By John Pickard, President, mid-Essex NUT, personal capacity.
A letter from joint general secretaries, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney has gone out to all members of the National Education Union about a ballot on cuts in education, beginning on November 15th. The NEU, formed from the amalgamation of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT), is now the fourth biggest union in the TUC.
As the circular says, although teachers are suffering in different degrees from excessive workload, inadequate pay rises, pressures to do more cover or poor working conditions, all teachers and schools are suffering from cuts to education. All members qualified to vote should vote YES in the ballot.
It is only now, a year and a half after the formal agreement to unification, that the local structures of the ATL and NUT are being properly amalgamated. It is essential that all former members of these two unions cooperate in the new Branches and Districts that will come into being in January 2019.
School meetings need to be organised
School reps and local Branch and District officers must discuss with their members to make sure the ballot turn-out is as high as possible. The local officers are vital in making members aware of what the issues are. All schools should organise special meetings, with the maximum possible numbers attending, to discuss how education cuts are affecting them. Posters being produced by the NEU should be put up on union notice boards. The ballot should be used as a means of recruiting members to the union.
Most voting will take place online, by computer or by phone, through unique reference numbers that will be sent to union members by post or e-mail. Ideally, members should be urged to bring their phones and reference numbers directly to a meeting to make voting a collective activity after the discussion has taken place in the meeting.
There will be four questions on the ballot – with differences depending on whether members are in schools or sixth-form colleges – but the answers to all four must be YES!
Reps and officers should canvass all those union members who have not been able to attend meetings to get them to put in their vote. Schools and colleges should aim to get a 100 per cent turnout on the ballot.
Although the NEU now has some members who are support staff, they cannot be legally balloted in this process. However, on a school-level, there is no reason why non-teacher members of the NEU shouldn’t participate in the discussions: they should still be able to record their votes in a consultative capacity, to show their support for their teacher-colleagues. All education staff are suffering from education cuts and all must be involved in the campaign.
National Campaign must follow
The ballot is in effect a consultation by the national leadership to see if members are prepared to take industrial action on education cuts. The national union must be given an unqualified YES vote, so that there is no reason to avoid a national campaign of rallies, demonstrations and activities leading to a national ballot for strike action. The Tory Government must be told in no uncertain terms that Enough is Enough! No more cuts in Education! No more cuts in pay and living conditions! We demand the restoration of the education budget, pay and conditions!
Ballot papers will start to arrive with members from this Thursday, 15th November. Members can either vote by e-ballot (using e-mails or a link to the ballot) or by post
Members should look out for e-mails with the subject line Your vote is inside so check your ‘junk’ folders just in case.
30th Anniversary of the National Curriculum
Amid all the other anniversaries this year, it has been overlooked by many that 2018 is the thirtieth anniversary of the introduction of the Education Reform Act (ERA) by the then Tory Education minister, Kenneth Baker. This was the Act that brought in the National Curriculum, Ofsted and SATs and it fundamentally changed education into what it is today: the 3 ‘Ts’, targets, tables and testing.
The ERA introduced the marketisation of education and, although there have been many more changes since then, it was that act that opened the way to the dismantlement of local education authorities and the complete fragmentation of the state education system into a myriad of academies, academy trusts and free-schools, none of which have any democratic accountability to the local community or the electorate.
The Act was dressed up as a means of ‘improving’ education, but all serious commentators and experts in teaching and learning are of the opinion that it has made the national education system much worse. More than anything, it has been a means of disciplining teachers by fragmenting their collective bargaining power, abolishing national pay agreements and cowing teachers with Ofsted, excessive workloads and easy routes for headteachers to sack teachers.
Teacher morale has never been lower
The so-called ‘management’ regime that exists in many schools today is based on fear, intimidation and favouritism. Combine the the thirty-year results of the Education Reform Act with repeated cuts in education and in the take-home pay of teachers and support staff and the net result is that morale in schools and colleges has never been lower than it is today.
NEU members should not only fight through their union for the restoration of decent pay and conditions, but they should fight through the Labour Party for a government that will implement policies in the interests of a good education for the majority. Local education authorities need to be re-established, democratically elected and accountable to local communities. All local schools – whether ‘free’ schools or academies – should be brought back under the control of these authorities. National bargaining for pay and conditions needs to be re-established. The cuts in pay over the last eight years need to be reversed. Cuts in education budgets needs to be restored.
The leadership of the NEU is right to be giving a lead on the issue of cuts to the education service, but it is ultimately a political issue and unless there is a commitment to a Labour government committed to socialist policies and a decent education service, then ballots like these will be in vain.
November 13, 2018
