By an NEU member
This academic year promises to be a difficult time for teachers and school budgets. As a result of the squeeze on finances in education, teaching staff are feeling the pinch more and more in terms of workload and other stresses. In a lot of instances this will spill over into strike action in local schools or academy trusts.
At my local district meeting this month, there was an excellent example of how teachers in one school were able to fight back against unnecessary stress and workload. In their school, part of a large multi-academy trust, the management had introduced a completely unnecessary regime of very frequent observations.
When senior staff observe teachers doing their work, observations are invariable felt to be threatening. Senior staff are seldom present in a ‘supportive’ role – although that is always the theory – and the observation is instead a prelude to criticism, pressure and improvement ‘targets’ on a teacher already overworked.
Observations in this particular school had been re-labelled ‘step-ins’, to make them sound ‘supportive’. But middle managers were told that each teacher had to have two every fortnight and they were not at all developmental, simply another means to harassing teachers by checking on the use of ‘key words’, and the like. All of this added to the workload and the stress teachers already felt.
There were other issues that were very concerning – like the amount of cover creeping up, despite an agreement some years ago that teacher cover would be cut to an absolute minimum. So bad is the cover situation that it is the ‘norm’ for classes to be ‘collapsed’ (ie combined) so they can be looked after by a single teacher, perhaps in the school hall. It is not teaching, when a hundred students, sometimes from different year groups, are watching a film in the school hall. It is child-minding.
Teachers are empowered by a strong union group in school
To begin with, the teaching staff were intimidated and although they grumbled, there was no mechanism to deal with the situation, despite a majority of them being NEU members.
It was outside officers of the union who began the intervention – by convening a meeting of members in school. The meeting was packed, with standing room only, and two or three were persuaded to become joint union reps. Once that outside help had been given, the fight to improve conditions was conducted entirely by the union reps, supported by NEU members.
The great thing about that first meeting that members empowered for the first time. They no longer felt isolated or intimated by the unreasonable pressures of management and they realised that they did not need to deal with difficult issues individually with senior staff.
When management at first refused to discuss and negotiate with the new reps, over the observation policy, NEU members moved quickly to a consultative ballot on industrial action. The mood of the managers changed immediately, especially when 91% voted for strike action on a 88% turnout.
The management immediately relented on their observation programme and agreed to one fifteen minute maximum every half term. The union is now working on the issue of cover, which is currently unsustainable.
This example shows the importance of having good reps in schools. This was a secondary school, with large numbers of teachers, but, surprisingly, there are many secondary schools where staff are so overwhelmed, and to a degree intimidated, that they do not have a rep and very rarely have school NEU meetings. That is even more true of primary schools where there are fewer staff.
Campaign for reps in every school
For national strike ballots, the NEU always struggles to get past the statutory 50% threshold, so a key part of getting members involved and participating in votes must be a campaign by full-time and lay officers to get reps in every school. In almost every case where there are school-based disputes, there is a high turnout for a strike ballot and for that reason they are usually successful. That lesson should be taken on board regionally and nationally.
The NEU nationally has produced some excellent material on the financial squeeze on schools, and they have a link, here, so you can find out how much has been lost by your local school over the past few years. Schools are being starved of necessary cash and it is affecting all aspects of teaching and learning. The school described above is simply unable to buy in cover as it did in the past and one can sympathise with the impossible situation in which headteachers are often placed.
The NEU website shows the scale of the cuts facing schools. Research from the Stop School Cuts campaign show that school cuts have deepened by £1bn since last year, “leaving spending on education at its lowest level as a share of GDP in 25 years.”
Since 2010 we have seen:
- 74 per cent of schools in England have less funding in real terms.
- 71 per cent of primary and 90 per cent of secondary schools are in need of serious repair.
- 1,180 schools have lost more than £1m each in real terms.
- 146 local authorities have had their school funding budgets slashed.
Pay rise has to be fully funded
Unfortunately, it is typical of this Starmer Tory-lite government that they talk the talk but fail to put any real money into the education system. The last pay award for teachers, which only just kept up with official inflation, was not even fully funded, so schools were obliged to make more cuts to be able to afford it. The School teachers Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) for 2025/26 has just been published and the NEU will be demanding that the pay rise included is fully funded by the government.
Rachel Reeves talked grandly at Labour conference about all primary schools having a functioning library – which is all well and good, but she didn’t offer a penny to pay for librarians, books or other facilties to make it a reality. The trade union movement – not just the teaching unions, which are not affiliated to Labour – must force the Labour government to change tack completely.
It was elected, among other things, to improve education, not starve it like the Tories did. If these Labour leaders are not prepared to change policies, they must be forced to stand aside for other who will.
