This Easter, as always, politicians and journalists will shake with rage as the teachers’ unions talk about strikes and other protests. Newsreaders will look grave, with that disapproving look they reserve for African politicians (except Nelson Mandela), anti-globalisation protesters and football hooligans. The Daily Telegraph will fulminate; the Daily Mail will alarm its readers with the prospect of feral children roaming the streets while the schools are shut; The Guardian will be sorrowful, hoping, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge’s pastiche, that wiser counsels will prevail.
Very little will happen. Union conference resolutions to go on strike usually mean about as much as international conference resolutions to end global poverty. But is it ever right for teachers to strike?
The supposed “damage” to children’s education can be dismissed rapidly. Damage to education is caused by the shortages of maths and science specialists, by the overuse of supply teachers, by schools being full of itinerant Antipodeans, and by low morale. Closing schools for a day is, by comparison, trivial.
Nor do I have much time for the argument that it is unprofessional to go on strike. Professionals, like anybody else, use such bargaining power as is available to them. My accountant will be unimpressed if I decline to pay his substantially increased charges. I shall probably accuse him of greed rather than lack of professionalism but, either way, I doubt that Daily Telegraph leader writers will be leaping to my support.
Teachers’ salaries, by contrast, are determined by Government fiat; in effect, they have a monopoly employer. Strikes are justified where people have little individual bargaining power and must fall back on their collective strength. That certainly covers teachers.
The only substantial objection to teachers’ strikes is that they do no harm to their employers: since there is no lost production and no pressing need to substitute the service provided, teachers’ strikes actually save money, both on salaries and on the costs of heating and lighting schools. Indeed, teachers, if they go on strike for long, can end up financing their own pay demands. If all the teachers in London went on strike for five days, the local authorities would easily have enough money to pay the pound;1,000 increase being demanded in the London allowance.
But pay is not the main issue in staff rooms. Workload is. The crucial point is that the greater the demands in the classroom, the greater the load of paperwork.
Children with special needs require forms to be completed, psychologists to be summoned, reports to be written. Allegedly “failing” schools are nearly always failing at least partly because their pupils come from deprived or disrupted homes or because they arrive at school with inadequate command of English. as teachers wrestle with these problems, they face the additional burden of being required to draw up or to revise action plans, objectives, mission statements, subject schemes, lesson plans and all the rest of the paraphernalia that bureaucracy regards as the answer to everything.
Teachers should simply dig their heels in and refuse to do most of this work, saying that they wish instead to devote themselves to the welfare of the children. Half the country - and just about the whole of the public sector - is drowning in paperwork, and would heartily sympathise. The ball would then be in the employers’ court. They would be the wreckers if they responded by suspending or dismissing teachers.
Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman
