NEU: Isolated strikes won’t save the schools

Following the Labour government’s announcement of an unfunded 2.8 per cent pay award for teachers next year, the NEU is set to launch an indicative ballot from 1 March to 11 April. 2.8 per cent is barely a drop in the bucket; but worse, being unfunded means it will come out of existing school budgets. This is an open attack by Labour which will push state schools one step closer to the brink: forget recruiting more teachers, many will face redundancies, which will send student outcomes plummeting even further.

Labour’s attack must be fought back with the maximum strength of the union. To this extent, it is good that the NEU has called an indicative ballot. All militants in the union must build for a “Yes” vote in their schools and branches, including by recruiting new members as part of building the fightback. However, a ballot is only the opening shot. It doesn’t resolve the main question: what strategy will win the strike? This is vital because there is much more at stake than just pay; it is about saving schools and students from disaster. To go forward, we must first draw the lessons from the last strike and be clear about what not to do.

No to business as usual!

During the 2022-23 strike wave against the weak and despised Tories, Mary Bousted (now Baroness) and Kevin Courtney, former NEU leaders, drove the strike into the ground through an impotent strategy: spread-out strike days with symbolic picket lines that didn’t shut down schools, rendering the struggle completely ineffective. This dragged out over months and sapped the morale of the rank and file, to the point that many members no longer saw the point of striking when their colleagues walked past them into schools that stayed open despite strike action. This was exacerbated by the fact that the union didn’t have a real strike fund, but instead handed out scraps to some strikers from meagre hardship funds, for which members were basically means-tested. With growing numbers facing the choice between striking or paying the bills, the strike was undermined with every passing day.

Ultimately, the strike ended not because the NEU won, but because the school year ended and members were fed up and voted to accept the crumbs we got from the Tories rather than continue with a losing strategy. The strike ended in defeat. The NEU leadership and left activists can try as much as they like to pass it off as a victory, but the truth is that for union reps at schools since, trying to recruit new members is like pushing water up a hill. Wouldn’t teachers and other staff be rushing to join the union if it was such a beacon of strength?

Yet this very losing strategy drives the sixth form strike today. This strike (of which most teachers aren’t even aware!) is extremely isolated and weak since it extends to only 32 colleges in all of England and Wales. But the NEU continues with business as usual: it has a pathetic campaign of begging for “pay justice”, with spread-out strike days and picket lines that, again, aren’t making the government feel any difference. To make the courageous sacrifice of sixth form teachers worthwhile, their struggle needs a path to victory.

Militants in the NEU must reject this status quo. Saving the schools will require a real confrontation with the Labour government. Daniel Kebede strikes a tough posture about “putting the government on notice”. Yet he voted for the anti-worker and pro-genocide platform of this government and hailed Reeves’s 5.5 per cent pay award for teachers, a tiny drop in the leaking bucket of school funding. Has he had a change of mind? Hardly. Kebede comes from the same school of trade unionism as Bousted and Courtney. With Labour granting Bousted a peerage in the House of Lords, surely her political heir is not going to make serious trouble for the government, no matter how much “notice” it’s given.

With leaders and politics like these, forget about saving schools; their course simply spells disaster. Militants must recognise a basic fact: the union emerged weaker from the last strike. There is demoralisation among members, and outside the bubble of left activists on various WhatsApp groups, many members agree that the strike was a defeat. To go forward, the union must be put in a better position to struggle; it must be strengthened from the ground up. This can only happen with a different strategy and is all the more necessary given that Britain is no longer facing a period of labour upsurge as with the last strike, but is rapidly moving to the right.

Prepare the battle against Labour

It is necessary to struggle, but waging the upcoming struggle on the losing strategy of yesterday is reckless stupidity bound to further weaken the union. Given the current state of the NEU (many do not even know about the ballot), we should not rush to strike but spend the coming months to prepare a real battle. This should include a struggle over political strategy as well as organisational questions. Below is our platform.

Recruit! All teachers should be in the union. But reps face the difficult task of motivating why more should join. The only way to recruit is to show the relevance of the union. Typically, members only hear from the union when there is a pay campaign. But the crisis of schools is something that impacts teachers and school staff every day. The NEU must become a union that fights to improve working conditions now. This starts by changing its rules on allowing senior management in the union; teachers can’t organise and push back against senior managers when they are in the union meeting! The NEU must also recruit support staff to the fullest extent. We all work at schools — their concerns are not different from ours! With unity between teachers, support and other school staff against management, it will become obvious why all school workers should join the NEU.

Build strike funds! Striking without strike funds is like going to war without ammunition. Members and reps must apply pressure, from local branches all the way to the national level, to build a war chest of strike funds so that we can stay out until the government capitulates. An easy first step would be to cut the gigantic pay of the NEU tops and force Kebede to get an average teacher’s salary.

Mobilise students and parents! The government and school management’s slander campaigns against teachers’ strikes always involve moral blackmail about jeopardising students’ learning. But there was huge support among students and parents for the last strike. This is because they experience first hand the damage done by the retention crisis: constant quits by teachers due to horrible conditions means that students simply cannot learn as they should. The NEU must campaign massively among students and parents as part of building general public support for the fight to save schools.

No support to Labour! Starmer is trying to balance the competing needs of a failing economy on the backs of public sector workers. This includes teachers. Any support to Labour is like a knife in our backs. For a working-class opposition to Labour!

Militants who agree with the above should fight for these politics at work and seek to build caucuses inside the union in order to pose a real political challenge to the existing strategy.