The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, and his mandarins at the Department for Education (DfE) have taken every opportunity to denigrate the performance of school teachers, whilst simultaneously seeking to reduce pensions, pay and terms and conditions of service. Siôn Reynolds, local secretary of Portsmouth NASUWT (personal capacity) looks at the attacks on teachers by the coalition government and explains the reasons for the latest action by the teaching unions.
Siôn Reynolds, local secretary of Portsmouth NASUWT (personal capacity) looks at the attacks on teachers by the coalition government and explains the reasons for the latest action by the teaching unions.
Enough is enough!
The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, and his mandarins at the Department for Education (DfE) have taken every opportunity to denigrate the performance of school teachers, whilst simultaneously seeking to reduce our pensions, pay and terms and conditions of service.
The Coalition’s Government’s main strategy for attacking teachers’ pay is deregulation. Their aim is to use “flexible” pay arrangements to create a dog’s breakfast, keeping union officials busy, firefighting, within a morass of individual members’ issues. The Government knows that union involvement in national bargaining has maintained schoolteachers’ pay and conditions higher than they would otherwise be. So they want to ,smash national bargaining! (As it happens, this is the hidden agenda behind the sell-off of state schooling to the crusaders of the academies and free schools movement.) In response to these Government attacks on pay, pensions, conditions and indeed the very existence of our first-class education system, the NASUWT and NUT are taking the unprecedented step of joint strike action in a rolling programme.
Worsening pay and pensions
Any socialist knows that workers need to bargain on pay as if they were haggling in a Moroccan market. The bargain that is reached is the price of our labour, which under capitalism, is always less than its true value. Therefore, it is entirely to be expected that teachers should want to strike when their pensions, pay and professional status are under threat.
Teachers’ pay and conditions are inextricably linked to the entitlement of children and young people to be taught by those that are recognised and rewarded as highly skilled professionals and who have working conditions which help them raise standards. The current system of pay and conditions has meant our education system is still seen as the sixth best in the world.
After the two-year pay freeze, the increase in average pensions’ contributions and cost-of-living increases over the last three years, teachers deserve a substantial pay rise. The Coalition Government has changed the teachers’ pay system to endanger pay progression. Also at risk is the entitlement to portability of pay, so that teachers may now be forced to drop down the incremental pay scale once they take up an appointment in another school.
The Coalition Government is further seeking to reduce teachers’ living standards by another increase in our pensions’ contributions. They are imposing a 50% increase in pension contributions over three years. Further increases are due in April 2015.
The strike is also a protest about teachers being made to work longer for a lower pension. Changes made to the teachers’ pensions will mean that most teachers will have to work until the age of 68 to unlock the full pension, or take early retirement on a reduced pension. Of course, most teachers will be forced, by natural circumstance and the rigours of the classroom, to take the latter option! One statistic shows that for every month a teacher works beyond the age of 60, it takes a year off that teacher’s life!
Worsening conditions of service
Another example of the Coalition Government’s attacks on teachers is that they are proposing to scrap the contractual entitlement that teachers have to deal with the necessary paperwork of the job and instead spend more time on teaching and learning. The government sees this paperwork as unnecessary and bureaucratic. The question is who will do it if teachers don’t? They also want to remove our contractual entitlements to guaranteed time for lesson planning, preparation and assessment of pupils’ work (PPA), leadership and management time, as well as our lunch breaks. Further, they want us to use our non-contact time to cover for absent colleagues, thereby pushing PPA and leadership/management tasks into our evenings, weekends and holidays. The Coalition Government’ aim is to extract more value from teachers’ labour by intensifying the working day and extending it without remuneration by overtime pay.
The Coalition Government’s intention to reduce school holidays and lengthen the school day can only worsen teachers’ quality of life and their ability to deliver their best teaching. It is typical of the Coalition Government to try to squeeze every last drop of labour out of us whilst reducing the amount of pay we receive in return. Public service workers such as teachers have paid the price of the bailout of the banks. We have suffered the Government cuts as a result of their attempts to reduce public expenditure and thus lower the deficit.
Standing up for standards
However, the teachers’ strike is not simply about our “vested interests”. The teachers’ strike is about far more than pay and pensions. It is about the very quality of education that our children and young people receive. Changes to the curriculum as a consequence of the introduction of Michael Gove’s English Baccalaureate (EBacc) measure of school standards, has led to thousands of art, music, drama, RE, PSHE and ICT teachers losing their jobs, reducing the opportunities for pupils to study these subjects. Young people have lost their entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum and access to creative subjects in which they may excel.
Jobs have been lost as a result of the Coalition Government’s cuts and changes to regulations that allow unqualified teachers to teach. As a result of these changes, schools are now free to employ unqualified people, instead of qualified teachers, to teach.
Between 2000 and 2010 the number of teachers increased by over 32,000. Since 2010, as a result of the Coalition Government’s cuts, the number of teachers has already fallen by over 10,000. The loss of experienced, specialist teachers deprives children and young people of expert support. Also at risk now are teaching assistants.
Access to specialist support for pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities is being cut, making it harder for teachers to meet pupils’ educational needs. SEN funding is no longer “ring fenced” for use on pupils with special needs. Schools may use it for other purposes.
The Coalition Government professes to know what is right in order to educational standards to be raised. In fact, the NUT and NASUWT are standing up for standards by taking this necessary industrial action against the Government.
A campaign strategy
The NASUWT is the only union that has been on continuous industrial action since the public sector strikes on 30th November 2011. The day after this strike, the NASUWT began its “action short of strike action,” which has pushed teachers to stand up for their professional integrity on a daily basis. It was the first salvo in a campaign to put maximum pressure on the Coalition Government. This action has since been escalated on a general basis and to strike action in individual schools that remain intransigent.
More recently, a number of joint “Rallies for Education” with the NUT for the public, parents, teachers, friends and families have been held around the country.
The rolling programme of regional strike action commenced on 27th June in the North West and this led to the closure of three quarters of schools. This programme will continue with strikes on 1 October in all local authorities in the east of England, the East and West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humberside. This will be followed by a strike on 17 October in the north-east, south-west, London and the south-east. Then there is likely to be a national day of action before Christmas or in January 2014.
The stated aim of the action is to bring Gove to the table to negotiate in good faith the future of the teaching profession and our schools. It is clear that this eventuality, however, is extremely unlikely, given the Government’s (and in particular Gove’s) rank intransigence. Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said recently that the unions first wrote to the DfE in March asking for a meeting with Gove over their concerns, securing one in June. Unsurprisingly, the meeting achieved nothing: “He made no attempt at that meeting to engage in serious debate. He dismissed the concerns of teachers.” That was the last time the unions were able to meet Gove, who has instead chosen to use public speeches to disparage the unions.
“He is using megaphone diplomacy rather than sitting down and trying to engage with this seriously. We believe this is a reckless and irresponsible way for a secretary of state to behave.”
Gove’s reaction to this, speaks volumes: he would be happy to meet the union leaders, “to try and get them to see the errors of their ways”.
The rolling programme of teachers’ strikes is a demonstration. Indeed, on the day of the strikes there will be marches and rallies up and down the country. There is no doubt that the only way to save the teaching profession from the pernicious and withering attacks by the Coalition Government, is to ramp up the industrial pressure through an escalating and sustained programme of industrial action. All the education unions must work together in united action. Indeed, this requirement again raises the urgent need to have a single union to reprersent all teaching staff.
We need to boot the Coalition Government out at the earliest opportunity! We also need to ensure that any incoming Labour administration stands on a socialist programme which will benefit education and the working class in general. It has not been forgotten that the last Labour administration raised many of the ideas now being implemented by Gove and the government.
In order to maximise the effect of demonstrations against the Coalition Government, any strikes ought to be coordinated between unions in the public, and indeed the private, sectors. The TUC has a role to play in this.
For education, our demands should be:
- To maintain national pay bargaining for teachers!
- No detriment to teachers’ pay, pensions, pay and conditions!
- For full and proper funding of SEN!
- For a broad and balanced curriculum!
- Every pupil to have the right to be taught by a qualified teacher!
- Stop the sell off! Bring all academies and free schools back into the state sector!
