Seize the Time to Build a United Union

Published in Education for Liberation (Spring 2016):

We face an unprecedented attack on education.

This government’s programme represents the culmination of nearly forty years of neoliberal education reform. If completed, it will see the end of state education, the complete deregulation of teacher supply, teacher qualification and teacher pay, and the replacement of education with a market system for the production of ‘human capital’ (as the DfE calls it), based on low-risk strategies to achieve temporary competence in a narrow range of skills for the purpose of passing tests.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, just look at the development of testing and charter schools in the US, or the role of state-funded for-profit education in Chile, or the growth of low-fee profit-making schools run by big edu-business across Africa and Asia.

Now is the Time for Unity

Published in the Unify 20th anniversary publication:

Over the past fifteen months, I have had the pleasure of participating in the ATL-NUT Joint Officer Group, a committee of eight lay representatives (four from each union) who have been meeting to discuss the prospect of creating a new union fit for the twenty-first century. It has been a fascinating process, during which we have all learned a lot about the other union’s core values and world view and, through consultation with our respective executives and more widely, the aspirations of their members, and indeed our own.

Does Unity Matter?

Published in Education for Tomorrow:

The well-known trade union maxim asserts that Unity is Strength. In union conferences across the movement, people declare that working people need to unite to defend themselves against this government’s attacks. Indeed, there is not one trade union activist who would oppose the idea that we need greater unity.

But what does this actually mean for education unions? I worry that too often, the unity we seek proves to be transitory, fleeting, of the moment. It is almost like we have been divided for so long that all of us have, on some level, developed a kind of cultural acceptance of that division.

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.

M26: What happened and what happens next?

Published 27/3/14 on Education for the People blog and 29/3/14 in the Morning Star as Top Tactics from the NUT:

In spite of attempts by the government to say otherwise, yesterday’s national strike by the NUT was a huge display of strength.  Not only was there a fantastic response from teachers across the country but the NUT clearly won over a huge proportion of parents and the public.

Part of this is to do with the fact that we won the arguments with government in the media.  Interview after interview showed the NUT come out positively in the face of government intransigence.

Strength in United Joint Action

Published in Education for Tomorrow.

Around 16 months ago, the National Union of Teachers declared a dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over pensions, pay, working conditions and jobs, and balloted its membership for strike action and action short of a strike on the three latter issues. This built on an existing dispute and ballot in relation to pensions and linked with a dispute declared by sister union NASUWT on all four issues less than one year previously.

This is, of course, a clear trade dispute in terms of the issues raised with the Secretary of State and is the subject of legitimate industrial action, even under Britain's restrictive anti-union laws. But the changes to teachers pay, pensions and working conditions, and the onslaught of job losses, particularly at local authority level, are part of a much wider programme of change which extends way beyond the bounds of national policy.