Sheila Caffrey, NEU executive member, personal capacity
The National Education Union (NEU) Executive in November agreed to ballot members in England – teachers and support staff – over teacher pay, funding and workload, with an indicative ballot in February. Socialist Party members helped to ensure there was a strong decision at the meeting.
No new money for schools was announced in Labour’s Budget. The Labour government’s recommendation to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB) is for an unfunded 6.5% pay rise over three years, a real-terms pay cut.
This is a worse funding settlement than under the last two Tory governments. We are already seeing cuts and redundancies in all areas, and the government has made it quite clear that staffing cuts are where ‘savings’ should be made.
We are already all overworked with staffing cut to the bone – we cannot accept further austerity in our schools. This is a political choice – and is certainly not one we’re willing to accept!
The Executive was unanimous in its decision that we need to ballot to fight. Socialist Party members put forward two key strengthening strategies: the need to include support staff in the ballot alongside teachers; and using the special conference planned for February, where we’ll have a massive group of NEU activists together, to launch the campaign.
Both these proposals were agreed. This ensures we can take action this academic year – pushing back against the government before the three-year deal is implemented. And as support staff jobs are more vulnerable to funding cuts, it’s essential that all school staff are included in the fight to save education!
Socialist Party members have long argued that it is essential that the fight on pay is linked to fighting for full funding and on workload. The announcement from head office declares: “We need a commitment to fully funded and above-inflation pay rises that start to address the real-terms pay cuts since 2010. And we need a guarantee to raise the level of education funding to reward and retain our amazing school staff.” The exec agreed to include fighting against threats to increase the hours teachers are directed to work, making workloads – already on average over 60 hours a week – even more excessive.
Support staff organising
There will be a special NEU conference to decide about organising support staff in February. We should aim to have at least 20% of delegations to be support staff, but also that discussions are had around the model motion that was passed at the exec.
Unfortunately, the proposed motion to go to the special conference from the Executive was presented to the relevant exec subcommittee just three minutes before the official end of the meeting! We objected to this effective fait accompli – we should be making sure our decisions are thought through and discussed with members.
In our view, it is important to build campaigns with support staff and teachers working together, and to aim at working in unity with other support staff unions. That should apply at a national level too; our union executive should approach the executives of the other unions to try to agree a cooperative way forward.
Solidarity with UCU in FE
In Further Education, the University and College Union (UCU) ballot for action over workload and pay was successful in a number of colleges. In my NEU district in Bristol, successful solidarity action was built with workers not covered by ballots collectively using their legal right to refuse to cross picket lines this year in our sixth form strike and recent Cathedral Schools Trust dispute. That approach has now become part of the union’s national campaign! So the NEU will share information and support for NEU members to not cross UCU picket lines, strengthening the action.
End supply rip-off
The Supply and Home Tutors Organising Forum met at the start of December. We discussed the government’s suggestions to cap agency fees for schools, as well as dropping finders’ fees – it’s no coincidence that these concessions have been proposed just weeks after the union re-launched our End the Agency Rip-off campaign!
The best way to end the agency rip-off would be to fight for supply to be brought back in-house – a power that councils have. Socialist Party members will be arguing that MPs and political leaders who say they are on our side should be invited to the Executive to discuss what they can do. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede talks with Zack Polanski of the Green Party, for example – why not call him in to demand that Green-led councils bring supply back under democratic council control?
Fighting racism
With very little notice, the exec was presented with a resolution to support the new anti-racism alliance ‘Together’. Socialist Party members expressed our concerns about the approach in this campaign.
