Education unions

National Union of Teachers (NUT), Association of University Teachers (AUT), National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) and other education unions

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Teachers vote 72% for strike action on pay

Members of the National Union of Teachers have voted by a 72% majority to strike on 24 April against the Government's plan to impose a real-wage-cutting 2% pay limit, nailed down for three years, on them and on all public sector workers. The turnout was 32%. The lecturers' union UCU is also balloting to strike over pay on 24 April, and there will be pressure within other unions which organise in schools, such as Unison, GMB, and NASUWT, to ensure that school managements cannot use their members to keep schools open in defiance of the NUT strike.

NUT Left Abstain on Homophobia

For the first time in its history, the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers debated a motion submitted by LGBT teachers from their own conference. The motion, entitled "International Homophobia and Transphobia" condemned the current levels of anti-LGBT bigotry in Britain and the rising tide of militant right-wing attacks on LGBT people and Pride demonstrations around the world. Poland, Russia, Israel and Iran were among the places singled out for mention. Tim Lucas and Claire Jenkins from the NUT LGBT Working Party proposed and seconded the motion and a number of delegates...

Giving them the measles

A large teachers’ strike has been called for Tuesday 18 March in France, with teachers in many schools voting to strike indefinitely. As the preparations for this are underway, the JCR (the LCR’s youth wing) has been mobilising to get word out to lycée (roughly equivalent to post-16/FE college) students, at a time when the organisation has identified expansion into that age group as a priority. I spent a day touring lycées in the south east of the city with two other comrades from my branch, handing out an A4 youth bulletin called La Rougeole (The Measle: online archive of PDFs here: http:/...

Handing over schools to business spivs?

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls will continue to accelerate the academies programme. The fake concern Balls expressed about some schools flouting admissions procedures acts as sand in our eyes as he and Brown increase selection through academies, trust and foundation status. Local authorities currently face a terrible choice. If they include an academy in their bid for funding under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, it will be built with no charge to the authority but at a £35m cost to the taxpayer. State schools will be given away at knock down prices to any two-bit entrepreneur...

Pushing education beyond capitalist limits

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire W. B. Yeats There has to be selection because we are beginning to create aspirations which society cannot match. In some ways this points to the success of education in contrast to the public mythology which has been created. When young people drop off the education production line and cannot find work at all, or work which meets their abilities and expectations, then we are only creating frustration with perhaps disturbing social consequences. We have to select: to ration the educational opportunities so that society can cope...

A different type of trade unionism

This [NUT 2008 Easter] conference comes at a crucial time for trade unionists both in education and across the Public Sector. Both the NUT and UCU are balloting members over the government’s 3 year pay cut, which will hopefully lead to the first national strike over pay for a very long time. At the same time, other Public Sector unions are involved in similar disputes. As NUT activists we need to seize the opportunity to unite and act with other unions who are fighting the same battle against an increasingly hostile and aggressive government. However, activists will know the problems we face...

Get a life — building action on workload

If you ask teachers what the worst aspect of their job is, a very big majority will point to excessive workload. We know this because they have been asked by trade unions and by academic researchers on a regular basis. In particular, research commissioned by government to identify why so many people leave the job consistently shows that workload is a crucial factor. Teacher trade unions are aware of the importance of this issue but have taken two diametrically opposed paths in dealing with it. The NASUWT and ATL have taken the route of social partnership. They made an agreement with the...

Education: the world’s biggest industry

“Teachers are proletarians. Indeed, it has been some time now since a significant number of teachers owned their own means of production; in order to survive they sell their labour power…” Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globaliation since 1870 The significance of teachers as workers has increased in Western capitalist economies in the post-war period. Mass education and the work of teachers within the “education industry” has become the lynchpin in an economy dependent upon workers with high levels of “knowledge”: “Like textile workers in the nineteenth century and...

Push back the “new management”

I am a local officer of Leeds NUT. One of our biggest sources of casework is workplace bullying. It is also one of the most depressing and frustrating aspects of our work because it is very difficult to protect individual members from systematic intimidation by school managers, and the problem grows like a malignant tumour. Recently I found myself sitting in the reception area of a Leeds secondary school staring at a wallposter which stridently proclaimed the legend “The power of me can tackle bullying in Leeds”. In the previous weeks I had frequently sat in traffic jams and stared at this...

End the rule of SATs!

The Cambridge Primary Review - arguably the most important review since Plowden in 1967 - calls for an end to national testing and a complete re-think of current primary practice. The evidence shows: • limited gains in reading skills at the expense of pupils’ enjoyment of reading; • increases in test-induced stress among pupils; a narrowing of the primary curriculum in response to the perceived pressure of testing; • the limited impact of the national strategies on both reading standards and the quality of classroom discourse on which higher-order learning depends; • a much bigger gap between...

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