By Pat Murphy, NUT executive
THE National Union of Teachers Annual Conference takes place in Harrogate over the Easter weekend. Those who only pay attention to this union only once a year may find the experience a very odd one. The media have come to expect guaranteed noise and division at the largest teachers’ union conference but, if that is how they define newsworthy, they are unlikely to be satisfied this year. Internal unity in the NUT is at an all-time peak and there are few parts of the agenda where fierce division and debate can be expected.
Partly this is because the left has no more vigorous answer to the Blair-Brown assault on schools — Academies and trust schools — than the right. Partly it is because the NUT has remained outside the government’s social partnership since the national Workload Agreement was adopted by the other teacher and support staff unions in 2003.
This agreement promised some fairly minor measures to reduce teacher workload in turn for an acceptance that support staff would take on more responsibility for learning in the classroom.
Since then the pro-Agreement unions, the employers’ organisation and the government have formed a body known as the Rewards and Incentives Group (RIG) which has become the source of series of measures which have worsened the pay and conditions of teachers. In 2005 they came up with new system for paying teachers who take on additional responsibilities which led to substantial pay cuts for thousands(TLRs).
Last year they agreed new performance management regulations which promise to ration performance pay more rigorously and divide staffrooms and departments as line managers become responsible for making decisions about the pay of their colleagues.
The fact that the NUT is the only union outside this shoddy and abusive relationship has created a tremendous unity of purpose in the Union.
Being outside RIG has also forced the Union to consider an alternative strategy and, in the absence of an alternative of their own, this has led the leadership to borrow from and adapt the idea of the left. So we have had a campaign of industrial action against pay cuts threatened by the TLR regime and a ballot to endorse comprehensive new guidelines on workload which could lead to action on lesson observation, planning and meetings amongst other things.
Another factor in this new-found unity is the end of the Doug McAvoy era. McAvoy ran an old-style internal regime in which the left was excluded, isolated and generally treated with contempt. It appears that many on the right were treated similarly, though they should be reminded that they were complicit in this authoritarianism too. New General Secretary Steve Sinnott has promised a union which is more inclusive and uses “all of the talents”. Those that have been on or around the Executive for a long time, left and right, are adamant that the atmosphere is completely transformed from that of the recent past.
There will be debate, however, and it will cover absolutely key issues. How can we build an effective pay campaign given that our two-year 2.5% pay imposition has turned out to be a pay cut as inflation exceeds 4%? Can we mobilise industrial action against the new performance management regime and if so can it be national or only school by school?
Can we adopt the aim of replacing religious schools with a secular system without alienating the thousands of members working in voluntary-aided schools? But the debate on these issues won’t always divide on conventional left-right lines.
In the longer term the NUT leadership will feel the pressure to join social partnership. Steve Sinnott has described RIG as a ‘corrupt and dishonest social partnership’, implying that there is a better kind out there somewhere. He has praised the decision of NAHT leader Mick Brookes to rejoin RIG as “brave” and he has repeatedly signalled that he expects much better from Gordon Brown.
This, together with the basic politics of Sinnott and his supporters on the Executive, suggests that they see independence from partnership as a temporary state forced on them by the previous General Secretary, the aggression of the Government and the strength of the left, rather than a basic precondition of self-reliant trade unionism.
It is the job of the left to make that impossible and undesirable. We can do that largely by demonstrating the superiority of militant independent trade unionism as a way to protect and improve the pay and conditions of our members.
