The issues are... (taken from the NUT website)
workload pressures: damaging teachers? health and threatening educational standards;
pensions: imposing unfair contribution increases and changes to pension ages;
pay: continuing the pay freeze and proposing local pay and further performance related pay;
conditions: attacking national terms and conditions of service, including through the academisation of schools;
inspections: creating workload and stress through punitive and frequent inspections; and
job security: increasing job losses through funding cuts and curriculum reforms
In terms of your question about SoW knowsabout; Yes, contributing to a SoW is part of the remit of a teacher without any TLR payments but the scenario in my case (think this will out me!) is as follows...
There are 4.5 people in my department; the HoD and 3.5 teachers without any responsibility (myself included). For the main subject for my department, the HoD is responsible for the SoWs and we, as teachers contribute to the writing of such, for example I write a unit for year 7, 8, 9 etc whilst my 'teacher' colleagues also write a unit each and therefore the SoW are a collective creation that we all follow.
Then, there is a secondary subject within the department that myself and 0.5 colleague teaches. I have taken on writing the SoW in its entirety, monitoring students progress, producing the reports, data entry on all students (not just those I teach) etc. For this, I receive no TLR payment, no extra free period. My HoD is very grateful that I do this and has been pushing for financial/free periods recognition for the work I do. My head & SLT are fully aware that I 'run' this subject and I get a 'thanks' each August as the results are very high but nothing else. But, its is far more than I am contracted to do and far more than my colleagues in the department that I am paid the same as.
Ii is not surprising then that more and more teachers are becoming very angry about the way we are being treated by the government, the way we are blamed for every undesirable aspect of social life, the way we are blamed for standards (we can only teach what we are told to and how we are told to, i.e. NC, specs, Ofsted) and now this morning we are told that if we dare to leave our place of work at the time that we finish getting paid for then we should not get any pay rise (forget the number of teachers that take home reams and reams of work to do; we should be doing this in the school building apparently).
this link [[http://www.teachers.org.uk/files/Action-Guidance-A4-24pp--8372-all-mem.pdf here] details the instructions we have been given during this action (the same instructions have been published for NASUWT)