The outgoing leader of the NASUWT has urged Bridget Phillipson to “focus on delivery” and give teachers “hope”, warning that Labour was too negative when it entered office.
Dr Patrick Roach left as general secretary of the teaching union this week after Matt Wrack, the former head of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), was elected unopposed to replace him.
Speaking to Schools Week in Liverpool during his final annual conference last weekend, Roach reflected on a “bruising” 15 years.
He became deputy general secretary weeks after Labour’s defeat in 2010. The union had been close to the Blair and Brown administrations, but the new Conservative-led government was a different beast.
“Fourteen years of pain began. That assault, we’d seen nothing like it,” he recalls, accusing Michael Gove, a former education secretary, of waging “war on the profession”, with deregulation that left teachers and pupils “so cruelly exposed”.
That exposure was demonstrated when Covid 19 struck. Roach became general secretary in April 2020, just a few weeks into lockdown.
“No one had a clue … what to do to keep education going, to keep schools safe, to keep teachers safe, nobody.
“And we had the lies and the misinformation, disinformation about how the virus was spread.”
‘Government must act in the public interest’
The lesson was that government must act “in the public interest, not its own interest”.
“Over the past 15 years, we’ve had 14 years of Tory rule. That’s what has failed. But people need to restore their trust in politics. They need to feel that politicians are on their side, and that’s the same for teachers.”
Hot on the heels of the pandemic came the cost-of-living crisis, followed by the bitter pay dispute of 2023.
A fresh confrontation with government looms. The NASUWT has voted to move to a strike ballot if teachers don’t get a “fully funded” pay rise.
“Our members don’t want to see their pupils suffering or the outcomes for their pupils damaged as a result of action that they take.”
He points out that action short of strikes recently won teachers a funded 5.5 per cent pay rise in Northern Ireland.
“Not a single day of education of pupils was lost as a result.”
‘Focus on delivery’
Of the four education union leaders, Roach has been the most vocally supportive of the new Labour administration.
But he has become more critical. Ministers’ suggestion that teachers should only get a 2.8 per cent pay rise next year and their support for controversial Ofsted reforms has soured the relationship.
In his keynote speech last Friday, Roach savaged the government for its cuts to disability benefits and the winter fuel payment, and its maintenance of the “spiteful” two-child benefit cap.
His parting message for the education secretary? “Focus on delivery. Even if that is relatively modest … you’ve got to focus on beginning to make change – and to show the profession, but also to show the country that change is happening.”
He describes it as a “tactical mistake” for the government, in the first few days and weeks of office, to be “saying that things are going to get worse, and they’re going to get much worse before they get better.
“All that does is destroy hope. People voted for change, to be told ‘it’s just going to be miserable for a long time yet’. So it is incumbent, I think, on ministers … to be positive in the narrative that they’re using.”
Private SEND ‘shaking down the taxpayer’
Quick delivery was especially needed for the “dire crisis” in SEND, he said.
“We’ve got money that’s literally pouring out the system day after day after day to private equity firms that are just basically shaking down the taxpayer.
“The government could do something about that. You could insist on a [profit] cap.”
Roach’s successor is an outspoken critic of Labour, and is likely to build closer ties to his allies in the National Education Union, who crave a merger.
But the NASUWT conference voted last weekend to instruct its ruling executive to “reiterate publicly that there is no desire by NASUWT to consider any union amalgamation or merger”.
Roach said the union’s position was clear … “we have no desire to be merging or amalgamating with anybody”.
While many union leaders serve multiple terms (Wrack led the FBU for 20 years), Roach surprised many when he announced last year he would stand down after just one.
“It has been a bruising 15 years,” he said. “That’s enough for anybody.”
Your thoughts