But a fighting strategy and leadership prepared to stand up to Starmer is still needed
Sheila Caffrey, National Education Union exec member, personal capacity
National union conferences are important: they bring together reps and activists to discuss what needs to be done. They are made up of a range of people – from hard-working reps to officials defending their positions; those who focus on defending individual members and those who want to build wider action. And there are delegates like the Socialist Party members, who put forward the strategy and programme that are essential to ensure that we can take on the government and the bosses.
This means the range of debate is wide. In the National Education Union (NEU), many debates focus around what education should look like to be beneficial for children and young people, communities and education workers. This include discussions against schools becoming exam factories, and the need for a broad, inclusive curriculum, to how AI is changing teaching techniques. These are important for us as socialists, and as NEU members in the Socialist Party we link improvements we can fight for now to what education might look like in a socialist society.
It was agreed to move to a formal ballot for teachers over the 2.8% unfunded pay deal currently on offer for September, if it isn’t improved. Unfunded would be a disaster! It would push cash-strapped schools further into debt and force most to consider redundancies. The funding is definitely the issue that most members are concerned about.
When the National Executive discusses next steps, red lines are going to have to be clearly formulated: what funding is acceptable? What pay level are we demanding – is it in line with inflation or is it pushing to recoup the decade-plus of pay cuts? Where do threats to support staff jobs come in? How about further education and early years members, who are facing even worse funding cuts?
The ballot timeline will also need to be clear to make sure members are confident there will be a clear national lead aiming to win. Socialist Party members will fight for the strongest campaign and ballot possible to fight for decent pay and adequate funding to prevent cuts, closures or downgrading of student support.
The funding and job cuts lead to the issue of crippling workload for teachers. It is regularly cited as one of the top reasons that teachers leave the profession in the first three years from qualifying. With funding and job cuts, this excessive workload is often shifted on to support staff meaning they are carrying out work far above pay grades, often with little training or support.
We have put forward the idea of a national contract for education workers for several years now, and NEU national conference has backed this idea, and supported a motion this year to fight for a national contract with a national campaign and action.
Strategy
However, the ‘NEU Left’ leadership in the union, backed by groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), doesn’t believe that we should fight on workload nationally. Conference voted against an SWP-supported amendment putting forward a strategy to just fight in some schools where the membership is big enough or strong enough to fight. This has been the strategy followed by the NEU the last two years, which has seen some great wins for individual workplaces, but the situation nationally becomes worse and worse.
The vote on the amendment was taken before lunchtime with the rest of the debate to be had afterwards. Leading members of the NEU Left then spent the whole of lunchtime bombarding social media and WhatsApp chats saying it was impossible and that the potential ballot in the summer to increase the 2.8% teacher pay deal ‘is the fight of our lives’ – as if the issues cannot be combined. Unfortunately this swung enough votes after lunch to vote down the motion, so the situation remains that action will only be local.
An unwillingness to take on the Labour government is key to all this. Although the Telegraph likes to write about militant union bosses, in reality the NEU has just signed a partnership deal with the government, CEOs of academy trusts and leaders of faith schools, and is hesitant to push forward on campaigns that would undermine this. The partnership deal was signed in January behind closed doors and members weren’t informed until after the event (see ‘Why we opposed ‘Improving Education Together’ at NEU Executive’).
There was meant to be an ‘urgent’ motion to conference to discuss this. The leadership was clearly worried about what the membership might think, so they argued on the pre-conference Executive that it didn’t fit the criteria to be heard. This was overturned after we and others opposed this move. But the person who had led the charge to try and shut it down then was elected to ask the conference whether they wanted to hear the motion, and managed to achieve winning the conference to vote against hearing the urgent motion. We will see over the next year how this plays out, but we will look to address this again at next year’s conference. The need for a lay-led union that isn’t stifled by the government and employers is essential.
Another discussion that made headlines in the media was around Reform. Daniel Kebede, NEU General Secretary, correctly raised the need to campaign against the right-wing, populist party and to put forward an alternative. But what is the alternative? We need trade unions to take a lead on uniting workers around slogans such as ‘jobs, homes and services, not racism’, and to raise the need for a political alternative to the current mainstream and right-wing populist parties. We need to push for workers and socialists to stand in elections. Unfortunately, none of the motions passed managed to push this forwards.
Other important issues discussed, such as academies and support staff, will be addressed in further articles. Socialist Party members will build the pay ballot in our local branches, and continue to argue for a fighting strategy and leadership locally and on the national executive.
