Developing Effective Strategy

Week #7 Meeting #16

At lunchtime today, I met with members at Henley College. We discussed the current ballot of school teachers (sixth form college teachers are not part of the current ballot group, although we intend to ballot them in the autumn term) and the NUT's ongoing tactics in the campaign.

The following points were raised in discussion:

National Executive Report

The General Secretary reported on the excellent response to the sixth form strike and the landmark case the Union won in the High Court. This centred on the government's attempt to get an injunction to prevent the strike. Their argument was that a strike over funding was a political strike (which is illegal under our repressive anti-union laws) and not a legitimate trade dispute.

The Union successfully argued that, because funding allocations from government have a direct impact on our members' terms and conditions by constricting the employers' room to negotiate. This judgement sets an important precedent for Unions fighting government funding cuts and the politics of austerity.

A Crucial Time for Education

As I prepare to travel to London for the National Executive today and tomorrow, I am struck by what a crucial time this is for education.

We have a government using a mantra of austerity to progressively underfund schools and sixth form colleges, whilst enforcing the mass privatisation of schools by an act of parliament, and changing the very nature of education through high-stakes standardised testing and hyper-accountability. The past couple of months have shown this in the extreme. At primary level, we have seen new assessments introduced which impose unrealistic and unhelpful targets on young children in a narrow range of skills. What is more, children will be expected to sit these tests in a couple of months, leaving teachers wondering how they will explain to children and their parents that they are no longer doing well but are now below 'national expectations' - that the government has arbitrarily deemed their child a failure aged 7 or 11.