The following article was written by a party member who works in teaching.
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As a rank-and-file educator, I am disgusted by what I read in the latest issue of the National Education Union (NEU) magazine. A list of labour aristocrats who have jumped from the ranks of our profession and its union bureaucracy into Parliament and the ranks of the new Labour government was jubilantly presented to us as a great victory for education.
But these careerists, who have departed from classrooms and union offices to Parliament, are not our ‘champions’ – they’re part of the problem. While education workers endure overcrowded classrooms, budget cuts and exhaustion, they speak in meaningless platitudes about “tough decisions” and “joined-up thinking”, all while betraying the very sector they claim to be fighting for.
My union has become a conveyor belt for such careerists, who use our struggles as stepping stones for personal gain. We are expected to celebrate another politician’s rise to power, while our schools crumble and our colleagues burn out.
The truth is that we don’t need more polished politicians; we need militant trade unionism – and we need strikes and struggles with real political demands at their core.
National Education Union: a sell-out to Labour
The NEU, the very body we once thought might play a positive role in the fight for education workers’ rights, has revealed its true colours in recent years – and now it is rolling out the red carpet for a Labour government that offers nothing but the illusion of a few crumbs to the working class while selling us down the river.
While the union’s leadership, including figures like Allison Gardner, Tristan Osborne, Natalie Fleet and Amanda Martin, parade their Labour party affiliation, rank-and-file teachers are being urged to bow down to abysmal pay settlements that only entrench the neoliberal privatisation agenda that’s been strangling public education for decades.
Let’s be clear: the so-called “reset” with Labour that our union leaders are promoting is nothing but a red herring, designed to pacify teachers while maintaining the status quo. Labour’s promises of a “review of the curriculum”, an “end to single-word Ofsted judgments” and the “recruitment of 6,500 new teachers” are simply smoke and mirrors.
These token gestures are not the structural changes needed to resolve the deep-rooted crisis in our schools, which have been caused by years of underfunding and capitalist exploitation, both of which this union’s leaders and their Labour party handlers have enabled.
A pathetic ‘pay offer’ and a pile of empty promises
The NEU’s fawning response to the government’s offer of a 5.5 percent pay rise – hailed by general secretary Daniel Kebede as a “victory” – should be seen for what it is: a betrayal. This ‘pay offer’ does not even keep up with recent inflation, never mind resolving the mounting financial burdens faced by teachers struggling under the cost of living crisis. And this pathetic ‘raise’ (in reality, a further cut) does nothing to address the burnout and overwork that have driven thousands of teachers out of the profession.
Kebede’s proclamation that the union is “ready to work with Labour” is a chilling reminder of the NEU’s true role as an enabler of capitalist exploitation. In what universe is a ‘5.5 percent pay rise’ a fair settlement for 14 years of savage cuts? Teachers are being sold out, told to accept a pitiful salary boost that does nothing to keep real wages level, never mind offering job security or returning teaching to its former status as an attractive and sustainable career.
Clearly the cozy relationship between our union leaders and the Labour government precludes our ‘representatives’ from demanding anything substantial. Begging the question: what do we pay them for, exactly?
But the NEU’s leadership isn’t just failing; they’re actively colluding with Labour to undermine the radical potential of teachers’ struggle. Labour’s proposals fall woefully short of the transformation needed in education. Their proposed cosmetic changes to Ofsted and pledges to establish more “breakfast clubs” are pathetic in the face of the crisis our schools are facing.
These crumbs do nothing to overturn the commodification of education and the transformation of schools into business units, nor do they even touch the central problem that the present education system’s focus is not on helping our children develop into well-rounded, critically-thinking individuals but on churning out pliable consumers and biddable workers for the labour market.
Labour’s promise to ‘recruit 6,500 new teachers’, just like its promise to address the critical staffing shortfall in the NHS, will not and cannot work until privatisation is reversed wholesale and education reverts to being a service to be delivered to the people rather than a budget to be milked by finance capital.
Teachers, like doctors and nurses, are leaving a loved profession in droves because they can no longer survive in unbearably stressful conditions imposed by business-target-driven micromanagement via the senior leadership in our schools.
And what is the NEU’s solution to this crisis, which affects not only its members, the teaching and support staff, but also all our working-class children, and therefore the whole of society? To ‘work with Labour’ – as if collaboration with the very machinery of neoliberal capitalism will save us from the abyss.
Ignoring the most vulnerable workers
While the NEU pats itself on the back for securing a 5.5 percent ‘pay rise’ for teachers and leaders, it’s important to ask: what about the support staff? What about the teaching assistants, the caretakers, the administrative staff who between them hold our schools together yet remain invisible and underpaid?
This pay award, touted as a victory, does nothing for the most vulnerable workers in our schools – the very people who work long hours for a pittance; who are forced into precarious, low-wage jobs with little to no security.
Teaching assistants and other support staff are left to battle in separate negotiations fragmented in a host of other unions including Unison, GMB and Unite, while many others work in non-unionised conditions in absolute precarity, with no guarantee of anything remotely approaching fair compensation. Women, mothers and grandmothers, often immigrants are at the bottom of the pay scale and are being ignored by a union leadership that’s more interested in appeasing Labour than fighting for the rights of the poor.
Support staff are always overworked, expected to fill in the gaps that emerge as a result of chronic understaffing, and many of them are at the same time being forced to line up in food banks to sustain the minimum level of existence. Many school staff, especially cleaners, are on zero-hour contracts or temporary employment schemes, barely scraping by while being expected to prop up the entire education system.
The NEU is unwilling to fight for all education workers, establishing instead hierarchies of high and low workers and preferring to focus on what is politically expedient – the offering of minor concessions to teachers while leaving support staff in the dust.
What is desperately needed is the reverse of this: a mass campaign to demand real, living wages for all those who make our schools function every day. The union’s silence on this is deafening, and it exposes the leadership’s indifference to the full scope of injustice in our schools.
It is clear that their priority is elsewhere – on securing ‘deals’ that they can present to a section of education workers and use to try and make themselves look good, while the most vulnerable workers remain trapped in poverty.
The real fight ahead
The union leadership is soft-pedalling and asking us to settle for mediocrity, even as the competitive and corporate system that has hijacked education is milking us for “excellence” in results and Ofsted “data”. What we need is not a weak union of labour aristocrats in partnership with a government aligned with corporate interests, but a full-scale struggle against the system that exploits teachers and students alike.
Teachers have been on the front line of this class war for years, fighting with passion and conviction to educate the next generation despite steadily worsening social and educational conditions.
Instead of fighting these depredations in a meaningful way, their own union continues to put up nothing but the most token resistance and to train its members to resign themselves to accepting the bare minimum.
But education workers need meaningful pay increases that reflect their worth to society and the work they do, fully funded schools that nurture the creativity and critical thinking of our children, and the dismantling of oppressive institutions like Ofsted that reduce education to a series of business-friendly bureaucratic targets.
The answer is not ‘to work with (privatisation-aligned) Labour’ as the NEU bureaucrats advise, but to fight both Labour and their capitalist handlers every step of the way.
Our unions, our struggle
It’s time for the rank and file to reclaim their trade unions from the clutches of careerists who are far too comfortable in their cushy union offices while teaching staff suffer in underfunded, overcrowded classrooms. The struggle is far from over, and it’s time for teachers to wage it themselves.
Only through class struggle, only through connecting demands for education funding with demands to end arming Israel and Ukraine, demands that open workers eyes to the interconnectedness of austerity and war under the capitalist-system, can we hope to build an education system that truly serves the people, rather than the interests of imperialist profiteers.
In the coming academic year, the betrayal of teachers by the NEU’s leaders and their connivance with the Labour party will become ever more glaringly obvious as education slips deeper into the hands of private interests. Academisation, which is nothing but privatisation by stealth, is being accelerated while the NEU leadership sits idly by, ready to shake hands with a Labour government that is aiming to complete the corporate takeover of our schools.
This should not be a fight for better pay alone; this is a battle for the soul of education. The recent moves by United Learning Trust (ULT), England’s largest academy trust, make this abundantly clear. In an outrageous proposal, ULT is offering teachers a 15 percent pay rise in exchange for leaving the teachers’ pension scheme (TPS), a vicious attempt to undermine teachers’ financial security and further entrench the privatisation of education.
The academy model represents the wholesale transfer of public assets into private hands, in which education is commodified and students are treated as units of production rather than as individuals with the right to a meaningful education. ULT and other academy chains have turned schools into profit centres, hoarding reserves worth over £50m while offering workers a false choice between hardship now or hardship in retirement.
This scheme entices desperate teachers, whose pay has been steadily eroded over a decade and a half of austerity, with a salary boost, only to strip them of all prospect of a dignified retirement. Once again, it’s our young teachers, struggling with sky-high rents and stagnant wages, who will be forced into accepting these abysmal conditions, while academy bosses enrich themselves.
The NEU leadership has welcomed the advent of a Labour government as great progress, calling Labour’s plans “music to our members’ ears”. But which members are they referring to? Certainly not the rank-and-file workers facing unbearable workloads and crumbling school infrastructure. What is ‘music’ to the NEU brass sounds like a funeral march to most of us.
If NEU leaders were serious about fighting for teachers, they would be organising mass resistance against the entrenchment of academies, mobilising all sectors of the working class to support a campaign to reverse the privatisation of education and fund the sector properly, not cozying up to the very party that first introduced the concept of academies as the pet project of Tony Blair.
Reject the sell-out, reclaim the struggle
NEU leaders are asking us to accept incremental changes when what’s needed is radical resistance. They want us to believe that this 5.5 percent pay rise, this paltry review of Ofsted, will solve the deep crisis in education.
But the real solution lies in rejecting academisation and fighting back against privatisation at every turn.
We must demand with renewed vigour:
- The reversal of all academisation and privatisation in education, the ejection of business interests and the return of schools to local authority control, with democratic oversight from teachers, parents and the community.
- Real pay increases for teachers and support staff that reflect the value of their work, well above inflation and redressing a decade of cuts, with guaranteed job security for all.
- Pensions for all staff that guarantee dignity also in retirement – not outrageous schemes that force workers to ‘choose’ between immediate survival and future poverty.
- The abolition of Ofsted and other bureaucratic mechanisms that stifle creativity and reduce education to a numbers game.
- Massive investment in public education, not only via staff pay and recruitment, but through meaningful funding that allows for the delivery of a genuinely rich and rounded education to our children by engaged, well-trained and well-supported staff.
Clearly, the NEU is not going to lead this fight for us. Its leaders long ago made their peace with Labour and the neoliberal privatisation agenda. It’s up to the rank and file to push for a militant, radical alternative to the craven compromises being offered by our so-called leaders.
Let’s build a movement that stands for teachers and students, not for the profits of academy CEOs. Together, we can resist this corporate takeover and rebuild an education system that works for all of us, not just the privileged few.
We must fight back, and we must organise now!
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Read and share our party’s Manifesto for the Crisis. We have the collective power in our hands to address the problems we face, but we must work together to use it.
