The National Education Union’s leadership has threatened to organise a huge protest during the Conservative party conference, accusing Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, of being deluded about teachers’ pay and staff shortages.
The NEU’s joint general secretary Kevin Courtney told delegates at the union’s annual conference: “If you need to, you will organise the biggest demo Manchester has seen for decades on 2 October, you’ll carry on a campaign right into the general election year. And you will win.
“The government is so rattled by our campaign, so rattled that it is reacting foolishly.”
The NEU’s delegates voted for five days of strikes at schools in England during the summer term, as well as holding a new members’ ballot that would authorise further industrial action until the start of 2024.
Pay talks with the government are at an impasse after three teaching unions including the NEU decisively rejected the government’s pay offer, with Keegan responding that negotiations had ended for this year.
Mary Bousted, the NEU’s other joint general secretary, said Keegan was “airily unconcerned” about low pay and staff shortages in schools. “When we show her the evidence of teacher flight from the profession, she dismissed it with a wave of her hand,” she said.
“Gillian, I have to tell you: you are deluded. You are living in a fantasy world. Gillian, you are secretary of state for education – it’s your job to ensure that there are enough teachers and leaders and support staff in our schools.
“It’s your job to make the strongest case to the Treasury that education needs funding so that our schools can recruit and retain teachers and support staff … And it’s your job to make the working lives of teachers and leaders better, so that they are willing to stay in the profession.
“So I say to you, Gillian: do your job.”
Bousted said teacher vacancies in England were far higher than before the start of the Covid pandemic, and a third higher than just a year ago.
She said: “So many schools are running on skeleton staff, unable to recruit. When they advertise for teaching posts there are no candidates applying, losing support staff because they can earn more stacking shelves in a supermarket.”
Bousted also made a plea for school leaders to refuse to work as part-time Ofsted inspectors, since what she called “the untimely and tragic death” of headteacher Ruth Perry after a punitive inspection report.
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“I ask them to stop it. Concentrate on your school. Refuse to be part of an inspection team until we have an inspectorate which commands respect, which supports schools to improve,” Bousted said.
The NEU conference on Wednesday voted for a campaign to abolish Ofsted and replace school inspections and gradings with a more collaborative system.
The conference in Harrogate was the last to be addressed by Bousted and Courtney, who have led the NEU since 2017 when it was formed by the merger of the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.
Students in higher education also face disruption to their end-of-year exams that could potentially delay graduations, after the University and College Union announced its members would boycott marking after Easter.
The UCU general secretary, Jo Grady, told members: “From Thursday 20 April we are asking you to cease undertaking all summative marking and associated assessment activities/duties. The boycott also covers assessment-related work such as exam invigilation and the processing of marks.”