By Socialist Alternative members in the National Education Union
Local industrial action taken by NEU members is at an unprecedented level. More and more groups of staff in schools and colleges are withdrawing their labour to address a range of school-related issues. In London, these include falling rolls, squeezed budgets leading to restructures, redundancies, unsustainable workload, Performance Related Pay and more.
On Thursday 27 February, 12 schools were on strike in Lambeth, Haringey, Waltham Forest and Hackney. Rather than battling away alone in silos, the reps and officers in those areas sought to coordinate strike days, linking the issues together showing that they aren’t merely localised problems, but part of the national ‘polycrisis’ gripping education and public services in general.
After picket lines, a mass strike breakfast in the crypt of St Martin’s in the Fields set the tone for the day, before a rally outside of the Department for Education in Westminster took the fight to the national decision makers.
The action was only two days before the opening of the NEU’s national preliminary ballot for strike action, called in response to the government’s suggestion that a 2.8% below inflation pay award should be financed from existing school budgets – meaning further cuts.
The coordination of these disputes comes from work across the union to re-establish a culture of militancy in schools after years of attacks. Action taken during Covid and the 2023 pay strike proved to education workers that they do have industrial weight and therefore potential power.
The union’s requirement to hold an indicative ballot before moving to a formal one, plus the nature of anti-trade union legislation, means that workers cannot afford to exhaust all possible avenues of negotiation before taking action. Instead they want to get to balloting more quickly and use that as leverage in negotiations.
The next steps for the union are to ensure that this level of industrial action is not allowed to fizzle out. It must be consolidated into stronger, democratic union groups in schools who must fight for greater control over what happens in their workplaces.
Coordination needs to be given structure to enable reps and members to easily share resources, communicate with each other and learn from other disputes. These local disputes must also be used as the foundations upon which national campaigns can be built. This can mean turning some local disputes into focal points for the national union to come in behind to fight on.
For example, the threatened closure of St Dominic’s Catholic Primary in Hackney is a harbinger for other schools facing falling rolls and declining income. Mobilising the union across the London region and beyond in support of that dispute is critical for honing the programme and strategy of the union for the coming period.
Starmer’s Labour is intent on continuing the policies of austerity, privatisation and marketisation of the previous Conservative administrations. An equally determined fight, industrially and politically, will be vital to preventing the further degradation of our education system.
This will need to include a strategy of national mobilisation, coordination and escalation both within the NEU, and with other education unions.
