Hugo Pierre, Tower Hamlets Socialist Party
National Education Union (NEU) members at Access Creative College in Tower Hamlets have taken 13 days of strike action since January, against poor pay, excessive workload and working conditions. There were also big problems with safeguarding for staff and students.
As an independent college, staff often feel that their main job is to encourage students to join and then to make sure they stay – they can feel more like sales reps than responsible for teaching and students’ learning.
The course offer is mainly creative, but many students come with low levels of maths and English and need to increase their grades. The NEU reps explained that the college put a heavy workload on those teaching maths, timetabling them to do 28 hours face-to-face teaching and sometimes nine-hour days. There were also inexplicable variations in pay between staff with the same workload and experience, sometimes of thousands of pounds a year.
To start with there were only a couple of NEU members, but they quickly went from three to 30. There were so many problems, with no bargaining structure at all, and coming together was the best way to find solutions.
When negotiations broke down they asked the NEU for a strike ballot. Their main demands were for a pay structure that mirrored teaching scales in a state sixth form, proper holiday entitlements, a workload agreement, health and safety, pensions, and union recognition.
The action was really cohesive even though most had never been on strike before. They got organised quickly. The NEU strike pay also kept everyone together, as well as support from the branch and local activists. Going into the last round of negotiations they also issued notice for a further round of action.
The strike won most of the aims, including a substantial pay rise for many with a proper pay structure, increased holiday pay, a limit on the number of face-to-face teaching hours, and a proper structure for discussing health and safety. This was enough to settle the dispute. The issue of union recognition was not won this time but they are hoping this will be achieved – as they said, in many ways this is just the start!
