The tectonic plates in the education landscape are shifting, and like all such geological movements, it will barely be perceptible until the dramatic moment when it’s impossible to miss.
The creation of a union from the coming together of the NUT and ATL later this year will appear to many to be rather boring and arcane, but it has the potential to send shockwaves through the schools system.
The new National Education Union (NEU) - the biggest of its kind in Europe with more than 450,000 members - will not of course include the members of the NASUWT, but it will be bigger than any teachers’ union this country has seen for decades.
Will it be a political earthquake? The ATL and NUT’s respective general secretaries, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, think so. They believe a profession less divided will be less easily ruled. Will they be proved right? Certainly the new union, with its amplified voice, has lots to tackle head on. Wage constraint, poor management, performance pay, to name but a few.
But as well as fighting these fights, it should set about trying to establish another string to its bow: moral authority.
It should aim to speak as an insistent, considered, reasoned voice of the profession: about education, mental health, poverty, the recruitment and retention crisis, and funding cuts.
It must carry out much more research into pedagogy and practice - commissioned without political or pedagogical bias.
It should look to be part of all educational conversations and work to advise governments of every hue, whether they choose to listen or not.
The union’s general secretary (or secretaries) should become household names, not just as union barons, but as national education figures who speak with authority for the collective voice of ordinary teachers.
They must also feel the responsibility to speak for the needs of children in their communities - a demographic too often sidelined.
Dignified maturity
Once this is established, the union will find itself in a strong, moral position to talk about pay and conditions. In these situations, the union’s officials must have a dignified maturity. When entering into disputes, the public position should be more in sorrow than in anger.
Which battles of the recent past could such a teacher union have won? Would they have gained more in the pensions disputes? Would they have seen off the imposition of performance pay? It’s hard to tell.
Ultimately, might the new super-union be able to change the national narrative that says we must keep spending on the NHS, while schools - with their little bundles of future-dwellers - are allowed to suffer death by a thousand cuts?
There are more than a few obstacles to the NEU achieving this potential. Not least the enormous risk that it will - like so many other examples of organised labour - descend into petty infighting, factionalism and the marginalising of mainstream political views.
The likelihood of such an outcome is probably why the DfE has not even begun to consider the impact of such a powerful new union.
Ministers have become used to the profession divided, as too often its representatives concentrate their fire on one another rather than the injustices being carried out on their members.
Big is not necessarily beautiful: Jeremy Corbyn’s vast Labour party is busy proving that mass membership organisations are a fat lot of good if their main preoccupation is navel-gazing. Self-discipline is key - and that’s tricky.
@Ed_Dorrell
