Teacher strikes: NAHT will re-ballot school leaders

The NAHT school leaders’ union will re-ballot its members for strikes over pay, school funding, workload and wellbeing.

Leaders of all four teaching and leadership unions will today hold a joint press conference at NAHT’s conference in Telford to announce plans to “announce co-ordination of their unions’ industrial action going forward”.

Unlike the heads’ union’s previous ballot, which did not meet the legal turnout threshold required, the new vote will seek a mandate for full strikes alone. In the last ballot, heads were asked if they backed strikes and action short of a strike.

In an eve-of-conference interview with Schools Week, general secretary Paul Whiteman said government’s continued refusal to hold fresh pay talks shows “contempt” for the profession and reveals that ministers fear unions.

He added he was “very confident we will get over the line” in the union’s fresh postal ballot. The last vote was affected by postal strikes, and Whiteman believes members’ resolve has hardened after they rejected the government’s pay offer.

Ministers said their offer was final, and that rejection would mean reverting to the annual review process, taking a proposed one-off payment for this year off the table.

Government shows ‘contempt’ for members

But Whiteman said there was “no logic to that position, and it just shows once again the contempt that government has for our members”.

“To say ‘we think you’re worth £1,000 now and 4.3 per cent next year’, then to say ‘we’re going to snatch that away as a punishment because you rejected it’ means they’re not committed to the pay levels they said they think the profession needs.”

Whiteman said the union’s members had “completely lost confidence” in the School Teachers’ Review Body. “The government claims it’s independent. It’s anything but.”

But calls for further talks have so far fallen on deaf ears. Whiteman wrote to Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, two weeks ago to urge her to come back to the table. He has received no reply.

“One of the things that surprises me about education is the fear that I see in politicians and others to properly engage with trade unions when there are really serious matters at hand. I see no evidence they understand how negotiation and industrial relations work.

“If we do it properly, I’m still convinced we will find a settlement.”

A DfE spokesperson said it had “made a fair and reasonable teacher pay offer … which recognises teachers’ hard work and commitment”.

Unions will co-ordinate action

A successful NAHT re-ballot raises the prospect of even greater disruption to schools in the autumn following this year’s National Education Union action.

NASUWT also recently announced a re-ballot, while ASCL will go to its members for the first time. Leaders of all four unions will hold a joint press conference about co-ordinating action this evening.

Whiteman insisted “no-one has any interest in disrupting the education of young people, but the simple fact is, the things we’re in dispute about mean we don’t have enough of the right people and we continue to lose people.

“And that all lays at the door of this government and the 13 years of previous administrations that have followed the same route of just letting education wither on the vine.”

At the press conference, unions were quizzed on what the action could look like.

Kevin Courtney, NEU joint general secretary said: “I think with all four unions, you’d find that every state school in England was affected by the dispute and that would put you up at you know, 300 to 400,000 teachers would be involved in taking the action I would have thought. 

“I think acting together…we will all pass the government’s undemocratic thresholds.”

Whiteman said it could “potentially” be the biggest strikes to hit the education sector on record, but added exact plans rely on the unions reaching voting thresholds.

“It’s just simply too early to begin to paint a picture of what that action would look like. We’d need to get through those thresholds.”

He added: “This is an unprecedented show of solidarity from the education unions. It sends a clear signal to government that our dispute is not going away.”

Ofsted crisis is sector’s ‘watershed moment’

Also high on the agenda in Telford is Ofsted, and the growing unrest over the impact of the school inspection system in England, prompted by the death earlier this year of headteacher Ruth Perry.

Her sister Professor Julia Waters, who says Perry took her own life in January before the publication of an inspection report that downgraded Caversham Primary School in Reading from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’, will address the conference tomorrow.

The National Education Union recently passed a motion calling on heads to stop working as Ofsted inspectors. Asked recently if any freelance inspectors had stepped down, Ofsted said numbers were in the “single figures”.

Whiteman said he backed heads who decided to walk away from second jobs as inspectors.

“Fair play to those that have looked at themselves and said I can no longer justify this in the circumstances.”

Whiteman believes it was a “watershed moment” for the profession, and something “has to change”.

Ofsted was “just one of the examples of the pressure that the profession is under”, which was why Perry’s death had prompted such a “huge reaction”.

“It needs to be a moment when everybody wakes up to the to the depth and the seriousness of the mental health problems inspection brings.

“Tragedies focus the mind. You can’t always explain why this one, why now, but it has caught everybody’s awareness and people are prepared to speak up. If the government and Ofsted don’t listen, it will be a tragedy for young people.”