Last week, the National Education Union (NEU) held its annual conference in Harrogate.
Most of the bosses’ press got wound up covering the leadership’s support for a campaign against Reform UK (see letter below). But by far the most important topic discussed at the conference was the upcoming strike ballot over teachers’ pay and funding.
Britain’s schools and colleges have been affected by a series of crises: from direct spending cuts, workload, and the crisis of special needs funding by local authorities; to the RAAC concrete scandal, which poses serious risk to a number of educators and students across the nation.
Alongside poor pay, all of these issues have led to a high turnover rate in the profession – especially in Multi Academy Trusts (MATs).
Pay and cuts
If anyone originally had any illusions in Starmer’s reformist government, those illusions have certainly been blown away since he came to power. ‘Sir’ Keir’s true allegiances have been revealed time and time again: from scrapping the two-child benefit cap, to winter fuel allowance for pensioners, and most recently the cruel rescinding of PIP benefits from disabled people.
NEU disabled members protested recent welfare cuts at #NEU2025. These cuts will push more into poverty and worsen job prospects. Half of children with a disabled parent already live in poverty. Poverty is scaring the lives of our children – 80% in our State of Education survey… pic.twitter.com/aoy8LqeJku
— National Education Union (@NEUnion) April 17, 2025
Meanwhile, Labour have been pledging to increase defence spending as they scramble to keep together what is left of British imperialism in the Trump era.
The STRB – the supposedly ‘impartial’ school teachers’ pay review body – recommended a measly 2.8 percent pay increase. However, the deal offered by the government is unfunded, meaning that these pay increases would come out of the already deficient, existing school budgets.
76 percent of primaries and 94 percent of secondaries will be forced to make cuts in order to implement this increase, according to the NEU. Support staff would be among the first to face the axe.
But teachers are clearly in a mood to fight back, having borne the burden for years of increased workloads, worsening real pay and crumbling teaching conditions. So in an indicative ballot that concluded just before the conference, 83.4 percent of NEU teachers voted in favour of taking strike action on a turnout of 47.2 percent for a fully-funded, improved pay offer.
NEU disabled members protested recent welfare cuts at #NEU2025. These cuts will push more into poverty and worsen job prospects. Half of children with a disabled parent already live in poverty. Poverty is scaring the lives of our children – 80% in our State of Education survey… pic.twitter.com/aoy8LqeJku
— National Education Union (@NEUnion) April 17, 2025
Yet at the conference, a few people on the right of the union tried to claim that this turnout was too low to hope to make it past 50 percent on a paper ballot – clearly an attempt to avoid a confrontation with the government. But delegates on the floor correctly dismissed this pathetic response.
Militant action
The right also tried to raise their ugly heads over the issues of imperialism and academisation. One delegate spoke about how the Israeli state being involved in funding STEM courses was a “complex issue”, and that it would be wrong for the union to fight back against it because, after all, “we need well-funded schools”(!). This motion was soundly defeated.
Unfortunately however, the right managed to sow confusion in a debate about MATs, which are nothing more than parasitic management bodies masquerading as charities. One delegate argued that stopping their involvement in state education would somehow hurt the ‘cause of charities’! Thus one motion against MATs being defeated.
Incidentally, when an NEU member on a WhatsApp discussion group called the delegate’s argument “ludicrous” (quite the understatement for such a cynical attempt to stand up for the academy bureaucrats!), they were told not to use such words to describe a woman’s speech – a typical move by those who use identity politics to shut down debate.
But on the question of the pay ballot, the direction of travel is clear. Strike action is the next step.
The national executive of the NEU are waiting for a response from the government before a move to a formal ballot for strike action is made. But the time for militancy cannot be delayed.
All efforts must be made to link the issue of pay and funding to a broad, militant programme against Starmer’s big business government.
Save our schools
General secretary Daniel Kebede has shown a willingness to adopt a political approach when he said that the union is ready to take industrial action and to campaign “in their constituencies” against Labour MPs that stand in the way of a fully-funded, above-inflation pay offer.
While preparing to take this action, however, the NEU’s endorsement of a broad political campaign to combat Reform UK at the ballot box amounts to an endorsement of the Labour Party, who are currently attacking education while in power.
This is a confused approach, to say the least. At the end of the day, Labour are the ones in power, and it is a Labour education secretary now presiding over this crisis. Focusing on a hypothetical Reform UK rise risks letting Starmer and co. off the hook.
Instead of playing ‘lesser-evilism’, the union must redouble its current efforts to link up the problems of funding with the issue of workload; to coordinate with other unions that organise more support staff; and to organise schools that don’t currently have an active rep.
A huge part of this drive must be expressly political. Only workers’ and parents’ control over our schools can offer a way out. It’s high time education’s future was placed in the hands of those who work in it.
And when strike action does come, we must be ready to break with the weak tactic of spaced-out ‘days of action’ that led to a frankly disappointing result in the 2023 strike wave.
To save our schools, we must be ready for an all-out fight against a government that is determined to have us pay for the crisis.
No to militarism, no to austerity! For books, not bombs!
The NEU vs Reform: The whole system is racist!
Georgie Gibson, NEU Norfolk
Nigel Farage recently hit out at the NEU teachers’ union for branding Reform UK as “far-right and racist”.
The union, which is worried about Reform’s growing popularity amongst the youth, is set to demand that students are taught about the dangers of voting Reform in schools.
It is undeniably true that Reform and Farage whip up vile rhetoric that any union worth its salt should stand against.
But warnings about Reform ring hollow from an NEU leadership that has been so cordial with Starmer’s government.
Painting Farage as a unique threat, and asking Labour to use schools to discredit Reform, entirely lets the establishment parties off the hook.
Aren’t the Labour leaders also happy to whip up racism toward migrants? Didn’t Starmer oversee the nasty campaign against Diane Abbott for daring to oppose him?
Isn’t the current Prime Minister the man who said that Israel had the right to starve the people of Gaza and cut off their water supplies? Isn’t he the one taking draconian measures against pro-Palestinian protestors in this country?
Any attempt to combat the racism and bigotry of Reform by allying ourselves with the hated liberal establishment will only serve to discredit the labour movement.
This provides reactionary demagogues like Farage with free reign to pose as the only ones giving a voice to the anger in society.
The labour movement must not cosy up to the hated establishment, but fight it tooth and nail on all fronts.
We must say that there is blood on all their hands: Labour, Tory, and Reform. The only way forward is through the class struggle.
We must fight racism – and all of capitalism’s ills – not in a popular front with hypocritical liberals, but on an independent class basis.
Such a movement would provide a genuine alternative to the crap that Farage and his ilk are peddling.
