Need to know: The Easter teaching union conferences

Members of Britain’s two biggest teachers’ unions are preparing for their annual conferences over the Easter weekend.

The NASUWT will meet in Birmingham for four days, while the NUT section of the National Education Union will meet for five days in Brighton.

Here is what you need to know:

What’s on the agenda?

It won’t surprise anyone that pay and workload figure highly on the list of issues that both unions will be debating.

But, in a sign of the rising importance of the issue, a motion about teachers’ mental health and wellbeing topped the list of issues that NASUWT delegates wanted to discuss.

It “notes with alarm the increased incidence of depression, anxiety and teacher suicide, which is exacerbated by poor management practice and lack of support”, and calls for an increase in the provision of the union’s mental health first-aid training programme.

What do the motions say about pay?

The discussions about teacher pay will be more topical than ever, following the government’s announcement of a 6.5 per cent deal for nurses over three years.

Kevin Courtney, who leads the NUT section, has already warned that even if teachers got a similar pay rise, it would not be enough to solve the recruitment and retention crisis.

A motion at the NUT conference calls for “an initial pay rise of at least 5 per cent to begin restoring the cuts in living standards all school staff have suffered”, while one at NASUWT “deplores the public sector pay cap which has resulted in a decrease in the standards of living for teachers and other public sector workers”.

A key demand will be that the government provides new money to cover any pay rise, rather than expecting schools to fund it from their already-stretched budgets.

But classroom teachers and support staff are not the only people whose pay is likely to be discussed.

The NUT conference agenda also includes a motion on “excessive CEO pay in academies”, which it says has “no moral or recruitment justification”. It calls for the union to campaign for regulation to curb such salaries.

Similarly, a motion calls for the NASUWT to “investigate and expose examples of excessive academy pay and abuse of vested interests”

And workload?

Inevitably, this is another massive issue for teachers, and one that is at the top of the agenda for new education secretary Damian Hinds.

Delegates are likely to cite last week’s research from the National Foundation for Educational Research, which found that teachers work longer hours than nurses and police officers - even when the long summer holidays are included.

NUT delegates are due to debate the issue on Easter Sunday, with a motion calling for a survey of parents to see “what reporting of pupil progress [they] find necessary”, and it will come up at the NASUWT conference during a motion about the teacher retention crisis.

Anything else being discussed?

Yes, lots. The full range of motions covers issues from housing and libraries to young people’s mental health, bullying, and sexism and harassment in schools.

Look out for a discussion of primary assessment - particularly calls to disrupt the government’s planned pilots of the Reception baseline assessment - at the NUT event, and calls for maximum class sizes at the NASUWT.

Are we set to see lots of calls for strike action?

Some headline-hungry journalists attending a press conference ahead of the NUT conference were disappointed by the lack of demands for strike action on the agenda.

In fact, the possibility of industrial action is raised in some NUT motions, including in relation to teacher pay (“be prepared to ballot members for strike action”), and primary school testing (“work hard to create the conditions that a boycott ballot could be won”).

Similarly, the possibility of such action crops up in NASUWT motions on the public sector pay cap (“consider the use of rolling strike action”), school funding (“consider escalating industrial action to include a rolling programme of strike action”) and the state pension age (“consider action, up to and including strike action, to oppose further increases to the pension age”).

Hang on, I thought the NUT no longer exists…

The NUT merged with the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) in September, to form the National Education Union, and this is the last time the NUT section will hold its own annual conference.

This does create a procedural question about what happens to motions passed at this Easter’s event, and the ATL’s conference next month.

If a motion is approved by NUT members, it would need to be put forward to the NEU’s joint executive council, who would decide whether it should be taken forward.

What happened at previous education union conferences in 2018?

The Association of School and College Leaders was the venue for Damian Hinds’ first address to school leaders since becoming education secretary.

He was flanked on-stage by ASCL general secretary Geoff Barton and Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman to signal a concerted push to reduce teacher workload, but many heads were frustrated when he dodged a question on school funding.

What’s next?

There are more conferences to come.

The ATL section of the NEU meets in Liverpool on 9-11 April, while the NAHT heads’ union rounds off the season with its conference in Liverpool at the start of May.

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