Union organising

Education workers at Learning Partner West in Bristol are striking for union recognition, higher pay, longer and regular breaks, and improvements to the school site. Learning Partner West is a privatised alternative learning provider (ALP) for children who have been excluded from mainstream schools...

NEU teachers and support staff at St Cuthbert’s High School in Rochdale are to start strike action on Tuesday (April 21st). The local NEU say the strikes are being taken in response to plans by management to cut posts, which will have a damaging impact on education provision, SEND, pupil support...

NEU teachers and support staff at Samworth Church Academy have taken seven days of strike action against management bullying, which included managers arranging disciplinary meetings with staff in front of students and worse. Samworth Church Academy has never been involved in strike action before...

The National Education Union (NEU) held a special conference on Saturday 28 February to decide whether to actively recruit and organise support staff. Workers’ Liberty supporters, who work alongside other activists in the union in Educators’ Fightback, have argued for the union to do this since the...

Support staff are the lowest paid in our workplaces. Many have more than one job, resort to using food banks and struggle to get by. Would your priority be paying union subs or putting food on the table? Every penny counts. If you were faced with the choice of joining a union with a low introductory...

There is a strange fatalism about the TUC in the discussion about NEU organising support staff. Leading people have been heard to say - including to other unions - that we will be out of the TUC after the special conference decision. The Executive’s motion for conference ends, strangely, with...

Here are Educators' Fightback's recommendations for voting on amendments at this Saturday's special NEU conference on organising support staff. Separate posts on the blog look at the issues in more depth. 1. against: sticks with 2017 agreement, which excludes NEU from the school support staff...

Saturday's NEU special conference is an opportunity for the union to take a historic step towards being able to fully represent its support staff members, now numbering 64,000, and becoming an industrial union for all workers in education. Our union has already taken decisions at annual conferences...

by Luke Woodward The money is there Yesterday I went to a friend’s house for dinner. Another guest told us how his software company had recently posted a new job description: HR something something, £110,000 plus bonuses. They are about to put on a conference in Europe, flying bosses from the USA...

By Anthony Gardner Every year, cost-of-living pay increases are agreed for school support staff and backdated to April, but not at the Cathedral Schools Trust (CST) in Bristol, where the academy chain had been pocketing the money owed from April to September. Initial discussions ended with an...