Below is the text of the speech I gave to the NEU (NUT Section) Conference at the Brighton Centre on 31/03/18

​MOTION 20 – AMENDMENT 1 – Crisis in Young People’s Mental Health

Conference, President. I have been flown in a plane, but I’m not qualified to fly a plane. I’ve been treated by a dentist, but I’m not qualified to perform dentistry. I have received counselling for mental health problems, but I’m no more qualified to offer focussed and wholly appropriate counselling than I am to perform the former two tasks. So why would the Government so undervalue the cost of providing properly trained individuals to fulfil their ambition of having a mental health first aider in every school by 2020? 

In the first year of the programme the Youth MHFA organisation has provided 100 one day training courses to around 1200 individuals. The cost of funding an individual is around £200. Conference I would suggest that to train staff to an adequate level in order to enable them to support children with mental health issues would actually cost way in excess of this amount. Furthermore, the idea of bundling around 120 staff at a time onto a one day course is never going to offer sufficient detail of training to enable those staff to fully deal with this ever escalating crisis of mental health issues in children from primary age up to university students. 

Put simply, in their usual haphazard way, this Government is applying a sticking plaster to fix a gapping wound.

Conference, in order to even begin to deal with this crisis in young people’s mental health it’s not enough to look at the cure, we need to look at the roots of the problem and in doing so seek prevention. 

Recently, I actually attended a very rare event for teachers. I attended CPD course that genuinely made me think. The session was based on the concept of load theory. Many of you will know that this theory is based on the capacity of the working memory and the limited information that our working memory can process. Even though there have been many creditable studies into the concept of load theory and the dangers of overloading young peoples working memories This Easter holidays children across the country are being bombarded with revision timetables, this ceaseless attack coming from all directions. Even yesterday Barnaby Lenon, Chairman of the Independent Schools Council, published advice arguing that GCSE students should be revising for seven hours a day over the Easter holidays. No wonder these still developing young minds are going into meltdown at the prospect of page after page of information pushing their working memory beyond capacity.

Conference, in 1986 the barbaric practice of corporal punishment was quite rightly banned from our schools. Why now, in the twenty first century, are we allowing a form of cognitive corporal punishment to pervade into our classrooms?

The Guardian recently published figures that show that whilst 16 million people in the UK show some form of mental illness, ¾ of these illnesses originate in childhood. Additionally, 73% of children with mental health problems are not receiving proper treatment for their conditions. Furthermore, it takes an average of 10 years for children to receive adequate treatment, and because of this we are send increasing numbers of children into adult life bereft of the personal capacity to cope with this increasingly complex world. 

Conference, as teachers we implement wave one intervention in learning every day. At the frontline we also deliver wave one intervention for our children’s mental wellbeing. But now the Government must put its money where it’s mouth is and properly fund properly trained professionals to look after our children’s mental health. To paraphrase something Kevin Courtney said a couple of years ago, we know the cost of fully funding children’s mental health services, we do not know the price we will pay if we don’t properly fund this provision. 

Below is the text of the speech I gave to the NEU (NUT Section) Conference at the Brighton Centre on Saturday 31/03/18 

MOTION 14 – Excessive CEO Pay in Academies

President, Conference. As the Government’s flagship academies and free school programme sails toward the rocky coast of disaster it’s time to really consider who is going to sink with the wreckage and who is going to be sitting safe in the lifeboats as the hull is finally  submerged into the murky waters of a neoliberal education sector. Will the captains stand at the bridge and, taking full responsibility,  go down fighting to save our school? Or, will those who once claimed to be the champions of education, but who now have more in common with the captains of industry, shed crocodile tears as their lifeboat sails away from the wreckage they helped to create? 

One thing is certain, these CEOs of academy trusts and MATs are not going to be like pirates of by-gone days, scouring the map to see where x marks the spot then getting out their shovels and digging for treasure. These privateers have had money freely given to them by a Government more concerned with lining the pockets of the few, rather than lining the hungry stomachs of some of our most disenfranchised children. 

These self-proclaimed educational gurus are doing fantastically well in one respect. Yes they are. They are flouting the constraints of below inflation public sector pay rises as their pockets bulge with the weight of inflation busting pay increases. Conference, such is this magic, it appears that for every penny that is stripped from already beleaguered school budgets a pound seems to miraculously drop into the pay packet of a MAT CEO. 

The magnificent Schools Week website recently published the earnings of some of these magical pirates. Here are some of the staggering figures:

Dan Moynihan of the Harris Federation earns a staggering £440,000 per year
Toby Salt of the Ormiston Academies Trust earns a whopping £200,000 per year
Diana Owen of the LEAD MAT Trust earns an incredible £185,000 per year

Conference, I could go on. These piratical pilferers of the public sector should hang their heads in shame as dedicated, hardworking teachers are increasingly putting their hands in their own pockets to provide much needed resources, and even sometimes food, for increasing numbers of children across the country. Yes, teachers who have themselves suffered a real terms pay cut of around 15% in the past 7 years now have the added insult of seeing CEOs of MATs receiving double figure percentage increases to their already astronomical wages. 

Let’s not forget, Conference, the fortunes that go to pay for these huge wages comes from the same pot of public money that should be going to fund our schools properly, so that no teacher has to pay for their students resources, no teacher has to struggle to make ends meet because of below inflation pay increases and ultimately no teacher should have to face the threat of redundancy. 

It’s the neo-liberal ideology that has seen these few CEO fat cats pile up their plates at the expense of the many that is redundant. 

Conference, it’s time to tear down the Jolly Roger as we raise the new flag of the National Education Union, a union committed to campaigning for proper regulation of these excessive salaries. 

As a life-long Mod, this room has very special meaning for me. This is where the Jam played their last ever gig. So I’ll leave you with the words of Paul Weller. I could go on for hours, and I probably will, but I’d sooner put some joy back in this town called Malice. Let’s wrestle that money from the fat cat’s pockets and put it back into our classrooms. I second. 
k here to edit.

Over the past few weeks I have been visiting Labour Branch and CLP meetings in my local area to explain the current state of education and to further explain the reasons why my union, the NUT, is balloting members for discontinues strike action. Below is the text of the speech that has gained wide support from a great deal of Labour Party members.


​Comrades. Firstly, I'd like to thank you for inviting me to speak this evening on the crucial topic of the systematic erosion of the education profession at the hands of this repugnant Tory government. I stand before you tonight as a Labour Party member and as an active member of the National Union of Teachers. Indeed, it filled my heart with pride when a few short weeks ago Jeremy Corbyn became the first ever Labour Party leader to address my union’s national conference. Indeed, Jeremy is the first politician of any party to come to the NUT conference since the unfortunate incident when David Blunkett was forced to hide in a broom cupboard as a group of teachers attempted to confront him after he used his address to conference to berate teachers for not getting behind his educational reforms. I'm happy to report the same fate did not befall Jeremy. Our leader came to my conference to praise hard working teachers and to offer support for the struggles we face in our daily jobs and for the struggles we face as we are in the process of balloting members for discontinuous industrial action in opposition to Nicky Morgan’s white paper.

This is a white paper with the wrong priorities. Rather than focusing on the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, the real-term cuts to school funding, the lack of school places and the devastating impact that the new curriculum will have on our children, the Tories are choosing to plough on with their desire to turn every school into an academy by 2022. 

After the supposed U-turn on forced academisation some members of the public, and indeed some members of the NUT, felt that victory had been secured and that the need for strike action had melted away. I was not convinced, even on the day of the announcement, and so it was that 3 days later Nicky Morgan stood before the Commons and reiterated the desire of the Tory party to see every school become an academy by 2022. The policy was still in place, only the mechanisms of getting there had changed slightly.

This white paper threatens the future of our state education system as it is undemocratic, it ignores evidence and it will be expensive to implement. 
If the Tories get their way all schools will become academies, which would mean an end to local authorities being able to offer support to schools and teachers. Some may decry the involvement of local authorities and their provision of educational services but over 80% of schools currently in local authority control are judged good or outstanding. These schools have, wisely, chosen to stay under local authority control and we must ask the question, if the system is not broken why are the Tories so doggedly determined to fix it? 

In a further blow to democracy in our schools, Nicky Morgan has said that she wants to end the right for schools to elect parent governors. What madness is this, when schools that beat at the very heart of local communities can no longer have members of the school community being part of the decision-making process. Parent governors act as an important checks and balance mechanism to make sure that the needs of the educational professionals who run our schools work in tune with the parents who access our educational services. 

A few weeks ago in PMQ’s, when pressed by Jeremy Corbyn, David Cameron said that the evidence showed that becoming an academy offered schools the best chance of improvement. Kevin Courtney, the NUT Deputy General Secretary, wrote to Nicky Morgan on the 23rd March and the 12th April asking her to provide the evidence that this was the case. It is with no great surprise that I tell you that whilst Nicky Morgan finally replied to Kevin’s request she has not provided any firm evidence to demonstrate that academies are the most efficient way to help schools improve. When asked to comment on the impact academisation has on school improvement, Professor Stephen Machin, from the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE has clearly stated, and I quote, ‘I don’t think we have any evidence on that so far. We certainly have no evidence at all for primary schools.’

What spurious evidence Nicky Morgan has attempted to use is very much open to scrutiny. Let’s take her claim that the percentage of pupils achieving the expected level in reading, writing and maths, at the end of Key Stage 2 in primary academies has risen by 4% from 67% in 2014 to 71% in 2015. This information was indeed true, but it only applied to sponsored academies, which themselves only make up a third of primary academies in general. Indeed, the majority of academies, known as convertor academies, have only improved by 2% during the same period, absolutely in line with the improvement made by LEA primary schools.

Equally, Nicky Morgan’s attempts to argue that convertor secondary academies have made improvements does not stand up to scrutiny. These convertor academies were generally higher achieving schools already and indeed sponsored secondary academies, those schools forced to find a financial partner to help them along, have performed 11.7% below national target levels over the past 5 years. 

Even that arch-nemesis of the teaching profession, Ofsted, reported late last year that many academy chains are performing badly. 

Remember how Michael Gove set out to win us over to the glorious Utopia that is academisation? He claimed that academies would in effect be state funded independent schools. Comrades, you go to inner city Leeds, inner city Bradford, inner city Birmingham, inner city Norwich, go north, south, east and west, you can throw all the money you want at schools but you’re not going to find Eton in East Ham, you’re not going to find Harrow in Hull, you’re not going to find Rodean in Rotherham. 

How dare the Tories with their old school ties and and their old boys’ networks try to take us for fools by dangling gold before our eyes yet giving us only tin. 

The cost of converting all schools to academies has been estimated at £1.3 billion. Is this money going to fund the education of our most disadvantaged pupils? No, this estimated £1.3 billion is the cost of hiring lawyers and PR experts in order to turn schools that currently work closely with local authorities to manage their budgets, into a multitude of independent businesses. At a time when schools across the country are being forced to make compulsory redundancies amongst qualified teaching staff it is abhorrent that money is being squandered in this way.  

Indeed, the only people in education who appear to be benefitting from the change to academy status are the growing number of headteachers and chief executives whose wages are now outstripping even the Prime Minister. Sir Daniel Moynihan, a former headteacher who is now the chief executive of the Harris academy chain, is earning over £400,000 a year. Let me remind you comrades, this is tax payer’s money going to line the pockets of one man, rather than providing resources for thousands of children. 

And don’t get me started on the increasing number of academy schools and academy chains that have got into deep water with some serious financial irregularities. Not so long ago we had the fiasco when two academy groups, AET and E-Act, were served with a warning from the Government about their financial dealings and indeed were barred from opening further schools, whilst having a number of schools taken from their control. Again, I emphasize, this is public money they are being so cavalier with and again I must point out that it is the education of our children that is being put at the centre of this political pantomime. 

We now have Regional Schools Commissioners. These mysterious people seemed to emerge fully formed from nowhere in particular in 2014. Initially these 8 people had no legislative basis but had considerable powers delegated from the Secretary of State. Furthermore, they were supported by Headteacher Boards to advise them. These are made up largely of heads of academies within the regions. Some are elected by local academy heads and others are appointed or co-opted. Regional Schools Commissioners have been appointed on salaries which in some cases are over £140,000 a year. Staffing costs in each office are up to £260,000. Payments for academy heads serving on the Head Teacher Boards are £500 per day and head teachers are expected to spend at least half to one day per week on the role. This is an absolute waste of money and resources. It was not asked for, it was imposed and flies in the face of any idea of autonomy for schools that Nicky Morgan talks about. These Regional Schools Commissioners are Nicky Morgan’s henchmen, sent into local authorities in order identify schools that are ripe for academisation. Indeed, these commissioners are measured against performance indicators which include increasing the number of schools that become academies within their Region. 

It’s all very well talking in generalities about the dangers of forcing schools into becoming academies but I’d like to tell you a little about the day to day damage that has been caused by the most recent curriculum reforms. Since 2000 I’ve taught English in Secondary Schools in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds and, for the past 8 years, in Knaresborough. During that time, I have been able to nurture and guide hundreds of GCSE students towards achieving suitable English Language and English Literature GCSEs. This has been done on the basis that we teach a text, the students gain a good understanding of the text, then we conduct a piece of coursework. Of course, there have been end of course exams where the students revisit some of these texts in exam conditions. The coursework element has allowed students across a range of abilities to access texts and elements of the English language over time and allowed them to go into their exams with the confidence of a banked set of marks. Equally, when the students sat exams in which they would analyse 2 novels, a Shakespeare play, a twentieth century play and a bank of 16 poems, they were allowed clean copies (without any notes) as reference points in the exams. But this was not good enough for Michael Gove, and latterly Nicky Morgan. Now, my students have to study the same number of texts across a two year course but the coursework has been cut completely. My current GCSE cohort will have to go into exams in the Summer of 2017 and not only answer complicated questions on these complicated works of literature, they have to sit the exams without any texts in front of them. This Government is asking our children to remember the entire contents of 2 novels, 2 plays (including the obligatory Shakespeare) and 16 poems. Comrades, if I need to do a bit of DIY at home or fix a minor problem on my car, I visit my local library and take out a book on the subject or I find the solution to my problem online. No-one is ever going to take away my source material and 18 months later ask me to do the job without being able to reference the source material. Let’s tell those Tories in the Commons that they can’t take notes into the house to help them deliver speeches. Let’s see how they would flounder without recourse to facts, statistics and quotes. Let’s see how they would like to be put in the very conditions that they are applying to our young people. 

You’ll maybe have heard that in primary education the situation is even more farcical. In their wisdom as the purveyors of all that is right and proper the Department for Education has created a whole new definition for the use of exclamation marks. I don’t want to brag comrades but I have a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature, as well as a Masters degree in English and I can tell you that an exclamation mark is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. I can also be used to end an imperative sentence. The DfE has now told us that primary school pupils will only get credit for using exclamation marks in sentences beginning with 'what' or 'how'. What nonsense! Exclamation mark. 

In the past weeks we have seen the DfE in meltdown as first the baseline tests for primary school pupils were scrapped and then the spelling test for Year 2 pupils was cancelled because the paper was posted on the internet. Both of these calamitous mistakes have cost countless hours of work for dedicated, hardworking teachers and have cost millions of pounds in miss-administration, money that would have been better spent paying well-qualified teachers and paying for more teaching resources. 

Governement attitudes towards highly-qualified teachers are a further bone of contention within my profession. The wrong priorities white paper aims to take away the rigorous qualification process that graduates have to go through to enter the world of teaching. This process has already been eroded over the past 5 years as Schools of Education within universities have been sidelined in favour the Teach First and Teach Direct training programmes. These new training models are primarily school based training schemes, with the role of universities marginalized to being little more than accreditation boards.  This is a dangerous precedent and I’ve already heard of a number of cases where, rather than a gradual development of pedagogy and practice has enabled trainees build up their knowledge and confidence of classroom teaching techniques, many young teachers are thrust straight into the classroom working with heavy time tables with little time for reflection and opportunity to make mistakes. The Government want to go even further and give headteachers the final say over who does and who doesn’t become an accredited teacher. This would be a dangerous precedent Comrades. This model would force trainees to buy into the culture and ethos of individual schools, rather than the culture and ethos of education in a general sense.

So, we know the dangers of this white paper. We know the calamities that have already befallen the DfE. We know how fractured and competition led our education system would be if they Tories are allowed to get away with this. In light of all this my union, the National Union of Teachers, is currently balloting our members for discontinuous strike action. We do not undertake this ballot lightly. It is our last recourse in the face of 6 years of our pay and conditions being run down, 6 years of us working in underfunded schools, 6 years of us seeing our most disenfranchised pupils fall into further poverty (whether that be financial poverty or the poverty of aspiration), 6 years of seeing civil servants and politicians playing political games with our school systems and our school curriculums. 

We will take strike action and we will hold this Government to account but we need the support of the Labour Party to assist us in getting the message across to the public. As a Labour Party member and as an NUT activist I’m asking you to ask 4 simple questions to anyone who talks to you about the wrong priorities white paper:

1)    Do you want schools to become undemocratic? Do you want boards of governors to be made up of people who come from the sector of business and industry, at the expense of parent and teacher governors?
2)    Do you want your children to be taught by unqualified teachers? Already academies and free schools are allowed to employ unqualified teachers. Full academisation would sound the death knell to our cherished profession. If we value education, then we must value the people who are qualified to provide education.
3)    Do you want children with special educational needs to be amongst the most disenfranchised in our schools? These SEN pupils rightly need greater funding to enable them to access education. Already evidence is emerging that academies and free schools are looking at reducing their provision for SEN pupils.
4)    Do you want schools to be run as profit making organizations? Education funding has already been cut in real terms and one can only imagine what the landscape would look like if companies are to be allowed to remove profits from schools.

Indeed, it is this final point that concerns me most. The behemoth that is TTIP sits waiting for ratification in the European Parliament and should this be passed the whole of our public sector becomes rich pickings for these ravenous American corporations. Whilst we look to conflict zones around the world for signs of the next global dispute, it is my belief that World War 3 will not be fought out on a battlefield, it will be planned in the boardrooms of global capitalism, it will be fought in our schools and hospitals and the euphemistic ‘collateral damage’ will be teachers and pupils, doctors, nurses and patients.

Comrades, at last we have a Labour Party offering a true opposition to Bullingdon bully boy Tories. In 2020, if not before, we’ll have a Labour Government, with socialist values, putting people before profits and standing up for the rights of teachers and other public sector workers. I urge you all to support the industrial action taken by the NUT. Together we can defend our education system, together we can educate to build a more include and better Britain. 

It is apposite, in the wake of the horrific atrocities carried out in Brussels recently, that we debated a motion at the NUT Conference in Brighton in response to the Prevent Strategy. This strategy, that was not called for by teachers, is already placing a great deal of added pressure on an already pressurised profession. 

In my own personal experience, and in the experiences of colleagues I’ve spoken to, training relating to the Prevent Strategy has been generally crude and often involves lazy stereotypes. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the Conference hall today who was given an A3 sheet with a line that showed ISIS at one end and the EDL at other, as if the modern world of extremist political beliefs can be explained away in such unexacting terms. 

What the Prevent Strategy has achieved so far has been suspicion in the classroom and confusion in the staffroom. David Anderson QC (the Government’s independent advisor on terror legislation) recently told a Parliamentary committee that there is ‘An acute crisis of confidence amongst some teachers about the way they’re expected to deal with Prevent’. 
Indeed, this confusion is evident in the story, reported recently on BBC Radio 5's 5 Live Investigates, of a 4 year old primary school pupil who drew and labelled a cucumber. As many primary school colleagues present today will testify, they often have to take the squint eyed approach to looking at letter formation at such a tender age and this particular child’s teacher read cucumber as ‘cooker bomb’ and reported the incident under the Prevent Strategy. 

Just take a moment to let that sink in. 4 years old, cucumber, Prevent (and by definition a concern of extremism). Although no further action was taken in this case the family were obviously distressed by the referral. 

Then we have the story of 10 year old Raheem, a story that made national newspapers when, after being asked to write a piece of fiction about a believable character, Raheem created Cheeky Charlie. Cheeky Charlie lived in a terrorist house with his uncle. Cheeky Charlie didn’t like his uncle much because his uncle hit him. I’m sure that most of us, under our right and proper duty of safeguarding might have just had our radar tweaked by the reference to the hitting uncle. Indeed, this was the concern of Raheem’s teacher, after clearing up that reference to the terrorist house was a clear spelling mistake and indeed Raheem had meant to write terraced house. 

The following day Raheem’s family were visited by a social worker and police officers. Whilst the social worker quickly established that the Cheeky Charlie story was based on a film Raheem had seen the police officers questioned Raheem and his 15 year old brother asking them how they found out about terrorists and whether their Mosque was connected to terrorism or not. 

The worrying thing about this case is that the teacher had referred it forward as a simple safeguarding issue and had not even mentioned the Prevent Strategy in their concerns. 

Between July and December 2015 the DfE’s Counter Extremism Hotline received 150 calls and emails reporting potential extremism. That equates to about 2 calls a day. These are just the figures reported to that hotline and there remains some confusion around just how many referrals are being made within schools under the Prevent Strategy. 

At best we are aware that around 80% of referrals lead to no further action but I’m sure that you, like me colleagues, are not wholly confident with the lack of transparency surrounding what happens with the names and information once they are logged. 

When terrorist atrocities occur, such as those in recent weeks in Afgahnistan, Yemen, Turkey and Belgium, children naturally want to sate their understanding of the world we live in. Are we teachers going to be the gatekeepers who deny access and discussion or are we going to continue to be the safe conduits to expanding our children’s knowledge of an increasingly complex and dangerous world?
​
We in the NUT demand that the Government withdraw the duty to carry out the Prevent Strategy in schools and colleges and stop education professionals being the secret service of the public sector.

As we go about the daily business of conducting our profession it’s easy to assume that we are continually running in a series of sprints: assessment data needs adding to spreadsheets, marking must be completed by…, residuals this year need to be 100%, performance management cycles must be adhered to, every one of the 20 or so daily emails requires action. Actually, our greatest success is not always seen in forms of instant gratification. As our Sociologist colleagues will tell us, deferred gratification is often the most rewarding. 

During the recent half-term break my wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. A simple post on Facebook elicited an unexpected but very moving response from a former student. I was Mikey’s form tutor and head of year in the early 2000s. Mikey was a challenging student who caused us no end of problems and suffered a number of temporary exclusions. Despite all that I always saw a spark in Mikey. His was not out and out destructive ill-discipline; it was more a constructive disobedience that we have to condemn within the framework of behavior policies, but that we secretly admire for it’s creative challenging of authority. 

I left the school when Mikey was about to begin Year 10 and I genuinely didn’t know whether he’d make it through his GCSE years at the school, whilst being quietly confident that at some time Mikey would find his place in the world and use that spark to light a fire of creativity in a more suitable environment. So it was that I was moved and delighted to receive the message below: 

It’s also 10 years since I left school and never had to darken your classroom again, ha ha. Also, I remember a speech you gave at assembly once and said you'd failed your exams. You where in not such a good place at the time but you went back passed, didn't give up and said it was never too late. I worked for 4 years in retail and simply because of those words you gave they inspired me and as of yesterday I found out I’d been accepted to university; the first of my family to do so and although I was shouted at many, many times by you it takes a long time to realise that it was because you cared about what you did. Happy anniversary Mr Kaye, the best teacher I ever had (even if I was a nightmare and didn't realise it at the time). Wishing you many more years of married bliss.

Indeed, my speech about failure is one I have delivered countless times in class and in assembly. Every word is true. For me education was not a sprint, it was a marathon. Indeed, whilst some teachers think they know all there is to know about their subject by their mid-twenties, and are keen to let us older lags know it, I’m still learning about my subjects and I put pedagogical knowledge at the heart of my drive to carry on trying to be the best teacher I can be.

I did leave school with no O Levels and I held no expectations of furthering my education, let alone going to university (places I frequented only to see bands I liked at student union bars, not a place I’d ever walk into for academic purposes). 

Since finding my place in the world I have maintained the belief that we all get two chances at education: the one we’re legally bound to attempt during formal schooling and the second bite of the cherry that comes in the right conditions at the right time. 

In the current climate of target driven teaching it would serve school leaders well to remember that there are plenty of Mikey’s out there. Head teachers will never hear about them because they don’t retrospectively show up on school performance data and we only find out about them through messages on Facebook. But, the Mikey’s of this world are of equal value to those students who sail through first time and amass 12 A*s at GCSE. Equally school leaders would do well to think about students and teachers as human beings, vulnerable to all the vicissitudes that life throws at us, and not treat us as some cross on a scatter diagram, or some data point on some spreadsheet. 

So, hats off to Mikey and all those other students like him. He’s found his time and his place and I salute his perseverance. Let’s remember that education is not a sprint to some hypothetical finish line, it is the first tentative steps on that great marathon of gathering knowledge that makes life’s journey so fascinating.

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The NUT is calling ALL members to take national strike action on Thursday 10th July 2014.

I urge ALL members to support the action and not report to work on Thursday 10th July. The union can only be successful in holding the Government to account if members support the position the union is taking.


On Thursday 10th July we will be joined by Unison, Unite, GMB, PCS and FBU. That is almost 2 million trade union members who will stand up for their conditions of service. I feel we have a moral obligation to join our colleagues in other unions and support the action.

Over the weekend the Government announced that it will be at least 4 years before public sector wages come close to being in line with inflation. That is a further 4 years, at least, of deflated wages for every one of us. The Government also said that it will look to further restrict union trade union activity and make it much more difficult for unions to take industrial action. If we do not act now they will take away our right to act. It’s that simple.

I know that it seems that we have been taking a lot of strike action over the past 4 years. We have, but this is in the face of an unprecedented attack from the Government. In real terms our wage has been devalued by 15.4% over the last 4 years. Without our action it would have been much worse.

What have we won?

The November 2012 strike clawed back 8% of the pensions contributions that the Government wanted to take from us

The November 2013 strike secured the right for teachers over the age of 50 (at the time of the strike) to retire at 60

The Autumn 2013 regional strikes put pressure on Michael Gove to accept the STRB proposals to protect teachers’ working conditions (remember he wanted to end the summer holidays, end non-cover, end non-invigilation and much
more)

The March 2014 strike forced the Government to advise schools not to seek bureaucratic paperwork in support of pay progression.

I have not yet heard of one single teacher who has broken strike action but has refused to accept the benefits gained by those who have taken strike action.

I’d like to dispel a couple of myths. Firstly, I’ve had members who have recently changed unions because they say that most of the colleagues in their department are with another union. The union make up of your individual department should have no influence at all. It is never the case that a ‘department’ would take strike action alone. It is the membership of the school that decides on localised strike action. Secondly members have raised concerns that the NASUWT and ATL are not joining the strike action. It is for the leadership of those unions to decide whether they are willing to stand up to the
Government and secure the best deal for teachers. Christine Blower and Kevin Courtney have been firm in their stance that unless the Government begin to negotiate with the NUT we have little option but to take strike action. To give a very clear analogy; the RMT union are very successful winning the majority of issues over which they take strike action. Their sister union, ASLEF, has been less involved in strike action. The RMT win because when they strike the overwhelming majority of their members join the action. As the late great Bob Crow used to say ‘You don’t win every fight you take part in, but you do lose every fight you don’t take part in.’

Once again, I urge all members to stand united on Thursday, don’t worry about what the other unions are NOT doing, rather support your colleagues in the NUT who are taking strike action to stand up for education and stand up for teachers.

As an active member of the NUT I have been attending our national conference, as a delegate, for the past four years. In my experience our Saturday afternoons are spent debating priority motions relating to strategy and action with regards to our dispute with Michael Gove and the ConDem Government. Immediately after conference I go back to my school with great fervour and tell my union members ‘This is it! This is our moment!’ I then spend the subsequent months having to explain to increasingly disinterested or frustrated members why decisive and sustatined action does not appear to be taking place.

Once again this year I feel the same way and so I make the argument that the time for planning is long over. We need a firm strategy based on the fundamental belief and principle that we must stand like the mighty oak, with deep buried roots, strong enough to withstand even the most savage winds of change.

This year’s Saturday afternoon session felt different. This year it felt that we might just be bold enough to establish a set of demands that would make Gove sit up and take notice of our intent but, more importantly, would galvanise rank and file members who are not always clear what our ultimate goals are in this dispute.

What was proposed by the Local Associations National Action Campaign, a grass roots group set up two years ago to argue the case for rank and file NUT members, was a clear set of demands and a clear strategy of action:

• Abolish OFSTED and league tables
• Create a more productive working environment by giving teachers 20% PPA time so that they have time to plan stimulating lessons and have time to mark accurately and with depth
• End Performance Related Pay, a system that has been shown to have no beneficial effects when introduced in other educations systems around the world
• Teachers should be allowed to retire on a full pension at 60, not at 68 as proposed by the current Government
• An immediate £2,000 increase at each point of the payscale. This would begin to compensate for the 15.3% devaluation of teachers’ pay over the last 4 years

In terms of action the LANAC amendment called for a calendar of national strike action:

• a 48 hour strike in the Summer term
• two further 48 hour strikes in the two half terms before Christmas
• a escalating scale of national action in 2015

At a fringe meeting on the Friday evening of conference we were addressed by a former National Executive member of the RMT. She told us in clear terms that the strength of the RMT comes not from responding to attacks from the Government but in looking to the future and being prepared for the attacks to come.

We in the NUT, and the wider teaching profession, know what Gove has done to our education system so far and it doesn’t need a fortune teller on Brighton Pier to prophesise what is to come whether Gove himself is still in place after 2015 or whether the baton is taken up by Tristram Hunt.

One of my historical heroes, Gerard Winstanley wrote in 1649:

Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing

So teaching colleagues, let’s end talk of strategy and let’s act.

Did the Diggers of 1649 spend their time strategising? No, they tilled the land in spite of the landlords. Did those brave comrades at Tolpuddle sit under the sycamore tree and strategise? No, they swore an oath of union. Did our sisters in the Suffragette movement sit drinking tea and strategising? No, they took to the streets and engaged in civil disobediance, some even paying a fatal price for their cause

The LANAC proposal offers us a clear plan of action and through it we can engage rank and file members. Whilst our March 26th national strike was a great success and show of unity let’s not fool ourselves that we had a solid response from our whole membership. This is an issue that we in the NUT and other unions have to tackle because our brave comrades in the NUM had a clear name for those who broke strike action back in 1984. Out of respect for some colleagues, of fainter soul, who might read this I’ll not repeat it here but I feel the same about colleagues who break strike action as those miners did 30 years ago. At least with a clear caldendar of strike action in place we can state to our members that this is our plan of action and we expect nothing but unwavering support.

Whilst it is right that we seek to engage in meaningful talks with any Government we must reserve that most fundamental of trade union rights, the right to withdraw our labour. It is a right we must be prepared to exercise, either in cooperation with our sister teaching unions, or as we stand alone.

Our comrade from the RMT told the fringe meeting that our brothers and sisters in that union realised that one day strikes every few months do just turn into protest actions. They reconciled that an outlined action plan of 2 and 3 day strikes immediately begins to see movement from the bosses and the Government. Whilst we do not wish to be viewed as a striking profession we must be prepared to take such action as part of a sustained plan. As our comrade, the late Bob Crow, so rightly said:

You don’t win every fight you take on, but you do lose every fight you don’t take on.

So next year, in Harrogate, I hope the NUT Conference will spend Saturday afternoon debating other matters.

As Marx said:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.

Although the LANAC amendment was defeated at Conference I did not feel disheartened. This was just a beginning of a strategy to really move forward our campaign. Whilst we seek to defend the education system that we take pride working within we must not be afraid to stand up for our own rights and working conditions.

No more philosophising. Let’s force a change.