Earlier this month, teachers and support staff at Castle Wood School, a special primary school in Coventry, successfully resisted an attempted takeover by an academy trust.
Comrades from The Communist interviewed Tara Tod, a teacher and rep for the National Education Union (NEU) at the school. She explained the threat that this move posed – both to the working conditions of staff, and to the services the children are receiving:
“Academies are in principle a bad thing,” Tara stated. “They mean that you have a business structure around schools, that you take schools out of democratic control, and that the CEOs can pay themselves huge salaries out of taxpayers’ money.”
“But also, my personal experience is that they promise a lot when they first take over a school,” she continued. “They say they will pay for the services that local authorities are no longer able to afford. But then, a year in, once the ‘sale’ is made, the cuts start coming in.”
“I worked at a school where a wonderful occupational therapist was hired by the academy trust,” Tara noted. “When September rolled around, all of a sudden she was expected to work across all five of their schools and her caseload went from 100 to 700 children overnight.”
Tara also highlighted the importance of fighting leadership. With the support of a strong local branch secretary, she was able to uncover scandalous revelations: obscene salaries for senior leaders at the school; a pattern of broken promises to staff and parents; and a culture of bullying in the schools already run by the trust.
After a sham consultation period, where questions submitted by union members largely went unanswered, the NEU bloc voted overwhelmingly for strike action. The school’s leadership was forced to beat a hasty retreat.
Now, Tara is considering building this up into a wider campaign to fight academisation. She has already been sharing ideas with a school facing a similar situation.
“They think we will sleepwalk into this because we’re nice,” the NEU activist stated. “We’re not just nice. We’re angry, because the children we work with are not getting what they need.”
“We can speak up, but the children in my class can’t,” Tara concluded. “As educators and as trade unionists, we’ve got to stand up – not only, for ourselves, but for those who aren’t able to stand up for themselves.”
