Teachers: Let’s stand up for ourselves!

All teachers will agree with two things: workload is insane and behaviour is mad. Over a decade of cuts means there are not enough of us to provide quality education. Teachers are also quitting in droves because of the physical and mental toll the job takes. Fewer teachers mean more students in each class, so workload increases. More students in each class leads to worse behaviour, especially post-pandemic, as young people have lost crucial years of education and socialisation and are struggling mentally and academically. Most of the time, it feels like we are not teaching but babysitting a room of 30 kids.

Our jobs are difficult, yet there is a conspicuous absence of any struggle to change the status quo. Why isn’t there pushback in defence of our sanity and for better working conditions? To make sense of this, we need to understand what the union is (or isn’t) doing, since it is supposed to fight for us.

The NEU’s campaign this year is called “Pay up”; it is “actively campaigning for a fully funded, above-inflation pay rise for all educators”. Fine and well. We certainly aren’t paid enough, but pay alone won’t solve the problems we face. Unbearable working conditions are the driving force behind the crisis of retention, and the union is doing nothing about this — the very things that make our job difficult, lead to our colleagues breaking down in the staff room and suck the joy out of teaching. This largely explains why the indicative ballot only scraped by at a turnout of 50.3 per cent — it simply did not strike a chord with most teachers.

The union’s job is to act as the collective voice of teachers on a daily basis, at the workplace, reacting to teachers’ daily conditions. New rules increasing workload? Being used for cover every other week? The union needs to be there to challenge management and defend us! But it totally fails on this count. The union does not actively recruit new members and is absent in many schools. Where it does exist, it is usually weak and submissive. This doesn’t inspire others to join. After all, why pay union dues if it doesn’t seem worth it?

So why doesn’t the union fight? Because its leaders see schools as one big family, where “we’re all teachers” and “we are in this together for the good of the children”. This impedes any struggle and reinforces all sorts of wrong ideas in the workforce.

The first wrong idea is precisely that everyone in education, from senior management to teachers and support staff, is in the same boat. This is a lie. There are those who call the shots, and the rest who eat it. This difference is between senior management, or SLT, and the rest of the teachers. It is SLT that disciplines teachers, imposes workload increases and carries out cuts. We are not all one big happy family. To make schools better for students and teachers both, we need to stand up to SLT!

Another wrong idea is that part of being a teacher is to suffer for the kids. Teaching is a vocation — we are teachers because we love educating students and improving their life outcomes. But the government and school management take advantage of this to make us accept worsening conditions, which also make students suffer. “We do it for the kids” is used to compensate for shrinking budgets, guilting us into buying glue sticks out of pocket or staying late most evenings catching up on marking and never-ending admin work. It is also used to prevent collective struggle by teachers. Just think about how many teachers crossed the picket line last year because they thought striking would jeopardise students’ education.

The truth is that a real fight for schools is the only way to help students. That teachers fighting back will hurt students’ education is a form of blackmail. The problem is that the union, instead of fighting this, accepts this blackmail.

The fact that the union isn’t putting up a real fight for education means that teachers don’t look to their collective strength as the way forward. Instead, many teachers change schools in the (false) hope that the next one will be better, or quit altogether. But the crisis of education is national; the next school won’t be different. And quit? To do what? Britain is broken. Working people are getting squeezed in every sector. Instead of changing our jobs, we need to change education itself. For this, we need to stand up for ourselves!

Push back against encroachment! Against the onslaught of work, look not to SLT but to your fellow teachers and stand together. There is strength in numbers. SLT can’t fire 50, 25 or even 5 teachers who all refuse to accept increased workload.

SLT out of the union! The union is the logical place to organise and find co-thinkers willing to take a stand. But we can’t do this if senior management is in the union meetings. How can teachers freely discuss their concerns if they are afraid of reprisals? The problem is that the NEU allows SLT in the union. This ties our hands behind our back. Teachers need to oppose this and put maximum pressure on local/branch level reps, all the way to the national leadership, to overturn the NEU’s policy and kick SLT out of the union.

Oppose repression of students! What students need to succeed and what we need to improve our conditions are the same: more teachers, more resources, more funding. But instead, CEOs of academy trusts and their SLT minions introduce draconian behaviour management rules that make schools feel more like prisons. Students are suffering as these rules become the norm for dealing with worsening behaviour. This only makes the problem worse: more punishment for students, more work for teachers and more animosity between students and teachers. It is not in our interest to go along with crazy new behaviour rules. Students will learn and listen when our conditions improve, and our conditions won’t improve without a struggle.

Worsening grades and behaviour are symptomatic of the crisis in schools, which is a reflection of a society going to hell. A Starmer government will do nothing to change this; in fact, no government is going to just hand out nice things. Every gain working people have won has come through struggle. Schools are no different. To fight for schools, the NEU needs a completely different strategy, one not just focused on pay but going to the heart of the crisis in education.

Last year’s strikes demonstrated that the NEU leadership (old and new) is not committed to the fight to save schools. The strikes were not organised to challenge the Tories, and we all took home a pay cut as a result. To defend teachers and their jobs, the union needs a new leadership, one that will stand up for teachers for their most pressing concerns now, not when the pay review committee hands out its insulting offer. We urge all teachers to stand up for themselves using the three demands above as the means to save their sanity, build the union and fight for a leadership that reflects our interests.