’s demands, and the local Labour MP Helena Dollimore has been handing out leaflets on school gates criticising UBAT and seeking parental views – although not going as far as to support our call to return schools to the local authority. We will be campaigning on these issues in Sussex, including public meetings and demonstrations.

Labour’s education bill

Labour’s new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill proposes that new schools should not have to be academies – so why does the same logic not apply to a failed academy trust?

It is imperative that, as a minimum, amendments are made to the bill to allow a route for academies to return to local authority control, and for greater oversight and regulation of academy executive pay and the amounts trusts take from school budgets to fund central services. The NEU should contact MPs – including Jeremy Corbyn, the Independents and suspended Labour MPs – to ask them to move such an amendment.

Ultimately, we need all schools to be returned to local authorities, under the democratic control of the school community. To make this a reality we need more than just slogans; the NEU needs to launch a bold national campaign to demand that the Labour government renationalises education. This campaign should be linked to wider issues of pay, funding and workload, as academisation plays a central role in all these.