SEND

Today, support staff at Ash Field Academy in Leicester are once again on strike to demand that management stop victimising their union rep, Tom Barker. Following previous strikes, once again a lively picket gathered outside the school. The support staff strikers were joined by Unison activists from...

Today saw support staff at Ash Field SEND Academy in Leicester take the first of three days of strike action in the latest round of their battle to defend their union rep. The employer - Discovery Schools Academy Trust (DSAT) - has suspended Unison rep Tom Barker. When its own investigation revealed...

Welcome to the first in what we fear will be a series of 'Stop the Shenanigans' posts from NEU annual conference. Quite rightly, conferencs has procedures in place to debate urgent issues that arise too late to have motions or amendments submitted about them. When 300 delegates submit such a motion...

On Wednesday 1 April at 9am, conference will debate motions in the education, policy and funding section of the agenda. The areas covered by the three motions are behaviour in schools, SEND provision, and academisation. We recommend supporting the motions and most of the amendments, with details...

Maybe, with everything else going on, we have missed something - but where is the outcry over the government announcement that it is returning to Boris Johnson’s policy on Multi-Academy Trusts? The U-turn was announced in the SEND White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, published on 23...

The BBC's Panorama programme has exposed appalling abuse of autistic and learning-disabled pupils at an independent school in Merseyside. An undercover reporter witness physical assaults, verbal abuse, and numerous incidents illustrating contempt for the students. Life Wirral is a private school...

By the government’s own reckoning over 2000 pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities are not getting access to necessary resources and equipment because of funding cuts. Since 2015 £5.4 billion has been cut from school budgets in England. The most vulnerable have been hit hardest...