A New Type of Union

Published in Unity:

Osbourne’s budget statement and the education white paper which quickly followed set out the latest and most drastic assault in the 40-year war against state education. From 1976 onwards, public discussion of education in Britain has been dominated by what Stephen Ball refers to as a “discourse of derision” about teachers and teaching. This was made concrete in policy terms by the 1988 Education Reform Act which set the trend, consistent throughout Tory, New Labour and Coalition governments, towards the announcements of recent weeks.

Every school is to be forced to become an academy and parent governors will be removed from governing bodies, where these still exist.

The impact of this on teachers’ terms and conditions will be severe, essentially ending the School Teachers Pay and Conditions Document (still followed by the vast majority of academies) and all collective agreements, and replacing these with chain by chain negotiations in a fragmented, privatised system.

But it goes much deeper than that. The reconfiguring of education as a narrow economic process, and its conversion into a market commodity, is an essential part of the restructuring of society along neoliberal lines. And, as David Harvey has argued, neoliberalism is and always has been, “a project to achieve the restoration of class power to the richest strata of the population”.

Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Our enemies are well aware of this and are acting accordingly.

The scale of the battle, and of what is at stake, therefore dictates the nature of our response. This is an attack on the whole of the class and we need to be able to mobilise the whole of the class in response. That means restructuring our unions to genuinely engage the mass of the membership through being rooted in every workplace up and down the country.

It means overcoming the divisions that have weakened the cause of education and creating a single education union, fit for the twenty-first century.

It means creating strong and lasting alliances with parents and the wider trade union movement, and establishing a strong base in every local community, taking up not just ‘trade union’ issues but wider social justice concerns as well.

This perspective of social justice should guide everything we do, as trade unionists, as educators.

We face the most virulent of attacks but we have a world to win.

Gawain Little is a member of the NUT National Executive