The National Education Union (NEU) has voted to “pro-actively seek” disputes with academy trusts to win improved working conditions and “undermine the notion of academy freedoms”.
Delegates at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate argued last week that victories in disputes that put trusts “on the back foot” should be replicated as a “blueprint” to take on larger national MATs.
The NEU has long opposed the academies programme, but the rhetoric ramped up this year in the wake of Labour’s children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which seeks to row back academy freedoms.
The mood was set by the union’s president Sarah Kilpatrick, who used her opening speech to describe the impact of forced academisation on a school she had worked at.
“I saw the joy sucked out of learning and replaced with talk of ‘standards’ and ‘expectations’. Respected, valued colleagues removed from their posts for the audacity of holding an opinion not shared by the central team of the academy trust.
“I wish I could say this was an unusual story, but it’s been repeated in schools, particularly schools in disadvantaged areas, all over the country.”
Chris Denson said the union in Coventry had a “conscious policy” to take on trusts “one at a time” if members had issues with pay and conditions.
“We put serious resource into each of those trusts. We create a dispute. We try to spread it across as many the schools as we can.”
This puts “every one of those trusts on the back foot because they don’t want to be the next one.
“It makes everyone else’s battle easier because they are terrified of being the last one. I think that has to be a blueprint for how we start to take on some of those national MATs.”
‘Targeting individual trusts’
A motion passed at the conference commits the union to “develop an industrial and organising strategy of targeting individual trusts” where conditions fell short of what was required in maintained schools.
Pay and conditions are not always the flashpoint for action. In Birmingham, teachers at George Dixon Primary School have taken more than 48 days of strike action in an attempt to stop the school’s conversion.
“They are the academy terminators,” David Room, a delegate from the city, told the conference.
Anna Scott, from the East Riding of Yorkshire, said the union had had “successful battles locally against academisation, but we need to bring that all together into a national strategy”.
Schools bill ramps up rhetoric
The schools bill will end automatic academisation of failing schools, set minimum pay for academy teachers, make all schools follow the national curriculum and force academies to cooperate with councils on admissions and place planning.
But delegates argued it did not go far enough. A conference motion called for a legal mechanism for schools to return to council oversight, something the education secretary has said she is “open to considering”.
NEU members also want a cap on academy executive pay, with boos in the hall for Harris’s Sir Dan Moynihan, who makes £515,000 a year.
But executive pay was defended by Leora Cruddas, the chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, who said: “Education is a crucial public service and especially large trusts are complex and demanding organisations.
“We should want to attract and reward the best leaders at all levels in schools.”
Ben Gresham, a teacher from Lambeth who previously worked at a school taken on by Harris, said academies had a “negative impact…on everything, but particularly funding.
“In particular top-slicing, division and diversion of resources and the doubling-up of jobs in central services.”
The schools bill “could be a much needed step in the right direction”.
Complaints about councils too
Not all delegates were negative about academies, however.
Bruno Duckworth-Russell, a teacher based in Southampton, said the city’s three main trusts had scrapped performance-related pay and introduced enhanced menopause and maternity rights, while the council “refused point blank”.
“So do not sit here and tell me that in Southampton, my members are better off working for the local authority. Unfortunately, they are not.”
A Southampton council spokesperson said said its policies, including on maternity and menopause, were “in the process of being updated.
“Our approach to performance related pay has been produced in accordance with the school teachers pay and conditions document 2024, published by the Department for Education.”
Meg Powell-Chandler, director of the New Schools Network, said free schools and academies “have been instrumental in raising standards in our education system by focusing on having excellent teachers in the classroom.
“Rather than taking freedoms away from teachers and school leaders and giving control of schools to bureaucrats and politicians through the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, the government should let these schools, and the teachers in them, get on with delivering a fantastic education to their pupils.”
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