Labour tries to have its cake and eat it too with arms-length approach to NEU

The NEU has been holding their annual conference in Harrogate this week, with the big story thus far being that Britain’s largest education union has voted overwhelmingly to reject the government’s latest pay offer, a decision that charts the course for further industrial action. Neatly illustrating why teachers feel the need to take action is a survey out today, conducted by the union, which has found that one in three young teachers are skipping meals to make ends meet and one in five have had to take on a second job. More than one in ten do not expect to work in education in ten years’ time.

Commenting on the results of the survey, Bridget Phillipson said: “These findings are further confirmation that teachers have been overworked, overstretched and undervalued, pushed to the brink by 13 years of Conservative neglect of our children’s education.” The Shadow Education Secretary continued: “As a result, thousands of both experienced and newly recruited teachers are leaving classrooms in their droves, while too few new teachers are coming in to replace them – and our children’s education is paying the price.” Mary Bousted said the survey “confirms the reach of the cost-of-living crisis on working people”. The NEU joint general secretary added: “It is worrying that teachers and support staff, who already have heavy workloads in their main job, are unable to make ends meet.”

The NEU is not affiliated to the Labour party and Phillipson has not been in attendance in Harrogate, opting instead to attend the conference (also happening this week) of the smaller teaching union NASUWT, who are also non-affiliated and who, having failed to hit the threshold for industrial action in a ballot that concluded in January, have not been striking. Phillipson’s decision to attend the conference of a non-striking teaching union has prompted criticism from some, with an NEU source telling Sky News: “The Shadow Education Secretary is happy to engage with teachers as long as they’re not on strike or opposing her policies. What kind of message does it send to educators if the Shadow Education Secretary is directly avoiding them?” A spokesperson for the union struck a notably different chord, saying: “Bridget Phillipson was welcome to attend this year’s NEU annual conference. The NEU also understands that with time constraints on the Shadow Education Secretary’s diary a mutually acceptable decision to attend the NASUWT conference who they did not have time for last year was made.”

The crisis in Britain’s schools, which are haemorrhaging teachers and in the most literal sense of the phrase falling apart, is a story that very much fits with Labour’s broken-Tory-Britain narrative. However, Labour’s arms-length approach to striking teachers (which sees conditions creating strikes condemned, while strikes themselves are not explicitly supported) illustrates a slightly have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach to industrial action in the public sector from a shadow cabinet that would seem to be seeking to reap the political rewards of criticising the government without the potential hazard of publicly backing industrial action.

The party’s proposed fix for the crisis in schools is a recruitment drive to bring in thousands of new teachers and fill vacancies, bringing schools up to capacity and bringing down workloads – often cited as a key reason for the teaching profession’s staff retention issues – that will be funded by the money raised by Labour’s proposal to end the tax breaks for private schools.