Militant leftie teachers will NOT be striking (NASUWT England)

[noblegiraffe]

The ballots have been counted and despite 90% of the votes being in favour of strike action, only 42% of members returned their ballot therefore the 50% threshold of membership voting was not reached and strike action will not take place.

This is for NASUWT members, the second biggest teaching union. The largest teaching union, the NEU, will be announcing its results early next week (possibly Sunday). The NAHT headteachers' union will also be announcing strike ballot results shortly.

If the NEU strike and the NASUWT don't, schools still may close. If headteachers strike, who knows as it has never happened before.

It has more legitimacy than many other votes that are allowed to stand. And there do seem to have been systemic issues.

My husband is with this union - he didn't receive a ballot paper. Chased for one, replacement didn't come. They really messed up.

Unfortunately, that doesn't matter. If legitimacy was the focus then it'd be easy enough to point out that electoral votes for the current Tory government wouldn't meet the strike thresholds for education (they received less than 30% of the total available votes in the 2019 election).

No, instead what the public will see is that no strike was called and infer that this means there are no issues in education great enough to warrant one. The government, and influenced media, will happily push that message as wide as possible.

There do seem to be an awful lot of teachers on twitter who didn't receive their ballot. There also seem to be some who binned their green ballot having posted the white one.

I got an email from Civica Election Services reminding me to vote although I'd posted mine weeks before. It said 'if you've posted your vote in the last few days, ignore this email', which implies it knew that I hadn't voted. I emailed the union and they said it was generic but now I'm not sure if my ballot ever made it in.

I only ever had one ballot paper which was white. Never had a green one. Honestly, I have no confidence.

I assumed my text was just a mass reminder text.

I thought I'd voted but couldn't now say if my returned paper was white or green...

Same Kiera. I only received one. Can't remember colour. Really unimpressed.

I think my paper was white, what was the significance of white/green?

Think I’m going to join NEU.

I got a ballot paper that was white. A few weeks later I got one that was green. I remembered seeing an email about it saying if you got a green one you had to send it back even if you had sent back the white one.

Someone on twitter said they received a follow-up letter telling them to post the green one. I didn’t. If I hadn’t dug back into my emails I might well have binned the green one as a duplicate. They looked the same apart from the colour!

Some on twitter say they did bin the green one. No idea how many people were affected or what it was about.

Oh, and I think most people didn’t get a green one so the white one was fine for them.

NEU are apparently announcing their ballot results on Monday in a live stream which people are suggesting means they met the threshold.

If they know the results of the ballot is there a reason for delaying the announcement until Monday?

Their ballot closes today so final results not yet known, but they’ll know the current state of play.

That makes sense, I thought it had already closed.

Sadly I think that as the depressing retention figures show ( and have shown for a number of years) many teachers are not in the profession for the long term. If you are only planning to work somewhere for two or three years then you aren’t really motivated to lose your own money through strike action to ensure that steps are taken to improve the situation for the next tranche of teachers.

In a strange reversal this is almost the opposite of how much of the teaching profession , particularly in the primary sector, used to be in the seventies when it was largely staffed by married women ( sorry, but this is true, I was there) who saw teaching as a pin money adjunct to their husbands salary with hours to suit, and had no interest in furthering their careers, improving teaching standards, or improving the status and financial reward of teaching.

And no, I don’t know how to fix it, but would suggest that :

stopping Education secretaries using their education portfolio as a vehicle for working out their own hang ups

not expecting schools to act as the safe hands for all societies ills

funding proper support for children with special needs

and instigating a proper programme to maintain school buildings so they are fit for purpose

could be a start.

Society’s . Blush.

I have remembered I did also get a phone call. Only just remembered that!

It was stupid to arrange a postal vote during postal strike times, BUT I don’t think it can be completely blamed on that as lots of other professions managed it . Neither can the idea that they are so overworked they haven’t had time to vote, as again others have managed it, even nurses.

From the public perception, we’ve been told for ages that teachers are on their knees, badly paid and too much work but now they aren’t actually bothered enough to strike. If the other teachers unions have voted to strike then that opinion will obviously be changed, but that’s what it looks like at the moment.

NEU Sixth form college ballot also took place during postal strikes. (18/10-11/11) Turnout 63%; 88.5% in favour of strike. They've had one strike day already - but a much smaller sector, so possibly an easier to reach threshold as the absolute numbers are lower.

All NEU Support staff have a separate ballot.

My local NEU has invited members to a pub at 4.30 with live streaming of the results at 5pm. I’m hoping that means that they are secretly confident of a positive result. After all, it would be a bit if an anticlimax for dozens of members to meet at a pub to find out we didn’t even meet the threshold.

That says a lot about public perception and media coverage though as there are actually multiple NHS trusts where nurses aren't striking because they didn't meet the threshold. However, the general line in the media is "Nurses are striking" so the public ignore or miss that several trusts didn't hit the threshold.

I heard that NASUWT are in discussions about a similar approach - ie strikes in regions where threshold was met.

Just got an email update from them.

A mandate for strike action in nearly 200 independent schools. So private schools will be going on strike and state schools won't??

Also, Wales seem more up for strike action than England, particularly their sixth form colleges. The 9 in 10 figure looks like it was rounded.

I had a ballot paper and sent it back (and voted not to strike) but had multiple phone calls about it so who knows if it arrived.

I also only had one ballot paper that I sent in. I confess that I don’t always open post from the union and sometimes it goes straight in the recycling but I assume that if it was a second ballot paper it would have been labelled as such.

why did we need to post 2 different colour ballot papers?!

Anyone reckon NAHT will meet the threshold?