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This week the National Education Union announced that 300,000 of its members in Wales and England had voted overwhelmingly for strike action over pay. 

Facing huge workloads, falling pay and underfunding of schools, teachers and support staff have had enough. They are now set to strike on February 1st, alongside hundreds of thousands of other workers. Ka Long Tung spoke to workers about why their fight is crucial for the future of education.  

By Ka Long Tung. Cover image by Ka Long Tung *

It is a Saturday afternoon, and Sophie Toovey is on her laptop in a café preparing for lessons the week ahead. Often she works on a Sunday as well, even though, officially, she is only supposed to work during the week.

But this has become a normal routine for Sophie, an English teacher in Torfaen who has been working in education for 15 years. 

She works from 7:30am to 4:30pm every day, and continues well into the evening with marking and preparing for the six classes she teaches when she gets back home. 

Considering the hours that she also puts in during the weekend, Sophie estimates that her working week is regularly in excess of 60 hours. 

In some people’s minds, being a teacher is a well-paid job despite the fact that the starting salary in Wales is just over £27,000. With the current rate of inflation, it’s a wage that won’t get you very far at all. 

This, combined with a huge workload, is leading to more and more workers worrying about their future and leaving the profession. 

Research for 2019-20 showed that a third of new teachers who taught in primary schools left after only two years service. For secondary schools, the drop off rate was 23%.

According to a survey by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), 73% of teachers said they had seriously considered leaving the profession over the past 12 months.

“I’ve seen a handful of people move sideways,” says Sophie when we met over a coffee in Cwmbran. “For example, I know someone’s now going to work for a solar energy company, doing school visits and things like that. So I’d say I’ve known quite a few people do things like that.”

“I knew another biology teacher who basically took a job working for a nature reserve,” she continues. “So again, she would run all the schools’ visits, and she was like, ‘it’s all the best parts of teaching without any of the worst parts.’”

Underlying all this, teachers’ unions point to an historic pay cut that has taken place over the past decade, as several under-inflation pay rises and pay freezes have been forced upon workers year after year.

As workers across the country face punishing price rises, the government-proposed 5% pay rise for teachers doesn’t even meet inflation halfway. As a result, teachers are joining workers in other sectors who are taking strike action against a government that is determined to keep pay low. 

On Monday, The National Education Union (NEU),  which has more than 450,000 members in Wales and England, announced that its members had voted overwhelmingly to walk out from February 1st. 

Here in Wales, 92.28% of teachers voted in favour of strike action on a 58.07% turnout  and 88.26% of support staff voted to walkout with a turnout of 51.30%. 

Speaking as the results came out, Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary for the NEU, said that teachers are determined to make a change and described the result as “the biggest ballot result of any union in recent times”.

“I think a lot of people are feeling now that the government doesn’t appreciate the work that teachers do,” Sophie says, explaining the mood amongst her colleagues.

The first strike day will be 1st February with teachers from both England and Wales walking out alongside over 100,000 civil servants in the PCS union, train drivers in the RMT union and 70,000 university workers in the UCU. The action – which is also being organised by the TUC in opposition to new anti-union laws – will represent one of the biggest joint strikes in recent times,  as workers push back against an historic attack on their living standards. 

Following February 1st, teachers in NEU Cymru will also walk out on February 14th, and on March 15th and 16th, a two-day strike of all schools in England and Wales will be held. 

In Scotland, teachers began striking last November and last week, The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) announced a further 22 strike days in March and April.

“Teachers are walking away when they are left to pick up the pieces.”

The National Education Union (NEU), where Sophie is a rep, demands a “fully funded, above-inflation” pay rise while the NASUWT, another major teaching union, is calling for a “fully-funded real-teams” pay award of 12%.

The NASUWT, which has 300,000 members across England, Scotland and Wales, ended their ballot on 9 January.

However, even though 95% of its members voted to support strike over pay, the union failed to meet the 50% turnout threshold required in law since 2016. 

Craig Jenkins, a teacher in Newport for 13 years who is a rep for NASUWT, says a decent pay rise is essential for nurturing the next generation of teachers.

“We’re arguing for the restorative pay award which kind of restores us to where we would be if there wasn’t an erosion. So it will recognise the hard job that we played over the pandemic, where we’ve had to go to teach in a totally different way.”

On top of this, he says that a pay rise that protects the living standards of teachers also serves the long-term quality of the education system.

According to the Welsh Schools’ census, there were 7.5% of infant classes (classes for four to seven-year-old pupils) of over 30 pupils in April 2021. In total, there were 7,617 students in these larger classes.

Throughout the past few years, there has also been an increase in the number of pupils in Wales, but the number of full-time teachers has not increased as rapidly.

In 2017, the number of students was 451,844. It s then increased to 459,851 in 2021. In comparison, the number of full-time qualified teachers was 23,910 in 2017. In 2021, the number increased only by 31 across the whole of Wales, to 23,941 teachers, in total.

Sophie says she has heard stories about staff shortages in several schools in Torfaen.

“In a primary school, you may only have seven teachers. They’re a lot smaller than secondaries. So there are fewer people to divide the share-out.”

Staff shortages can also impact the ability to teach specialist subjects. 

“If you can’t get a science teacher, then, for example, for insurance purposes, you can’t have a non-specialist teacher doing experiments,” says Sophie. “So those children in that class, they’re not going to get an experience of a science teacher where they do experiments, it’s never as good.”

These things may seem minor, but gradually they chip away at children’s right to an education. 

In some schools, this also manifests itself in the swapping of roles due to staffing issues. Sophie explains that at key points in the year, such as flu season, there are not enough supply staff available. This may result in pastoral staff covering lessons, which takes them away from helping pupils who need additional support.

“So that has a big effect, actually, on how the school runs, because people are not doing the job they’re paid to do, they’re doing another job instead.”

Sophie describes how schools have been “underfunded” over the years and that  “many of them [teachers] are walking away when they are left to pick up the pieces of staffing shortages and lack of resources”.

The demand for a pay rise that is ‘fully-funded’ from  the government in acknowledgement that schools themselves cannot afford to raise pay because they have been plunged into a  budgetary crisis due to years of cuts. 

“As zero-hours contractors, we can very easily withdraw our labour.”

A common way for schools to fill the teaching responsibility is to deploy supply teachers. They might be employed by the local council, by the school directly or through an agency.

From March 2020-21, there were 4,222 supply teachers and most of them (76.6% or 3,232) were employed through an agency in Wales.

These workers have even been seen as a reserve army of strike-breaking labour. 

In June, Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory Education Secretary under Boris Johnson, said that a teachers’ strike would be “unforgivable” and officials had plans for an army of supply teachers to keep schools open.

The plan, however, might not be feasible. Naill James Bradley, a chair of a supply teacher network of 2,700 members mainly in England and Wales, ran a poll of more than 300 supply teachers, and it turned out that 92% said that they would not cross the picket line.

“We can’t strike, but as zero-hours contractors, we can very easily withdraw our labour. We just say we’re not available that day. So, when there’s a strike day, we can say we’re not going to go in,” Nail told voice.wales before the ballots in England and Wales ended.

“Most supply teachers have been full-time teachers, maybe full-time teachers in the future. The newly qualified teachers, or those people who go into supply while they’re having young kids, and then go back to permanent, so it will affect us,” says Nail.

In practice, pay for some supply teachers directly links to that for full-time teachers. Supply teachers who are employed by a local authority or by a school should be paid in accordance with the pay scales that apply to other teachers under the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD).

However, those who are employed by agencies do not have this guarantee as their pay is determined by the agencies. The network has demanded regulations against agencies, another major issue.

Other than teachers, support staff in school such as teaching assistants, catering staff, cleaners, receptionists and crossing patrol officers could  feel even more aggrieved about pay relative to inflation. For these workers, their pay can be as low as £18,333 per annum. Or put it another way, the minimum wage. 

These essential workers often have to supplement their income with second jobs even though they are working all day in school. On top of this, unlike teachers, they don’t get paid for school holidays. However, their pay is set with local government workers and negotiated separately from teachers. For many, immediate strike action is not on the cards after support staff unions accepted a £1950 flat rate pay rise last year. 

However, the NEU also balloted their members who are support staff, even though the union is not involved in the local government pay negotiations – which decide support staff pay. 

Nevertheless, they are set to take industrial action alongside teachers in Wales after 88.26% of support staff voted in favour of striking in a ballot turnout of 51.30%. 

Support staff in England, however, didn’t get enough votes to meet the threshold. Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary for the NEU, said that the union will continue to demand improvement for them even though they will not strike. “We will not forget you.”

Strike action by teachers is highly effective, as hundreds of thousands of other workers cannot send their children to school and it has a huge impact. 

However, despite government attacks on teachers preparing to strike, a poll by You Gov revealed that a majority of people (51% to 41%) backed the industrial action. 

Sophie says that if the demand for a decent pay rise is achieved, it’s beneficial to education as a whole. 

“If we just let the government continue to only raise the pay by 5%, underfunded schools, if we continue to let that happen, what’s going to happen is a very detrimental effect on students’ long term.”

“Ultimately, if it would stop people leaving the profession and thinking about leaving the profession, then that continuity of having one teacher there with them (students), it’s going to benefit the student,” says Craig.

“I’ve been in the job of my school for 13 years. And I know the students really well. I know the brothers and sisters of our students really well. It just gives you a kind of closer relationship with those students.”

After failing to get the 50% turnout required, Craig says that the National Executive of NASUWT is considering plans to further ballot members. 

He says the union is continuing to campaign for the repeal of “anti-trade union laws”. 

“In the meantime, we are continuing to do whatever it takes to secure a better pay deal for teachers.”

On the other hand, Sophie is motivated by the NEU’s ballot result. “I feel very proud that so many teachers are making their voices heard,” she says.

“I think the government will be feeling the pressure to come to the negotiating table, and I’m optimistic that we will achieve a better offer than the current 5%.”

*The cover photo used is an illustration of a state school typical of those referred to in the article. It does not refer to a specific school mentioned.