NEU members on strike: a struggle for the future of state education
Posted on 31/01/2023
Howard Stevenson outlines why huge number of teachers have vote for strike action.
On the 1st February members of the National Education Union (NEU), will take part in the largest strikes by teachers in England and Wales since the 1980s. This follows a vote of members that voted overwhelmingly for strike action and easily exceeded the threshold for industrial action that the government imposed as a deliberate obstacle to workers being able to take collective action. Teachers in Scotland have already been taking substantial strike action, and although the contexts are quite different, there are many common issues.
Why are teachers striking?
In common with many other workers, teachers are taking industrial action because current rates of inflation are rapidly eroding the real terms value of their pay. Like other public sector workers, current cuts in real terms pay for teachers follow on from year after year of salary erosion. This is because public sector pay awards have never recovered from the cuts that followed the 2008 economic crisis.
However, as with many strikes, the headline issue of pay may have triggered the dispute, but teachers’ anger reflects a much wider set of set of frustrations. The reality is that the current demands for strike action have been many years in the making. The signs have been clearly visible, but those able to address the issues have chosen to ignore them.
For example, it has long been recognised that the working hours of teachers have been excessive. It is exactly twenty years since employers and several education unions signed an agreement to tackle workload issues, but since then the problem has simply worsened. In 2018 the TALIS survey of teachers conducted by the OECD reported that secondary teachers in England worked 20% longer hours than the OECD average (or put another way, for every five days worked by the average teacher in the OECD, a teacher in England was working six days). In the primary sector, across all the participating countries, teachers in England worked the second longest hours. Only teachers in Japan worked longer. In 2019, using TALIS data, the European Commission reported that teachers in England had the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the European Union.
However, long working hours and declining pay are still only a part of the picture. In the 2017 UK Skills and Employment Survey teachers fared particularly badly. The study showed that teachers suffer in particular from ‘work strain’ which is measured as a combination of ‘work intensity’ and ‘task discretion’. In an analysis of the data Professor Francis Green of University College London demonstrated that teachers suffer from both high work intensity (effort expended within working hours) and low task discretion (ability to make professional judgements about one’s own work). Green highlighted two points in particular – that teachers’ experience was considerably worse than other graduate occupations, and that it had deteriorated appreciably since the first survey conducted in 1992 (significant as the year that Ofsted was established!).
What is clear, is that when compared to teachers internationally, or to other graduate occupations in the UK, teachers in England have uncompetitive pay, work long hours and experience little agency in relation to the management of their own work. England is an outlier on many of these issues and yet there is almost no effort to understand why, let alone to seriously address the issues.
Recent experiences, such as keeping the school system functioning through Covid (despite incompetent Ministerial leadership), and the impact of the cost of living crisis, have merely compounded a set of problems that were already clearly visible and inevitably, at some point, going to reach a crisis.
Political significance
Perhaps the real significance of the impending strikes in English schools is the extent to which they attest to the enduring power and influence of the teacher unions. It is more than 40 years since the Thatcher government introduced the 1988 Education Reform Act, and the raft of measures that were meant to deal a body blow to teacher union organisation. Local management of schools, grant-maintained status (the forerunners to academy schools), standardised testing and league tables were all intended to undermine collective solidarity and set school against school and teacher against teacher. It is over a decade since David Cameron announced he would go into ‘battle’ with the ‘education establishment’ over Tory party education reforms and since Michael Gove announced that the Department of Education was on a ‘war footing’ in preparation for a confrontation with teacher unions over pay proposals that at the time the unions had not even seen. This was Michael Gove’s attack on not only teachers’ unions, but on local authorities and university academics, who he collectively characterised as ‘the Blob’ and the ‘enemies of promise’. It is part of what has been a relentless ‘war on teachers’, but which must be seen as part of a wider struggle over the form, purposes and future direction of state education.
Ever since the ballot results were announced teachers have been vilified in much of the popular press. The reality is that this industrial action has been inevitable for some time. The government has done nothing about problems that have been visible in the system for years, and which are now evident in crisis levels of teacher recruitment and retention. Labour markets don’t lie. Schools in England are struggling to attract new teachers, and struggling even harder to hold on to the ones they have. The looming strikes are a symptom of this crisis, not its cause.
However, rather than confront the evidence, and listen and respond to teachers’ concerns, the government has repeatedly opted for provocation and confrontation.
It should not be surprising then that teachers are going on strike. What they need now is everyone’s support to make a huge statement that teachers deserve fair pay, and we all deserve an education system that is public, democratic and that works in the interests of all students.