More teacher strikes, Thursday 27th April, Tuesday 2nd May

[noblegiraffe]

Fair warning, the NEU have said that if their members vote to reject the derisory government pay offer, they will immediately announce two further strike dates.

"If you vote to reject this offer, the executive has agreed to notify two further days of strike action on Thursday, 27 April and Tuesday, 2 May. The executive has agreed to seek local agreements with head teachers to ensure exam preparation is not interrupted for Years 11 and 13."

From the response on edutwitter and from colleagues, I think the offer will be rejected.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4772501-up-yours-gillian-keegan-teacher-pay-offer

The NAHT headteachers union have also voted to reject the offer, 90% vote no on a turnout of 64%

And 78% of those voting said they would vote for strike action if balloted. If those figures hold, that would be a successful ballot and headteachers joining the NEU on strike.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/inadequate-and-unaffordable-naht-votes-to-reject-pay-offer/

Good. All she has done with this mostly UNFUNDED pay offer is unite the unions against the lack
of school funding. Before they’ve tried to divide us, to some extent successfully, but this has resolved that issue.

Someone up thread asked about Y11 and Y13. I don’t know what it will look like, or how it will work, but they have explicitly said about not disrupting those exams years in these next two strike days, so there will be suggestions/info on that moving forwards.

someone also asked about strikes on Monday/Friday. This is traditionally something to do with weekends because I think they might be able to withhold pay for weekends/deduct more if you don’t work those days. Not entirely sure, but have definitely heard about that at an NEU meeting. So if we took action on a Friday they could take 3/365 instead of 1/365 of pay.

I'd like to preface this by saying this is a genuine question not a comment to stir the pot!

I completely understand the point that there is a lack of funding and resources in schools due to cuts. Equally that retention and recruitment is lower which has an impact on workload. My question is though, how will a pay increase resolve the fundamental issues that the education sector face in terms of a lack of resources? I get that a higher wages may attract more teachers but given the unseen hours of the job - lesson planning, marking etc on evenings - that may still impact on retention perhaps.

I'm a SW and unison have asked for an indication on who would support strike action (im on maternity so this decision is not a pressing concern). I struggle to see how a payrise makes my working life easier. It doesn't give my families access to more resources or free up more time to support them. Yes we're horrifically understaffed as a profession and it may attract more students in to the field but the majority of NQSWs I've seen come and leave has been more that the reality of doing the job is very different to what they expect.

I could however be massively missing the point and perhaps still suffering baby brain!

The payrise that some teachers have already received of approx 5% was unfunded and came out of existing school budgets.

This is on top of increasing utility bills and cost of everything going up. Paper for example has gone up loads. A secondary near me has had their utility bills treble in a year from 6000 pcm to 18000
pcm.

The 4.5% on top of that is mostly unfunded again. In my school that would be approx £50,000.

ALL of that money comes from things that would be spent on pupils, or school buildings. We used to have a supply of glue sticks and mini-whiteboard pens for example. Now we have none and we can’t lend to pupils. There is no money for new equipment, a friend who is HoD for DT can no longer run certain projects in DT for KS3 because the cost of materials has gone up so much yet school funding hasn’t.

We are expected year on year to achieve not only the same, but more, with less and less. We have next to no TA support in lessons. Students with EHCPS are lucky to get the supported hours they are provided for - many students who need support in the classroom can not access it.

There is more and more scrutiny and admin, for more and more pupils, with less and less time. It is not unusual to have classes of over 32 now in my school. We have one less set per year group for my subject because we can’t afford teachers and also can no longer recruit them.

Teachers are striking for fair funding for schools. Teachers don’t get paid enough - I work and live in London and most od
our young teachers are leaving to move away or giving up teaching altogether.

Better pay would make teaching more desirable. Currently the teacher training targets are not being met and retainment is appalling. There are not enough teachers. But this needs to be funded.

As a teacher I would take 4.5% on top of the 5% I’ve already received but I cannot in good conscience take this away from my pupils.

Better pay would mean more teachers. More teachers would mean better workload conditions.

Ex-teacher here. I went on maternity leave in 2022, and decided never to go back after 10 years in the Primary Classroom.

Whole-heartedly agree with the strikes, the pay, the workload, the cuts are absolutely horrific. I now work in a completely different sector. A job where I’m valued, my time is valued, there is funding for training, an appreciation for the work I complete and a brilliant work life balance.

My advice, having children of my own as well
who are primary age too, the Tory government have created a HUGE divide between opportunities for state vs private educated kids, and they continue now to give a toss about public schools failing in every single way.

I would say to parents, tutor your own children, provide them with extra curricular opportunities, educate them in whichever way you can because the teachers in the schools just cannot do it anymore.

Torys are absolute scum.

I loved teaching, but it is unsustainable as a career. Roll on election, although I don’t trust any politician to fix this mess, it’s down to us to take responsibility for our children’s education.

I teach science. I don't know of any schools that are finding it easy to recruit in science right now.

My previous school has been advertising vaccancies for almost 2 years now. It's a vicious cycle, because being in an understaffed department is hard work, so you look to leave, and then the department gets even more short staffed. Plenty of times they've advertised and had no applicants, or no-one deemed suitable.

All the local SCITT science trainees had jobs by February last year, as well.

I think it's well known in my local area that:

1. You won't find a science specialist for a maternity/short term post.
2. You won't find a science specialist after the may half term.
3. You're unlikely to find a physics specialist, full stop.
4. If you advertise for a permanent post for a Christmas or Easter start, you're unlikely to get any decent applicants.

I know of schools that pre-emptively advertise science vacancies in Jan/Feb for the following September, because they know someone might leave and they'd end up without staff if they didn't advertise early.

On twitter, people were comparing vacancies across England for science- easily added up to 500 odd vacancies on TES alone. And bear in mind that's what's being advertised during the Easter Holidays!

BTW, NAHT and ASCL have both voted to reject. 92% of NAHT members said the pay offer was unaffordable for their schools.

I guess only 8% of them work in "average" schools?

Well, for starters, they would be striking for their own pay rise, which as you point out is desperately needed.

However, the union does also have hardship funds- in my local area they could be confident of receiving their full pay back via this, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for NEU members in any branch and district.

What is actually happening right now is that support staff are refusing to cross picket lines, and we are told by the union centrally that we cannot reimburse them pay from our hardship fund, as it could be regarded as encouraging a wildcat strike so would put them at risk.

So actually, they'd be financially better off.

A pay increase is not going to fully solve the problem- but the NEU certainly is also campaigning around workload. STPCD is really insidious- it basically says we have to do the work needed to get the job done.

Therefore, it's very hard to get specific commitments around workload, and something like asking for additional PPA would likely be very expensive for schools, and again would need to come with a lot of funding. A 5% or even a 10% pay rise would actually probably be significantly less expensive for schools than funding an extra 10% PPA (which is the only workload change I've seen people agree would actually make a difference).

But to cover that extra 10% PPA, even in a small primary school you'd likely need 1- 1.5 extra teachers, who have to be paid, need pension contributions, have to be provided with resources, could go off sick/on maternity etc etc. I think it would end up being a lot more expensive for schools. And in subjects like science/maths/MFL, the teachers simply aren't there to recruit.

However, a pay increase would help in a lot of ways:

1. It would mean less teachers have to take on second jobs like tutoring/exam marking in order to make ends meet. This would improve wellbeing. I also know teachers who work during the holidays in holiday childcare etc. If you are, e.g., a single parent, teaching alone does not pay the bills anymore.

2. It would help increase recruitment. Compare the starting salary for a science teacher with the starting salary in pharmacology or chemical engineering or biomedical science (in a private lab, not NHS) for example. There are big training bursaries to lure people in, but when people get hit by the reality of an ECT salary, they often start to consider other options.

As well as helping increase recruitment for new grads, it would help make the profession more viable for career changers.

3. It would help increase retention. High workload 100% makes people leave, but lots of people say they will only leave if they can find a job that matches their salary- so make the salary higher, and you get more people sticking it out, maybe trying another school rather than leaving altogether.

4. By increasing recruitment and retention, less people work in short staffed schools and departments- which actually will have a significant impact on their workload, which in turn makes them want to stay. It can become a virtuous circle.

I think one of the differences is that actually, in terms of providing an education, the experienced, subject specialist teacher is the biggest resource schools have. Yes, it's great to have all the shiny addons, but the best outcomes for kids come from having an excellent teacher- and the worst outcomes (for a cohort/class) often come through inconsistent, irregular teaching by cover supervisors/supply because their teacher has left and the school cannot recruit a new one.

That said, teachers would never be able to justify taking money from students in order to have a pay rise, hence why it's so important the offer is fully funded.

Very well-explained. Thank you!

Thank you, noblegiraffe, for dealing so comprehensively with Clav.

With clear-thinking and compassionate people like you, maybe this government will finally listen.

(Of course, when you're in the Westminster bubble, send your children to private school, and use private healthcare, it must be hard to give a damn about public services! So much for 21st century democracy.)

Thank you 😊

Great post, @Postapocalypticcowgirl

Worth noting that even the Tories recognised that teacher pay needed to increase in order to improve recruitment - their 2019 manifesto included a pledge to increase NQT pay to £30,000. They should meet that pledge next year.

Unfortunately, that increase has been entirely wiped out by inflation, so rather than being a hefty increase for teacher pay, it has merely represented new teacher pay effectively staying the same.

If the Tories wanted to actually meet their manifesto pledge to increase new teacher pay to a competitive level, it should now be over £36k.

a) no consolation if they don't have money to pay their childminder or bus fare to work for the whole of the next month.

b) last time I looked, Unison strike pay was £50/day maximum, which means they'd have to be working less than 4 hours a day at NMW to not be losing out. I also suspect that whilst they've lost the money from UC payments, the fact that they receive strike pay (if they do and however little it is) in a different pay period, as they are obliged to declare all income received in the online journal, the strike pay would then be deducted from the following month's UC entitlement as well.

c) they're not members of your union or are part that haven't voted to strike, so you should be reassuring them that they shouldn't feel bad about going into work as usual, not shrugging your shoulders and saying they should vote to strike and then they wouldn't have to worry about being thought of as scabs. Because they aren't.

d) If they aren't part of legal strike action, they're putting themselves at risk because they don't have legal protection for withdrawing their labour.

e) if they are part of legal strike action, every day is deducted from their length of service which can mean that they could then lose 1 to 1.5 weeks' pay in the course of calculating redundancy entitlements. As they're the ones who will be made redundant over teaching staff, that makes a huge difference.

f) They could also lose out in terms of calculating employment length for having rights - that two year's service suddenly becomes 1 year and 364 days, so they could be told not to come back on Sept 1 (for example) and there would be nothing they could do about it.

g) support staff tend to be older. Striking affects those in their last year of service when calculating pension entitlement as per f) in terms of it being less than one year.

h) teachers aren't going to be striking to support the support staff when they get made redundant/contracts terminated/can't pay their bills.

Discussions like this really highlight the differences in security and income of teaching staff compared to support.

I was going to rebut your post point by point, but then I decided I couldn't be bothered. You don't care about the future of education, and that's fine, but don't dress it up as a moral issue, that I'm somehow in the wrong...

I know lots of support staff who aren't crossing picket lines (this is totally legal, btw, LGA advice says you can refuse to cross a picket line at your place of work). The only person suggesting anything that's not legal is you. Teachers aren't allowed to strike based on support staff pay and conditions- it's illegal (because no-one is allowed to do a sympathy strike). I would absolutely go on sympathy strike for support staff pay and conditions if it was legal.

But I will point out, I didn't mention the word scab, you did...

Teachers have voted down their own pay rise in part because they know taking 4.5% would lead to support staff redundancies.

I get it, you don't want to strike, you want teachers to bear the full burden of this, despite the fact that may teachers are struggling due to strikes as well, despite the fact many new teachers are employed on insecure one year contracts, or some of us are new in jobs, so many of your points apply to us.

To say that we are so much more financially secure than you, then being concerned you'd only get £50 a day strike pay is laughable. Due to my salary deductions, my strike pay losses are significantly less than this.

All I'm saying is that support staff should be re-balloted. Lots of support staff I know in the NEU want to be balloted again- don't forget their ballot came VERY close to minimum thresholds and was impacted by the postal strike.

We should all be in this together and showing each other solidarity, not undermining each other. Because ultimately, this is about the future of education.

This is a really important point.

When they first mooted the £30,000 starting pay, it would have been competitive. But now I see biomedical jobs (which are also struggling to recruit apparently, as recruiters get in touch with me about them every so often) starting at £32,000. And at the top end of the salary range, you can earn equivalent to UPS with no additional responsibilities.

I'm not saying it's so much more of an attractive package compared to teaching, and I think teaching and lab work suit very different personalities.

But it's just a comparison, to show what's out there.

During the pandemic, I do know a few people who went into/back to working in biomedical type labs, in part because they were almost begged to, which I do think is a contributory factor in the shortage of science teachers right now.

@NeverDropYourMooncup as rep at my school we politely invited anyone who wanted to not to cross out picket line with the full support of my head/school who promised they would lost a days pay but no further action would be taken against them.

Wr had three KSW choose to not to cross and they even asked us to hold the picket line on the last day when we weren’t going to (so we did).

I would not cross if support staff in the NEU held a picket line and invited/asked me not to
in support of them.

i really like to think given the strength of feeling that this time around that more non NEU staff will chose not to cross. Of course I know it depends on the school- and what action they say they will take, but if Heads are supportive then lots more can choose not to cross.

Gillian Keegan has just written a garbled piece of nonsense for the Daily Mail including several lies. For a start, a one-off payment of £1000 isn't a pay rise. Then she witters on about industrial action during the Easter holidays when kids are trying to revise

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11939101/Education-Secretary-GILLIAN-KEEGAN-pleas-militant-teaching-unions-students-first.html

She has made the mistake of putting it as the militant NEU endangering the education of children by lying to members about whether the pay rise was fully funded.

She must be then very confused as to why it was overwhelmingly rejected by both headteacher unions who actually know the state of school budgets better than her. Perhaps they have been taken over by the NEU?

Or perhaps moving around numbers on a spreadsheet is no substitute for actually living in the real world.

Why is she writing for the right wing press? Their readers hate teachers already.

You'd think so, but all the top rated comments on that article are against the government and in favour of teachers.

They seem to have badly misjudged how this nonsense would go down.

Agreed- I would 100% refuse to cross a support staff picket line.

I would strike on their behalf were it legal.

The wages we pay support staff are a disgrace.

TBH, she hates teachers, doesn't she?

Presumably, they were the ones who were receptive to running her article.

I personally can afford to strike and will do so if my union has a vote in favour of it. I'm in a fortunate financial position these days. I'll still have to make up the work afterwards, as would any other support staff that aren't employed solely there for the here and now. The financial circumstances of the vast majority of support staff are not anywhere near as good as mine. Just as mine weren't when working in the NHS as a lone parent with the grand sum of £37 over the bills coming in each month.

There will also be knock on effects for agency staff who won't be working that day due to closures, any cleaning staff who are on ZHCs, lunchtime supervisors on ZHCs, kitchen staff employed by private contractors, people who did not get TUPEd out on Green Book T&Cs but are on Academy contracts...

Whilst a teacher may be losing a larger sum of money in respect of what they would have earned in work for that day, the salary received on the other days of the month is significantly higher, which gives them the financial wriggle room that a huge proportion of support staff simply do not have. After all, if somebody on Main Scale is losing £100 or more for a day's strike (and if the NEU doesn't apply sustension, which they don't tend to do for national levels of action), they've still got well over two grand coming in that month; if somebody is on next to sod all in the first place due to being support, they don't have that financial space to do it. And they are also more precariously employed in the first place, even under NJC terms.

'For teachers, the Burgundy Book (Section 3, Paragraph 3.2) states that the pay deduction for a day of 'unauthorised absence (e.g. strikes)' should be 1/365th of annual salary. However, for Green Book-covered staff, employers can make deductions on the basis of 1/5 of a week's pay per day spent on strike (for full-time employees). This is the equivalent of 1/260th of a year's pay, and is based on the High Court decision in Cooper & others v The Isle of Wight College (2007).' So they also lose a greater proportion of their salary for striking, even with the broadly better T&Cs provided for under the Green Book.

(By the way, a teacher on a fixed term contract also still has the benefit of continuous service under the terms of the STPCD 'A person has completed a “year of employment” if: a) the person has completed periods of employment amounting to at least twenty-six weeks in aggregate within the previous school year', so they benefit from this hugely compared to somebody whose length of service starts at the point at which they join a particular academy).

Being 'all in it together' ignores the disproportionate effect such action would have upon a huge number of women. If they do vote for and then strike, they are risking more than the majority of teachers and this should be appreciated by teaching staff. And if they don't, then it should be remembered that they have made their decision from a considerably weaker position financially than the majority of teachers.

Equity, not equality is the key to understanding the differences.

The comments on that Daily Mail link are surprising. Even six months ago they were solely negative against teachers.

Yes it's a shit show along with having to Google to find out when the schools shut! I'm all for the strikes... but the heads should update the school sites at least or send the parents a text!