Members of the ATL section of the NEU teaching union will today open their annual conference.

Amid the motions highlighting the financial pressures facing schools and concerns about Ofsted, there will also be a sense of nostalgia as they meet for the last time as the ATL.

Here is what you need to know:

Hang on, I thought the ATL no longer existed?

In a legal sense, that’s right. Following years of negotiations, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers merged with the National Union of Teachers in September 2017, to form the National Education Union - the fourth biggest union in the UK.

But although the two unions are now a single legal entity, their two sections are holding separate conferences for the last time in 2018, before their first joint gathering in Liverpool next year.

So, won’t the ATL conference just be a repeat of the NUT’s Easter conference?

No, it won’t.

The ATL and NUT have different personas and traditions, and these will be reflected in their separate events.

While NUT delegates are sometimes stereotyped as left-wing agitators, the ATL is traditionally seen as being at the more conservative, sensible-shoes end of union activity. If there is rarely a NUT motion that does not include a call for industrial action, the reverse is true of the ATL.

There are other differences. The NUT has a strong concern for global activism, sending messages of support to left-wing groups in Palestine and Venezuela, while the ATL conference has breakout sessions on more domestic concerns, such as teacher qualification pathways and managing stress.

What happens when these differing strands come together in the new ‘super-union’?

That is the big question, and something that NUT delegates were pondering as they met in Brighton over Easter. Will the smaller ATL moderate the voice of the NUT? Will the NUT swamp the ATL? Or will the two sections come together to synthesise something new?

Both the ATL and the NUT conferences debate and pass motions, but because neither on its own can speak for the NEU as a whole, a joint executive council of the two sections will meet in May to decide which motions to adopt as NEU-wide policy.

The NUT passed some motions that sought to commit the NEU to moves towards industrial action, but it is the joint council that will determine, for this year at least, which voice the NEU will speak with.

But the words in Brighton were of unity. Mary Bousted, the NEU’s joint general secretary from the ATL side, told delegates from the NUT side that “together we can campaign more effectively for the things we believe in”.

To applause, she told them that if the government does not cut teacher workload, the NEU will consult its members to ask if they are “willing to do more and to take action to reduce workload”.

What will ATL delegates be discussing?

No surprise that school funding, Ofsted and teacher workload are on the agenda.

Motions include calls to: lobby the government to “act… on the barriers to teacher retention”, encourage school leaders to “speak out and challenge the funding barriers they face”, and focus resources “on teaching and learning rather than CEO roles”.

What’s next?

This is the last of this year’s conferences for the classroom teachers’ unions, but the NAHT heads’ union’s annual gathering is yet to come. Expect more concerns to be raised about pay, funding and workload when they meet in Liverpool at the start of next month.

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