‘The new superunion is going to have its work cut out battling May’s grammar schools revolution’

But the National Education Union will more than likely inherit some of the NUT’s more combative spirit, writes a high-profile education journalist
22nd April 2017, 10:01am

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‘The new superunion is going to have its work cut out battling May’s grammar schools revolution’

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/new-superunion-going-have-its-work-cut-out-battling-mays-grammar-schools-revolution
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There was a kind of an end-of-term atmosphere at the first of the three major teacher union conferences this Easter.

As I arrived at the ATL conference in Liverpool, I soon became aware of quite a number of prominent NUT members sitting around, chatting without that sense of urgency they normally show about trying to get their motions through conference.

They were, of course, sitting in on the ATL conference - the union with which they will join up next year to form a new “superunion”, the National Education Union - to see what they have let themselves in for.

“There’s no real passion on the conference floor,” said one. Of course, he’s right: ATL conferences are not littered with earnestly sought points of order during debates and ceaseless calls for action “up to and including strike action” to further a policy.

It will be interesting to see what effect the coming together of the two unions will have - will ATL’s more moderate membership act as a brake on the larger NUT or will they just get swallowed up by the bigger beast in the merger?

I suspect NEU conferences will be more passionate affairs than the ATL conferences. There will be calls for action and, yes, these endless points of order. But the true impact will be known when we see the results of any ballots on strike action that the new union calls for.

This season’s conferences are the last of their kind. Next year there will still be two separate conferences but they will be operating as two different wings of the same union. It won’t be until the following year, 2019, when we see the first fully fledged conference of the new union.

So we will have to wait and see what the effect will be. In the meantime, the concerns expressed at the conferences were predictable - anger at the impact of austerity cuts in the classroom (the Department for Education’s insistence that record amounts of money are being spent on education does not really address the point of increasing pupil numbers and rising national insurance and pension contributions), and opposition to Theresa May’s grammar school proposals.

In the case of the former, the threat of a one-day national strike was held out at the NUT conference amidst talk of schools losing as much as £180,000 from their budgets and rising class sizes.

In the case of the latter, of course the policy moves into the long grass now to be put forward in the next Parliament following May’s decision to call a general election.

I have always thought that was a more dangerous option: assuming a Conservative victory, she will be able to force it through the Commons and the Lords as a manifesto commitment. She would most likely have been defeated by a backbench revolt in this Parliament.

The NEU is going to have its work cut out.

One school hits a boundary

I actually took a break at Easter after 38 consecutive NUT conferences - preferring to indulge in my first love, cricket, and found myself toddling off to the Oval on Good Friday (it’s where we Middlesex supporters go to when our club is not playing at home in the vain hope that we will see Surrey lose).

My mind returned to education on walking past a secondary school opposite the ground - Archbishop Tenison’s - which was proclaiming to businesses in a large banner that if they wanted to advertise their company they could do worse than contact the school, which would display their advert during the first three weeks of June - when an international world cricket cup is being played at the Oval - in front of thousands of spectators walking past the school gates.

At least one school, therefore, has found an ingenious method of offsetting the impact of the cuts.

Richard Garner was education editor of The Independent for 12 years, and before that news editor of Tes. He has been writing about education for more than three decades. 

To read more columns by Richard, view his back catalogue

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