Teacher Strikes: Right Or Wrong?
You can’t fail to be aware of the situation that faced schools in the England last week, whether you’re a teacher or not. The NUT’s promised one-day strike went ahead as planned on Tuesday, and the DfE said that at the last count, 31.6% of English maintained schools had been affected, with 20.3% partially closed, and 11.3% closed fully. Teachers have now made their voices heard loud and clear in the debate over government spending on education, with Conservative policies in 2015 heralding the lowest spending on education since the 1970s, according to theInstitute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). The NUT’s Acting General Secretary Kevin Courtney praised teachers in England for their commitment to the cause, whilst Education Secretary Nicky Morgan condemned the strikes as ‘unnecessary’ and ‘harmful.’
The NUT overwhelmingly passed the motion to strike on 23rd June this year, with 91.7% of members voting in favour. On one estimate, the NUT represents 82% of teachers in England and Wales, so this vote was an extremely strong indication of national feeling.
The NUT’s press release stated that the strikes were in response to ‘huge funding cuts to schools, worsening terms and conditions, and unmanageable and exhausting workloads.’
In the lead up to the 2015 general election, David Cameron promised to ring-fence ‘flat cash per pupil spending’ on education up until 2020. But accounting for inflation, this means a real terms cut to education spending, and according to theIFS the downturn is likely to be between 7% and 8% over the current parliament.
Following pension reforms in the public sector this year, schools are now required to pay higher pension and national insurance contributions per teacher, effectively leading to a 5% rise in the cost per teacher. Maintained schools spend approximately 80% of their budget on teaching staff (75% in academies), so this does essentially mean that money is being channelled away from the classroom, inflation lessens the value of each pound schools get from the government. (In the interests of balance, Labour said in 2015 that if elected they would ‘ensure the whole budget…is protected,’ but there is no indication that this means taking account of inflation either.)
The NUT says that the ‘recruitment and retention crisis in schools will deepen’, since pay and working conditions for teachers are likely to get worse. They say that staff are increasingly being made redundant or not replaced when they leave, leading to larger class sizes, reduced subject provision and, crucially, less attention allocated to individual pupils. Add to this that in academies, pay and working conditions are deregulated (transferred from local authority to the leadership team of a single-school or multi-school trust). This means that in theory headteachers, or sponsors, could force teachers to work evenings and weekends.
Mr Courtney thanked parents for supporting the teachers ‘despite the inconvenience it may have caused.’ He had emphasized in June the effect that budget cuts would have on children, and many teachers have taken to social media to appeal to parents that they are acting in the best interests of pupils.
Teacher, Charlotte Carson posted on Facebook, warning that, among other concerns, the introduction of performance-related-pay would lead to ‘problem’ children being excluded by teachers simply because they might ‘wreck my data and stop my pay rise’ — her post has been shared by more than 33,000 users.
Meanwhile, Nicky Morgan was thoroughgoing in her condemnation of the teachers’ actions. She said that the strike was ‘unnecessary’ and that the NUT was ‘playing politics with children’s futures’.
Mrs Morgan went on to say that the strike would ‘damage the profession’s reputation in the eyes of the public’.
Deborah Lawson wrote in the Daily Telegraph that the strikes were ‘a futile and politically motivated gesture’. Mrs Lawson, who is the general secretary of alternative teacher union Voice, which aims to avoid industrial action, wrote that teacher strikes should not be considered ‘even as a last resort.’
She continued: ‘[Strikes] fail to impact on those responsible for disputed policies but do provide ammunition for politicians and politically motivated commentators eager to portray teachers as militant hardliners who are unwilling to compromise.’
Key concerns of sceptics included disruption to learning and the difficulty of arranging last-minute childcare.
Kevin Courtney emphasised that teachers had considered concerns such as these. He said that teachers ‘do not take strike action lightly,’ but that ‘the problems facing education…are too great to be ignored.’
Mr Courtney apologised ‘wholeheartedly’ to parents for disruption, but said that he believed that many parents shared the NUT’s concerns.
Workers have used strikes as a method of negotiation since the early 19th Century, when trade unions were illegal and groups such as the Tolpuddle martyrs were punished with transportation for forming them. Strike action is now generally seen as a legitimate tool for expression of grievances, and the right to form trade unions is enshrined as law in the European Convention on Human Rights. Some contemporary commentators have argued over whether or not these rights should extend to public sector workers.
Michael Lee of Forbes magazine wrote in 2012 that the Chicago teacher strikes were ‘unacceptable in principle’. He argued that it was wrong for teachers to undertake action which had adverse effects on the poor, such as depriving children of their free school meals, and forcing parents to arrange expensive childcare provision at short notice. But his central point was that strike action in the public sector is action against the government, and therefore (in his mind) against the people.
The Oxford University philosopher Dominic Wilkinson considered the ethical implications of a doctors’ strike in April 2016. He took a more nuanced view than Lee, carefully weighing the need for the public to be protected by people in professions involving a duty of care against the potential vulnerability of public sector professionals if their right to strike were taken away.
It has to be right that professionals on the front line in any sector have their voices heard. In a democratic, thoughtful society, there needs to be a decent amount of consultation with those that are to be affected by major changes in policy, and with those that will have to carry out those changes. There can be no substitute for the expertise which teachers gain from working in the classroom, and the opinions of teachers should not be discounted when considering what works, and what doesn’t, in education. It would be wrong-headed to conclude that teachers are selfishly holding the nation to ransom. These are some of the country’s most dedicated workers, and it’s clear that government policy has taken little account of their concerns in recent years.
In any case, the government is not the same thing as the people — Lee is wrong there — and the present government has a track record of protecting society’s most vulnerable that is concerning enough to warrant a second opinion. (Remember Osborne’s climb-down on his ‘cruel’ tax credit cuts, after the Lords voted against them?) The present rise in pension and national insurance payments coming after real terms funding cuts really is the perfect storm — schools will be squeezed and pupils will suffer. For the sake of children, there needs to be a genuinely two-sided debate here.
Striking is clearly a desperate measure, but if that’s what it takes to ensure proper consultation with teachers on issues like this, then so be it: this right to expression must never be revoked.
Sam Williamson — Teachers Register Contributor
*Based on the 2015 Annual return of the NUT, and the DfE estimate of the number of full-time equivalent teachers in England and in 2014
