John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, has said he and Jeremy Corbyn will support teachers if they decide to strike over funding cuts and frozen pay.
Speaking at the NUT teaching union’s annual conference in Cardiff, Mr McDonnell said: “Jeremy and I will give you absolutely 100 per cent support in your campaign to oppose the cuts and to also overturn the pay cap. 100 per cent.
“Whether it’s in parliament or, yes, if necessary on the picket line, we will be with you.”
Mr McDonnell said the Conservative government had been responsible for “the first real terms cuts in school budgets for two decades”.
“This is the worst school funding settlement since, to be frank, I was wearing flares, had an army surplus grey coat, rode a motorbike and had brown hair down to my shoulders in the 1970s. That’s how far back you have to go to experience this scale of cuts.”
He attacked the rising pay of multi-academy trust chief executives at the same time as classroom teachers’ pay was stagnating.
He said: “I notice there haven’t been pay cuts in the directors and chief executives of the trust bodies that have gone on throughout the country - people now being paid literally hundreds of thousands of pounds as chief execs and directors of trust, privatisation by the backdoor and the first wave.
He also criticised the government for “throwing some red meat to Tory hard right backbenchers” with its plans to introduce new grammar schools.
“All the evidence tells us, that segregation in education fails,” he said.
He said the government had been forced to “fiddle the statistics” by inventing a new statistical category of “ordinary working families”.
Mr McDonnell also repeated Labour’s promise to found a “National Education Service”.
He praised Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, saying: “I told [shadow education secretary] Angela Rayner, that Angela will become the Nye Bevan of the Corbyn government,” he said, “she will go down in history for the NES.”
Earlier today, NUT general secretary Kevin Courtney reiterated a warning that the union could take national strike action if the government does not make extra funding available to schools.
The NUT is one of seven teaching unions joining forces with a parent group to hold a joint protest at parliament on 6 June against school funding cuts next month, Mr Courtney announced. The event would be a “significant moment” in the fight for more cash for schools, he said.
Speaking to journalists ahead of today’s conference, Mr Courtney said: “Until this point, unions have had different campaigns running.
”...The fact that headteachers are saying this lobby of parliament is a good thing, we think teachers in schools can say to their head ‘I’d really like to go to this lobby of parliament, if I can arrange for colleagues to cover for me, can I be released to go to it?’
“And we want it to be on that sort of scale, we want it to be a substantial lobby of parliament on that day, from all parts of the country.”
The protesters will gather inside parliament and air their concerns to MPs, the NUT said. The other groups involved are the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of School and College Leaders, UNISON, GMB, Unite and Rescue our Schools.
