Class Dismissed: Against The State of Education

Notes From Below (Issue #26)

Spring 2026

Education is no longer fulfilling the role historically assigned to it by the state. Increasingly, schools and universities fail to supply the capitalist economy with labour-power that meets its technical and ideological requirements. This mirrors trends across the wider public sector. Austerity and decline are not only the industrial-relations terrain of workers but also formative experiences for students moving through the British education system, from early years through to adult learners. There are many issues to fight over in the here and now. As this issue demonstrates, we also need to develop an alternative vision of education. This can only emerge from workers and students embedded in collective struggle within the sector.

Notes from Below

Issue 26

Spring 2026

Editors
Jamie Woodcock

Callum Cant
Lydia Hughes
Wendy Liu
Sai Englert
Matthew
Dante Philp
George Briley
Roberto Mozzachiodi

Website

Wendy Liu

Cover design and layout

Bella Harter

www.notesfrombelow.org
editors@notesfrombelow.org

ISSN 2631-9284 (Online)

ISBN 978-1-0683586-3-0

About Notes from Below

Notes from Below is a socialist journal written for and by workplace militants. We believe that when workers come together to fight for their own interests they don’t just improve their conditions at work, but initiate a confrontation between workers and bosses that can only be finally resolved by a revolutionary transformation of society. The journal aims to actively contribute to that struggle of the working class against capitalism: an economic system that exploits us to make the rich richer and is willing to drive us toward total ecological collapse in order to do it.

We use the tools of workers’ inquiry and class composition.

Workers’ Inquiry is the study of work from the workers’ point of view. The goal of inquiry is to understand our work better so that we can fight against our bosses and advance the wider fight against the capitalist economic system.

Class composition is a theory that allows us to analyse how the working class is organised at this specific point in time by looking at three key factors: the technical, social and political composition of the class. Technical composition is the organisation of lots of individual workers into a working class through the network of connections and relations that make up the whole economy. It is shaped by factors like how we produce value for our bosses, the technology we work with, how we are managed, and how our work fits into the work of other people. Social composition is the organisation of workers into a class About Notes From Below 2 outside the workplace, in our homes and communities. This is diverse and complicated, shaped by factors ranging from the kind of housing we live in, how we get to work, migration status, relationship to the state, how we buy our food, and more. Political composition is a bit different, because we shape it: it describes the ways in which we organise ourselves into a force that can take part in class struggle. It includes everything from the tactics we use in strikes, the kinds of unions we are part of, and the political parties we support (or don’t). We think that when we analyse all three of these factors together, then we get a better understanding of how militant workers can intervene in wider social processes to try and accelerate the fight against a capitalist system that is based on our exploitation.

This journal focuses on work for two reasons. First, because it shapes our experience of daily life: the working class reproduces the system every day because we provide services and manufacture goods that society could not function without, and yet the system doesn’t work in our interests. This experience of exploitation defines the working class viewpoint. Second, because work is the place where we have the greatest leverage over our enemies. The bosses and politicians don’t care what we think, but they do care if we don’t do the work that keeps reproducing the system. Work is the place where workers feel like we can turn to our boss and say “I am nothing, but I should be everything.”

Want to read more on workers’ inquiry and class composition? Read The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition  on notesfrombelow.org , available also in Italian, Spanish and French.

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Contents

Editorial: 'But they struck in sympathy'

Notes From Below

Situating the Work of Education

Jack and Tom

Reflections on a Nursery Strike

Jo

Day in the Life Working in the Factory School

Eleanor Davies

Fighting for our class: Working and Organising in Further Education

A former FE worker

A Right to Language? Working in Deaf Education

An Anonymous SEN worker

Challenging the State: Building a Rank and File in Higher Education

Rank-and-file university workers

Turning the Tide: Organising Against Militarism in Schools

Disarm Education

‘A Lesson in Class Struggle’: Working in a South London School

Matthew

UCORE: School Struggle and Strikes in the US

Ellen David Friedman

Editorial: ‘But they struck in sympathy’

Notes from Below

Introduction

On 1 April 1914, the seventy-two students at Burston School in Norfolk who arrived at school that day discovered their two teachers had been sacked. After supporting the organising drives amongst the many agricultural labourers who lived in the village, Kitty and Tom Higdon had been victimised by the local landowners who controlled the school management body. In the “finest, spontaneous, and most loving act of kindness” towards their teachers, sixty-six of these students walked out in protest. Marching through the streets of this village, singing songs of rebellion, they made their way to the village green, where they refused to go back to school.

This was not a random anomaly, but a result of the teachers’ approach to schooling. As one account of the events recalled: “ Children know when they are loved.  They cannot pretend as grown-ups can.  Had Higdon and his wife been disciples of Whackford Squeers or advocates of the ‘Big Stick’, the children would gladly have sung Tosti’s ‘Good-bye for ever,’ and good shuttance.  But they struck in sympathy. ” [1]  

An alternative school with the sacked Kitty and Tom Higdon  was set up on the green. Local workers raised collections to cover the fines imposed on parents whose children attended the strike school and refused to return to that assigned by the council. The “Burston Strike School” was born and would continue for over 25 years.

In this issue of Notes from Below, we focus on the education sector. Education is a sector we know well as editors. Most of us currently work in the sector. We have an array of experience working with and organising different workforces across secondary and higher education, including casualised academics, outsourced cleaners and security guards, and low-paid teaching assistants.

It is also a sector we have published many workers’ inquiries  from before: during the pandemic we conducted a collective workers’ inquiry into the sector that formed the education chapter  of our Class Composition Project ; during the massive 2023 national school strikes, we helped co-ordinate the workplace bulletin ‘ Marked Absent ’; we have published our reflections on university struggles in our long-lasting ‘ University Worker’ bulletin ; and two years ago we produced a collection of worker-writing on the recent  upsurge in labour organising in higher education  in Britain and the US.

However, there are areas of the education sector noticeably absent from these past publications, such as nurseries, Special Educational Needs (SEN) education, adult education and support staff. These are areas most overlooked by the traditional labour movement in education, but also the areas where perhaps some of the most interesting rank-and-file organising is happening.

Across this issue, we have aimed to cover as much of the education sector as possible, from cradle to grave, enveloping the wide variety of roles that make up the sector. As well as the workers’ inquiries that make up this issue, we had also hoped to publish reflections from school students. Within the sector, they are increasingly subject to violence and authoritarianism, but also responding in kind in their own resistance and organisation, with student walkouts for the climate and Palestine, as well as organising against racism and exclusions within schools. Sadly, our attempts to produce such an inquiry within the issue’s timeframe failed to bear fruit - but we aim to make it happen in the future so that we can hear from this vital section of the education sector.

We are interested in hearing from workers in this sector, not for the sake of producing a labour movement able to win a few more pennies on the pound and better conditions for a certain strata of workers within society. We recognise the central role the sector plays within capitalism, and the political power an organised working-class within it could play in a revolutionary transformation of society. As exemplified by the rank-and-file workers writing for the ‘Disarm Education’ campaign in this issue, the self-organisation of education workers can and does have implications far beyond the schools walls - from El Fasher to Rafah, they have deep and urgent consequences.

A Brief History of Education Unions

Part of understanding our contemporary moment is understanding our history. The first trade union for teachers was formed in 1870 after a meeting of around one-hundred teachers at Kings College London. Earlier the same year, the government had passed the 'Elementary Education Act' after a campaign by the National Education League, who fought for primary education free from religious influence. This act set a common framework for the schooling of children, established local education authorities and provided public funding to improve the provision of schools. With teachers' conditions now bound by a more common framework, and influenced more than ever by the state, a trade union was deemed necessary by teachers to promote their interests. The 'National Union of Elementary Teachers' (later shortened to NUT) was formed. [2]

Whilst attempts to work in partnership with the Department of Education characterised the early years of the union, its officials faced increased resistance to negotiation with union representatives as well as pressure from the rank-and-file to act on issues such as ‘payment by results’. [3]  This pressure eventually led to an union campaign for a national salary scale, which was won in 1919, with NUT representatives given the right to sit on the committees setting these scales. However, teachers in local authorities across the country often had to fight to have these agreements enforced, such as in Lowestoft in 1923, when over 160 teachers went on strike against the local authority for almost a year. Influenced by the nearby Burston Strike School, they set up alternative schools which educated over 1,300 children for much of the duration of the strike. [4]  

However, frustration by various members within the union over its attitudes to various topics continued. A pressure group within the union, called the National Federation of Women Teachers,  became increasingly exasperated that after many years of campaigning for the NUT to take up the policy of equal pay for teachers, no serious bargaining on this issue was being undertaken by officials with the government. They split off in 1920 to become the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT). Peaking at 8,500 members in the mid-1920s, the union struggled to recruit a mass membership, but continued to fight, working in tandem with the broader feminist movement. [5]  When victory finally came in 1961, with equal pay won for teachers, the union dissolved, having achieved its mission.

Contrasting this, however, was another  pressure group within the NUT formed in opposition to equal pay for women teachers. These members were expelled in 1922, forming the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS) in the aftermath. NAS ran chauvinistic campaigns for the ‘interests’ of male teachers, including against the presence of women headmasters and for children below a certain age to be solely taught by men. They refused admittance for women all the way up until 1976, when the Sex Discrimination Act finally forced them to accept members of all genders, and they merged with their tiny sister union to form NASUWT.

In the early years of the 20th Century, university staff would join their teacher colleagues in unionising. From 1909, junior and assistant lecturers began to campaign against what they saw as low pay and poor advancement prospects. A grouping around zoology lecturer Douglas Laure at Liverpool University formed a discussion circle for junior academic staff, which slowly grew to become a campaign group encompassing other university workforces. It formally anointed itself as the Association of University Teachers (AUT) at a conference in 1919. The union was initially defined by its implicit exclusion of professorial staff, although these would soon also be integrated into the union. College and technical institution teaching staff had similarly formed the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions (ATTI) in 1904, which would later become NATFHE, encompassing staff mostly in further education colleges and post-92 universities.

Whilst forming unions early on in the sector’s history, these unions were characterised by their professional nature, and national strikes were few and far between. Industrial workers, rightly or wrongly, were frequently less than keen to consider these staff part of the ‘labour movement’ proper, with those feelings often mirrored by education workers themselves, who could often see themselves as a class above: for instance, it took the NUT over a century to affiliate to the TUC, not joining until 1973.

As the years continued on, this situation changed. Falling working conditions and the absorption of a new generation of more militant teachers, shaped by the struggles of the 1960s, set in motion a change in pace for the sector’s workforce. In November 1969, rank-and-file members of the NUT voted down their latest pay offer, despite pleas from their union executive to accept it. What followed over the next few months was the first of a series of coordinated strikes by both the NUT and the NAS. [6]  Rolling strikes encompassing various different local authorities were organised, culminating in an indefinite strike of teachers in Birmingham, Southwark and Waltham Forest. Eventually, an additional £120 increase - over double what was originally proposed to the teachers - was offered by the government. [7]  

For many teachers, the argument had been won. More militant action won results. Going forward, a more strike-prone approach was taken by the unions. The NUT gained a reputation for militancy, taking part in national and local strike action, including a London weighting strike between 1972-74, initiated by a cross-section of London NUT branches. A rank-and-file network based around the publication ‘Rank and File Teacher’ grew, encompassing up to 5,000 members at its peak in the mid-1970s. [8]  This rising militancy was paired in the student population, with the School Action Union formed and mass student strikes against corporal punishment in 1972.

In the same period, the ‘Cleaners Action Group’ was formed by May Hobbs, who had been blacklisted after organising her job as a nightcleaner at an art school in Cockfosters. [9]  Working with the women's liberation movement, the group helped unionise cleaners across the country, with local campaigns at various educational institutes, including the University of Lancaster. [10]  In schools, groups of organised cleaners also emerged within NUPE, the public services union, in areas such as Somerset. [11]  

A decade later, the women’s liberation movement also helped birth one of the largest nursery worker strikes in British history. In 1984, over 150 nursery workers employed by Islington Council began an indefinite strike against chronic understaffing, despite promises made by a new local socialist Labour administration during their election campaign to make sweeping improvements to nurseries. These workers - almost entirely young women - were motivated to organise not just by their own working conditions, but to improve the conditions of the children they cared for. Their strike would run for fifteen weeks until finally the Council yielded to their demands. [12]

Meanwhile, teachers’ strike action peaked in the mid-1980s with two years of national strikes. However, in the same period, membership of the NUT and NASUWT fell, the former by almost a third. The proliferation of various unions in the sector meant less militant workers could decamp to other unions, such as the ATL, whilst a more hardened core remained. In the face of this fragmentation and waning public support, despite union opposition, Thatcher’s hard-right government was able to introduce a series of ‘reforms’, such as mandatory testing and a national curriculum, which weakened educator autonomy.

Throughout the decades that followed, a significant militant core of the workforce remained fighting - including the teachers who pinned Labour’s Education spokesperson David Blunkett in an office at the 1995 NUT conference after he gave an anti-union speech - with local, regional and national strikes in the sector, mostly by the NUT and then NASUWT. National strikes often consisted of singular days of action, whilst local actions tended to be longer. With the introduction of academisation by the Blair government, and accelerated after the election of the Coalition government in 2010, a series of hard fought local strikes against academisation would come to define the sector - continuing to this very day. In Lewisham and Glasgow, parents mirrored these actions with the occupations of schools and nurseries threatened with closure.

In more recent years these unions have had the tendency to merge. The AUT and NATFHE merged to form UCU in 2006, during the middle of a national assessment boycott that, combined with threats of additional strike action by thousands of cleaners and support staff, led to an increased pay offer for university workers. In 2017, the NUT and the ATL also merged to form the NEU, now the largest education union in Europe. Particularly exciting in this development was the opening up of the NEU to all workers in the education sector - meaning for the first time, an education union intended to be organised - at least in theory - along industrial rather than craft lines.

Waves of national university and further education strikes have continued since 2018, with an increasing number of local disputes - unfortunately most often around redundancies. During the same period, an increasing series of strikes by outsourced workers have taken place across universities, sometimes through more militant TUC union branches, but with grassroots ‘base unions’ such as IWGB, or even workers themselves without any union, leading the way in these struggles. These recent struggles have been widely documented by Notes from Below. Within primary and secondary education, however, only one national strike has taken place since the formation of the NEU in 2017, during the 2023 strike wave.

The role of the education system, and the workers within it, has adapted over time, but these changes have not solely been imposed from above. They have also been shaped by the workers in the sector and the struggles they have undertaken. The historic fights against sexism, casualisation and sectarianism recounted here are also not only things of the past: as various pieces in this issue show, they continue to plague us today.

Continuing efforts by the leadership of UNISON, Unite and GMB to censure NEU for organising support staff shows the scale of sectarianism that rank-and-file education workers need to challenge in the sector. This sectarianism can persist within the rank-and-file too, but often more common is a fragmentation of organised workers between unions. The day schools described by rank-and-file university workers and ‘UCORE’ network by Ellen David Friedman in this issue present two models attempting to address this situation from the bottom up.

The accounts in ‘Reflections on a Nursery Strike’ and ‘Fighting for our class’ exemplify how sexism and sexual harassment in a largely feminised sector continue to be immense issues, that have to be confronted head on if the working-class wishes to grow its power in education.

Similarly, the demands and agency of casualised workers, at the undoing of the wider labour movement, continue to often be ignored. As the pieces from workers in d/Deaf, further and higher education show, there is a strong desire from many casualised workers to organise. With effort this is not only possible, but can be transformative for our struggles.

Our task then is to understand the role of education within contemporary society, the present-day manifestations of issues that have long afflicted our movement within the sector, and how we may overcome them within and for our struggles today.

The Role of the Education Sector

Investment in education offers a key vantage point to view how a political economic system projects a vision of itself into the future. The inquiries in this issue, alongside their immediate insights into current class composition, can also be read as a bellwether for the relationship British capital intends to have with its growing crop of labour power (children and untrained adult learners). With this in mind, the declineism that runs throughout the issue should give us pause. Beyond the rhetoric, the era of “education, education, education” is not coming back. Austerity and decline is not just the industrial relations terrain of workers, but the formative experience of students moving through the British education system, from early years up to adult learners.  

The role the system once played under contemporary British capitalism is changing. An evaporation of state-led industrial strategy has resulted in education becoming increasingly less influential in class stratification or the training of future workers. Understanding the function of education workers therefore requires more nuance.

Firstly, education workers’ role is to produce the skills necessary to produce the next generation of workers required by capital. This includes more basic skills, - such as literacy, numeracy and motor skills - as well as more stratified, higher level of skills to (supposedly) meet the various needs of the capitalist economy and maintain the class system. The exact ways that education further sorts and allocates students into the job market has been argued by many different educationalists, academics and political radicals. However, at a base level, education in our society aims to equip a wide array of the population with the skills necessary to continue the production of profit and reproduction of a system that allows for that.

In a mainstream education, these skills are transmitted using disciplinary authority. Forms of punishment and reward are used to repress behaviours which disrupt the aims of pedagogical instruction. As such, capitalist schooling transmits knowledge through forms of behavioural control. Therefore, even for a system that may wish to reduce the cost of reproduction of the working-class to as little as possible, it is undesirable for students to leave education without having acquired basic skills, behavioural norms and, for various strata, more specialist skills.

Secondly, it is obvious a large section of the education workforce’s jobs - notably in primary and secondary education - revolve around the management of a population legally safeguarded from work due to their age, and therefore allowing their full-time carers to attend to work. This is made clear from the particular leverage school workers hold when they go on strike: in theory, if schools can’t open, children can’t go to school, and therefore parents have to make alternative arrangements, otherwise they cannot go to work. Without schools then, and in particular nurseries and primary schools, capital would either struggle to exploit labour for profit, or the dominant culture and law around childcare would have to drastically change. [13]  

The increased authoritarianism within contemporary educational institutions, highlighted in both ‘A Lesson in Class Struggle’ and ‘Situating the Work of Education’, draws attention to how these two roles are aligning within an austerity state. As is made clear through the various workers’ inquiries in this issue, much of the school day is now focused not on learning, but rather on ‘regulating behaviour’. This points to both a decline in the resourcing of schools by the state, as well as the wider role disciplining is seen to play in the production of the next generation of workers.

The never-ending audit culture of contemporary education, through OFSTED, Office for Students and other regulatory bodies and frameworks, has played an important role in remodelling educational quality around quantitative metrics. This has been compounded by increasing student numbers, many with complex needs, with an ever decreasing ratio of staff. Yet, in the long-term, this is also an attempt by the state to mitigate how these future workers will respond to the violence inflicted on them by the capitalist economy: ‘stop running’, ‘stop talking’, ‘if you miss class you will be sanctioned’. Whether as exploited workers, or part of the reserve army of labour whose access to reproduction is mediated through the ability to access state welfare, debt and/or ‘illegal’ activity, instilling this behaviour has value to the ruling class.

However, just because these are the roles that education plays in the capitalist organisation of society, doesn’t mean the state or capitalist class work together to do so efficiently. In many cases, these ambitions are defaced both by companies attempting to profit from education - such as outsourcing companies - and by a state ideologically committed to defunding public services. As an anonymous contributor to this issue describes the logic to various cuts in further education: “this is an approach akin to not putting oil in your car because it's running ok so far”.

These dynamics are further complicated by the proliferation of academy chains in publicly funded education, that often seek to meet the reproductive requirements whilst also profiting from the production and sale of curriculums, lesson resources and other ‘educational’ commodities. In this sense, they are already failing to provide the basic resources needed to ensure as many students as possible leave schools with the fundamental skills they require to join the job market. Here, we see private capital in certain industries step in to boost their own agenda. In their article, Disarm Education gives the example of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, home to a high concentration of arms industry jobs and where BAE employees sit on a number of governing boards, even ‘sponsoring’ certain schools, in an attempt to ensure a sufficient flow of trained, new workers into their industry.

Ironic also is how the increasing hyper-authoritarian trend in education doesn’t necessarily create more disciplined populations of new or current workers. On the contrary, in recent years, students have seemingly responded to this increasing daily repression with protests and school walkouts, including the widespread trend of “school riots” that spread through TikTok . In these, students would leave classes en masse and partake in various acts of disorderly behaviour, such as climbing up school buildings, releasing fire extinguishers, or chucking around school furniture. Whilst these ‘riots’ were presented in the media as random acts of rebellion, many were underpinned by overt expressions of discontent over particular behavioural policies. On the other hand, excessive restructures, cuts and disciplinary action seems to be the driving force for collective action by many local workforces against their employers.

If we see the building of our own Burston Strike Schools today as desirable, then these forms of resistance within the education sector must be joined up with to fight against the repressive and exploitative manoeuvrings of senior management and the State. [14]  This could take the form of joint struggles against repressive measures, such as the shouting that is commonly used to discipline both school workers and students. More generally, the refusal of students to be taught in a certain way could be linked up with the refusal of school workers to teach in a certain way. New, socialised forms of pedagogy could emerge from that refusal.

Education and Revolution?

So, what are we aiming for when we say that the education sector needs to change? As the articles in this issue demonstrate, education is no longer fulfilling the role historically assigned to it by the state. Increasingly, schools and universities fail to supply the capitalist economy with labour-power that meets its technical and ideological requirements. This mirrors trends across the wider public sector.

Under neoliberalism, the state and its various organs have been reorganised along market lines, on the assumption that the profit motive will render public services more efficient and effective. In practice, the marketisation of the public sector has in fact undermined the capacity of the bourgeois state to meet its basic obligation of managing capitalist growth. In education, this has meant that essential pedagogical and ideological functions are constantly frustrated by a proliferation of structural barriers. As a consequence, youth and graduate unemployment is an increasingly large part of what the education system produces. [15]  

These crises within education are themselves bound by the long-term stagnation of the British economy. Global conditions of declining profitability paired with low state investment positions education as stuck within a self-reinforcing feedback loop of collapse; a directionless apparatus of discipline for all but those who might play a role in the sectors the state has determined as capable of growth and productivity (and so is willing to invest in). Where the state might intervene in education to help resolve more immediate labour shortages in vocational trades and services, from electricians to careworkers, a reliance on outsourced labour or overseas hiring appears preferable: both as a profitable enterprise for intermediary firms in control of hiring and employment, and in producing an hyper-exploitable class of workers who face additional challenges in organising.

In this scenario, there’s a risk of assuming that the only alternative to marketisation is an education system reintegrated into a Keynesian state. But is this really the extent of our political vision for the future of education? Are we only able to imagine transformation in terms of rebuilding the link between what education does and the needs of capital? We all want the best for our pupils and students, but we should be under no illusions about what educational success means in a capitalist society. Primarily, it equates to preparing learners for positions within a system of exploitation. In the best cases, students might come to appreciate learning for its own sake, developing intellectual autonomy and curiosity that will help them navigate this system. But even here, when education is idealised as the route to individual  enlightenment, the question of education’s function in reproducing class  relations is ultimately overlooked. How then to imagine a politics of schooling which confronts the role that education always already plays in class struggle?

This is a broad and demanding question, and satisfactory answers will only emerge from workers and students embedded in collective struggle within the sector. But it is a question that communists should be prepared to address, since every revolution requires an organised system of education capable of meeting its scientific, ideological, and cultural needs. For this reason, we need alternative visions of educational organisation  on which to draw.

One such vision can be found in Vittorio De Sica’s 1973 mini-series Diario di un maestro  (a lesser known gem of workerist cultural production). Set in the proletarian district of Tiburtino on the outskirts of Rome, the series follows a teacher, recently politicised through his experiences at university in 1970s Italy, as he takes up an entry-level post at a local school. Relegated to overseeing a class of ‘no hopes’ (sons of the region's historic lumpen and working classes), the teacher develops an approach to engaging the young boys which is strongly marked by the politics of inquiry.

At the beginning of the second episode, the boys witness the demolition of local slums. This encounter with encroaching alien forces becomes the starting point for a collective research project into the situation of the classroom. ‘Where and how do we live?’ is the question which drives a series of inquiries into their concrete living conditions (number of rooms, number of inhabitants, number of inhabitants per room, function of rooms, public/private housing, new/old public housing etc.). With the results, the teacher explains: “This schematic we have built gives us information about this reality. Necessary information. We must try to understand why such situations exist.”

This opens up a broader investigation into the relationship between personal family history and wider socio-economic and political factors bearing on the composition of the classroom. Finally, the boys turn their attention to what’s not present in the classroom - truants working formally and informally instead of being at school. The culminating sequence shows the boys surveying their classmates in their workplaces, then mapping the results onto their already amassed research covering the classroom walls.

Diario di un maestro  gives us a vision of how the school could be a site of collective knowledge production directly linked to material conditions - conditions which are inseparable from the barriers variously inhibiting the educational chances of school children. Here, delinquacy is seen not as a set of behaviors to be repressed, but as a form of intelligence responding to real conditions of life; a mode of understanding which is illegible to the traditional aims and methods of teaching. It shows how social inquiry can be a route to mobilising this subaltern intelligence for processes of collective self-understanding, self-development and ultimately self-activity.

Whether this model can short-circuit the boys’ fate is left as an open question in the final episode. But there’s an interesting counterpoint to the idea that progressive pedagogy alone can be the path to genuine educational transformation. Midway through the research project, the teacher is confronted by a colleague who points out the workload implications of his pedagogical experiment. The additional preparation and resources which have gone into transforming the classroom, entails more work for the same pay. For those with caring responsibilities, this is not an option.

Here, the underlying tension of all transformative struggles in and through education is dramatised. While education plays a key role in social reproduction, isolated instances of subverting this function ultimately run up against constraints determined by the economic organisation of the sector as a whole. As such, economic struggle led by school workers would appear to have priority over aspirations to change what education does. But a communist perspective insists that workplace struggles cannot stop at demands for better pay, conditions, or funding within the existing framework, important as these are. In the case of education, these demands must be linked to a collective challenge to the social function of schooling as a mechanism for reproducing capitalist class relations. This would inevitably face resistance from more conservative educational workers, many of whom are professionally and ideologically invested in the current organisation of education. But only when workers’ economic struggles in the sector are consciously articulated with projects that reorient education towards collective inquiry, social need, and working-class self-emancipation, can schooling become something other than a failing service to capital. In this sense, transforming education is inseparable from transforming the conditions of those who work and learn within it - and from the wider struggle to abolish the social relations that currently determine both.

Situating the Work of Education

Jack and Tom

Jack and Tom are school teachers.

Some Context

What follows is a brief overview of the education system (mainly secondary) and some of the struggles within it, as we see them. We are two teachers, one primary and one secondary who have been working in education for 8 and 10 years respectively. We’re interested in workers inquiry because we believe in generating knowledge for political practice from the ground up and want to use our experiences of education generated from day-to-day practice to think carefully and critically about the work of teaching, then share our perspectives. We want our experiences to have the potential to guide others and contribute to a mass of experience and knowledge about the work school staff do and the struggles we face. For us this is part of a process of reimagining and rebuilding education, for ourselves and for the children we teach.

We take seriously the idea that ‘our working conditions are their learning conditions’. A worker inquiry into the labour of being a teacher is also an indirect enquiry into the labour of being a student. We don’t speak for our students and their voices urgently need to be heard in all political work within education. In a separate piece written at the same time as this one, we analyse a specific school that we both have experience of. We want inquiries and writing like this to respond to the experience of teaching, but also the experience of learning, under the conditions we describe. As teachers with interests in radical politics, we want to work in ways that are very different from today's mainstream schools, just as we want something very different for students, in response to what we see and hear from them about their needs, desires and aspirations. We write more about this in the separate inquiry.

History of Schools

Comprehensive education is a relatively new thing. There were a number of Education Acts at the end of the 19th Century which brought about compulsory, free education for all young people up to the age of 10. After the First World War this was raised to 14. After the Second World War the Butler Act introduced the tripartite system of Grammar, Secondary Modern or Secondary Technical Schools. In 1965 the Labour Government moved most (but significantly, not all) local authorities towards Comprehensive schools with the intention of giving all young people a standardised level of education. In 1973 the leaving age was raised to 16, and in 1988 the Thatcher government introduced Ofsted, league tables and the National Curriculum. The Blair government introduced City Academies which were essentially state schools operating with reduced state control and were subsidised by charities, individuals or businesses. The Coalition government under Micahel Gove expanded the academies program significantly, so that now around 80% of secondary schools (c.2075) and 40% of primary schools (c.2440) are academies. Importantly from a workers perspective, these schools do not have to comply with the Burgundy Book, which is the national agreement around pay and working conditions for state school teachers in England and Wales. That government also encouraged private investment through its ‘free schools’ initiative, which allowed schools to draw public funds, as well as private, and exist with an even greater degree of autonomy from the state. Due to changes in government approach, far fewer free schools are now being established.

Parallel to state funded schools are Independent schools. These consist of two types: Public and Private. Public schools in the UK were originally fee paying schools open to anyone who could afford the fees whereas Private schools were available to those of certain religious or cultural backgrounds. The vast majority still charge fees for the education they provide, and most follow fairly traditional approaches to pedagogy and curricula. A small number broke with tradition and developed forms of what has become known as ‘democratic’, ‘progressive’ or ‘alternative’ education, the most famous being Summerhill in Suffolk. There are also various other educational settings which sit outside of the ‘mainstream’ - specialist Special Education Needs (SEN) schools; Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and Alternative Provisions both of which are where young people who’ve been permanently excluded go; and schools within other institutions like hospitals.

Workforce

The education of young people is an enormously labour intensive process. As of 2024 there were 468,258 teachers, 288,812 teaching assistants and 228,684 other support staff working in schools in England and Wales. This doesn’t include the 11,520 working in independent (private or public) schools, the 203,000 working in Further Education Colleges, the 368,100 working in nurseries and the countless other formal and informal tutors and others who help provide education in the community to those under the age of 18. Add to that the 246,930 involved in university education and that puts the total sector at nearly 2 million people and that means that almost one in every 20 people of working age (37.5 million in 2021) works in education in one way or another.

We saw the enormous bargaining power which the education sector held in January 2021 when school staff refused en masse to go back to schools. The executive of the National Education Union (NEU) had no choice but to follow suit having failed to ballot members for industrial action in the Autumn term. The NEU is the largest education trade union in Europe with 487,420 members, but has been unable in recent years to organise its members into a coherent, militant force. Teachers are often very resistant to strike action, partly because of the knock on impact it has on young people and families, partly because of their middle class economic position and - from our cynical perspective - because of their capitulation to hierarchical power structures.

Unions

There are two main unions for teachers, the NEU and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) (which has 228,437 members). However, teaching assistants (TAs) are not able to negotiate as a group as part of these unions. In a total stitchup TAs and support staff can only be bargained for by Unison, Unite and GMB on the National Joint Council. This is despite the fact that these three unions do not have the same number of members in schools and as such regularly fail to meet strike ballot thresholds set by the anti-trade union laws. Last year Unison, Unite and GMB complained to the TUC who ultimately fined the NEU £150,000 for recruiting and representing TAs. All this means that it is very difficult to have one trade union to represent all staff within a school. If you have an NEU branch in the school, TAs can join, but they are powerless to bargain about their pay and working conditions on a national level - which hardly gives them an incentive to join and pay their monthly union fees.

Both of us have been active in our schools as trade union members, and as reps. We’ve had different levels of involvement in wider union organising, and both have a degree of scepticism around the direction and strategy of the NEU over recent years - in terms of leadership and the tendencies of its membership.

Overview of Work in Schools

Technical

There are two key roles which most teaching staff do: teaching and pastoral. Within both of these roles you have the practical side and the administrative side. One of the huge shifts which has taken place in schools over the past 40 years has been the escalation of the administrative tasks which teaching staff are required to do. Planning, marking, working with data and writing reports are all forms of work expected on top of the primary role of teaching, and large numbers of teachers are leaving the profession due to workload-related stress. [16]  The task of switching between these areas of work is also taxing in itself - a day of teaching can involve a wide range of quickly changing and largely administrative, tasks.

Teaching

In most primary and secondary educational institutions in the UK, teaching looks relatively similar. There will be one adult, stood next to some sort of display (a whiteboard, projected screen, touchscreen etc) with a pre written lesson (often on some sort of slide show) in front of a group of young people who they will guide through the learning material, occasionally asking them to talk to one another, or answer questions, write in exercise books or laptops, or take part in some other activity like a science experiment. It’s pretty standard stuff. This work involves being able to know about the topic at hand and the skills required to grasp it, an ability to guide young people and keep their attention, and to monitor how well the young people are understanding the information as well as how able they are to participate either actively or passively with the lesson. This format differs according to subject (drama, art, PE and music are notable examples). Class sizes in mainstream schools are generally about 30. [17]

Teaching staff have to know their subject well, which often requires reading around the subject, researching current pedagogy, participating in discussions, going to conferences and so on. We would wager that the vast majority of teaching staff in the UK do not do any of these - at least not regularly enough to make a material difference to their practice. These things are often seen as an additional luxury and the time demands of other parts of the job often take precedence. For a full time member of teaching staff with no additional responsibilities, you can expect to teach 18 hours a week, with an hour and a half of Personal Planning Allowance where you are expected to do nothing other than plan. That’s 5 minutes per lesson (or per hour if you’re on 45 minute lessons). The rest of the work week is expected to be dedicated to meetings, pastoral work or other responsibilities.

Outside of the classroom a huge amount of labour is taken up marking students’ work (although this does also happen within lessons, the efficacy of which can range wildly). Depending on the subject which you are teaching will change the impact of marking. Secondary English teachers may have fewer class groups as they often teach the same group four or five times a week but will have to mark longer, denser pieces of work; Language teachers may have more classes, but have shorter pieces to mark; Maths teachers may have fewer classes but have consistent and high levels of marking to do. More and more, teachers are trying to find technological ways to reduce the amount of marking like using apps or setting work online. Some of these are effective (in subjects like Maths and Science), some less so (like English and other Humanities subjects).

The other huge part of teachers’ workload is taken up with planning lessons, writing schemes of work, medium term plans and so forth. Planning lessons can be a very short activity for experienced teachers, or take hours for newer members of staff. Once you have come up with a starter, some main activities and a plenary (a final activity where you round off the lesson and check the learning of the class) you usually have to design a slide show to keep the focus or attention of the class, and some paper or physical resources. These might be card sorts, gap fills, information packs, questions sheets etc. Once this is done you often have to differentiate (make adjustments for young people with additional learning needs, varying the level of difficulty if you are teaching a ‘mixed ability’ class etc) your resources to make sure that everyone is able to participate in the lesson. You have to do this for all 20 of the lessons you are teaching that week.

Fortunately, curriculums don’t change quickly, so often you can reuse and recycle material. You can find lessons and resources of varying quality online, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee. If you are part of a Multi-Academy Trust or a large network of schools you may not have to do any planning but be compelled to use resources predesigned for you (a relatively recent move, designed to reduce workload but which brings about its own set of problems). This was not the case at the school we discuss elsewhere.. Almost every lesson was new, bespoke and following the needs of the young people.

If you are part of a department you will likely have regular meetings to discuss planning, marking, or the exciting new idea the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) has from the conference they went to but can’t quite quote the research about (or worse, the twitter thread they skim read). You will also have to do regular parents evenings. Depending on how many students you teach and how long the meetings are, these can be used as productive conversations between the young person, their guardians and you. However, at one school one of us had over 400 separate students. There is no way to have productive, meaningful conversations about young people who you have taught a handful of times and whose name you are still trying to learn. You end up repeating a few stock phrases (‘use this app to help learning vocab at home’) whilst hoping that you are able to remember which class they are in.

Pastoral

Pastoral responsibilities fluctuate massively between schools. We will not go into all the variations, but give a flavour of the workload required. If you are a form tutor you might be required to spend 15-30 minutes a day in tutor time, sometimes chatting with the young people, sometimes delivering Personal Social Health Education (PSHE) sessions, sometimes talking through announcements from the wider school. You may have to take your class to assemblies, run team building activities with them and so on.

The big pastoral issue many teachers talk about is behaviour. We do not have enough space to critique this term, or the ideas around it but when teachers talk about behaviour they mean bad behaviour, or ‘the young people under my control are not doing what I want them to do’. The rise in zero tolerance schools and strict responses to bad behaviour has also come hand in hand with a rise in school dissatisfaction amongst young people, a drop in teaching retention and a stagnation in academic outcomes. Of course, approaches to punishment are not the only factor, it is the whole neoliberal ecosystem where students are treated as objects with basic inputs and outputs rather than complex human beings.

Anyway, having to manage behaviour is a lot. One of the ideas around zero tolerance schools is to reduce workload, you ‘nip bad behaviour in the bud’ before it escalates. Sometimes this works, and lessons run according to plan, and you have no extra work. But often enough, giving out warnings and detentions escalates conflict, which brings about paperwork for you as the teacher, the tiring and emotional work of taking to young people, attempting to maintain control of the atmosphere in the class, deescalation, running detentions or ‘restorative’ meetings (spoiler, they are rarely restorative, though, like all neoliberal institutions, they use a radical name to mean a punitive thing). It is not just that we think punitive measures are mean to young people, we also recognise the waste of labour, emotional and administrative that they cause. They are bad from a workers perspective. They are a feature of a workplace which is trying to squeeze so much out of its employees and subjects (the students) that there is no time left for humanity.

Everything else

All of this is before we get to running trips, extra-curricular clubs, sports, activities weeks and union activity. There isn’t time to go into all this, but this shit takes up so much time in the school day, not to mention evenings, weekends and sometimes summer holidays.

Time

Time, as always, is the constant restricting factor. There is never enough time to plan, mark, email, write up incidents, plan trips, call parents, go to meetings and carry out pastoral duties. Why? Because there are too few staff being asked to do too many things. We have a huge number of trained teachers in the UK, but many quit before they make it 5 years in the job (33%). They leave because of workload stress, difficult relationships with students (always lumped under the bland title ‘behaviour’), shit management, low pay, lack of in-classroom support and so on. We write this to show that it is entirely possible to shift the sector in a matter of years and decades, but the financial and physical infrastructure needs to be invested in. Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) were widely despised and criticised, however a local model for understanding school needs, given proper funding and where shit managers are actually held to account could provide a viable alternative to the bizarro patchwork of multi academy trusts, alternative provisions, grammar schools, faith schools, free schools, PRUs and local authority schools which we currently have.

There are guidelines about how many hours teaching staff have to work, 1275 hours a year. As a result there is a maximum amount of hours which you can teach, though many teachers are compelled to teach more than these hours. However, ask any teacher and they will tell you they work more than these allotted hours. They work in their evenings, on weekends, in the holidays or all three. This is not the norm. Go to Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and the teaching staff will end their day at the school door, and go home. As it should be for all workers! We have settled for less because we have accepted that school staff can and should be martyrs sacrificed on the altar of ‘good grades’ and ‘social mobility’. We know it’s bollocks, we know that education plays very little role in social mobility because the conditions which allow for education to happen are largely determined by the young person’s economic background! It’s a vicious cycle. But successive neoliberal governments and a media class wedded to capitalism have and constantly recycle the idea of meritocracy.

We hope that this piece has provided some kind of introduction to a field of labour in dire need of worker-led overhaul - not only for the workers themselves but because schools are where almost all young people spend the majority of their pre-work lives. If we’re to build worker power for the future, they need forms of education that are drastically different too.

You can also visit the Notes from Below blog for our inquiry into a specific, and quite unusual school that we both worked at.  

Reflections on a Nursery Strike

Jo

Jo is an early years teacher, educator and trade union activist

In March 2024 myself and my colleagues walked out on the first maintained nursery school (MNS) strike in the National Education Union’s (NEU) history. What follows is a reflection on my experience as a workplace rep in the strike. We went out over the managed decline of our school, deep cuts and job losses, and an attack on our ability to teach. This led to us organising all classroom-based workers into the union, before overwhelmingly winning a strike ballot. We took 15 days of strike action over the 6 month period of our strike mandate before there was any resolution.

What is a Maintained Nursery School?

From 1918 onwards, the MNS system in England was developed with a focus on the holistic child where healthy food and medical care was delivered alongside carefully designed learning environments. In their design, and to this day, MNS are legally constituted as schools and need to be led by a headteacher. They are specialised in the education and care of very young children and supported by qualified early years teachers. The extra statutory requirements of MNS mean they cost more to run, and many have to cover costs that schools don’t pay, such as business rates. MNS were nearly always built in areas of deprivation. Over the years they’ve become known for providing inclusive education, meeting the needs of significant proportions of two-year-old children and those with additional needs.

MNS activists’ campaign for a long-term funding solution that fully covers costs. Insufficient investment has been exacerbated in London where MNS have been further negatively impacted by falling numbers of children on roll. This has led to financial instability and MNS closures – 3 are due to close in England this year!

My nursery school opened in 1935 and we operated it in much the same way as when it was first opened. Some of the same facilities that we see in photographs taken shortly after its opening are still in use today. Until recently, staff teams were long serving and proudly held onto the roots of quality early childhood education, whilst also looking at the latest research and adapting to changing needs. Knowledge had been passed from one worker to the next.

MNS do not have the ‘top-down’ pressure of schools which often involves formalising learning for very young children. MNS pedagogy (the way we teach) is child-led, play based, free-flow, nurturing but also enables children to assess and take risks – normally in a big garden with trees to climb. MNS teaching and care is radical, socialist teaching that rejects the standardization that is typical of neoliberal education in most primary schools and private nurseries. For example, in my nursery two, three, and four-year-old children were taught how to use cameras and printers independently to document and reflect on their own learning, a system imbued with meaning and care, valuing each child’s agency and ideas. It was far removed from some experiences I had as a trainee teacher in a primary school. Sitting with a glue stick for meaningless hours, pasting in photographs taken by a Teaching Assistant of a teacher-led learning activity, almost the same photograph for each child.

The Pre-strike Context

The COVID-19 pandemic had been incredibly challenging and, unlike many, our nursery had remained open and taken in children of key workers. During this time the nursery had accumulated a large deficit.   Shortly after, in 2021, we went through a restructure, and, like many nursery schools, this included federation. Federation is often sold to workers as a form of protection – a way to save money and save jobs to keep nursery schools open. Speaking with other MNS union members, I often hear them cheerfully speak of federation as if it will solve all their problems. Federation means cuts and should be opposed by all MNS workers.

Federation connects two or more schools and typically involves cuts to senior leadership teams, with remaining senior leaders taking on the running of multiple nurseries. In our nursery the increase in workloads for senior leaders had a devastating impact on them. When concerns were raised about a further restructuring, we received an email from the Executive Headteacher saying the senior leadership team had experienced PTSD from the last one and couldn’t face another.

After the first restructure, we lost staff to the pressures of growing workloads and to the loss of a sense of pedagogy and care we once delivered with pride. Staff weren’t replaced. Even before the restructure of 2024, we were a vastly diminished staff team in both number and expertise. If workers were replaced, they employed the cheapest labour they could, deskilling the workforce over time. By our second restructure and subsequent strike action, all senior leaders had left the school either due to illness and/or burnout. We lost long standing members of staff who had passed carefully crafted, precious expertise from one generation to another.

Rumours of closure started to emerge during the Summer Term of 2023. Staff were stopped in the street by concerned parents asking if they should move their children to other nurseries. We weren’t sure where the rumours were coming from. They weren’t from us, but they increased in frequency. I contacted HR and was told that nothing would happen under our outgoing Executive Headteacher’s tenure. That the situation would be made clear in September 2023, the implication being that something would happen, but not yet.

We were alarmed when we heard that the federation could not afford to advertise for an Executive Headteacher, and that an agency headteacher would take it instead. Schools rely on agency staff – at greater cost – but as they are not written into the school’s budget, they help to balance the books. Workers at our sister nursery told us that when first meeting the new agency Executive Headteacher, she told workers that she had closed the last two schools she had worked for.

Anxiety was growing and we started being in closer contact with our local union secretary, who began to liaise with our local case worker and central union team. This all happened alongside NEU teaching staff in my nursery taking part in national strikes, seeking a fully-funded, above inflation pay rise from the UK government. Although support staff had narrowly missed the threshold to go ahead with strike action, some of our nursery’s support staff could afford to support the strikes and refused to cross the picket. These strikes were key in helping our nursery workers feel connected in struggle; that a future local strike was a possibility.

During May 2023 I stepped down from the Acting Deputy Head role to return to my substantive lead teacher post. I had spent the last year managing a school that for chunks of time didn’t even have a premises officer or an admin team. We had employed an agency admin worker that left after a few months citing workload and stress. For two thirds of the year our Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Coordinator (SENDCo) was on long term sick leave. I was expected to absorb all this extra work into my role; I was firefighting.

Even more difficult for me was seeing much-loved colleagues become seriously unwell and knowing if things got worse, as I had been warned, I would be on a pathway there too. In that year I had also had treatment for skin cancer, the second question I had been asked was, ‘Do you work outside?’ In a nursery that valued outdoor play, I had often been rota’d on whole days or afternoons outside. As budgets tightened, shade sails had not been replaced, and with fewer staff it was hard to swap inside for breaks. My workplace was beginning to feel like a physical risk to us all.

I wrote in my letter stepping down as Acting Deputy Head:

‘Ultimately, in light of the new budget and reduced staffing structure, I don't feel that I can lead the school in a way which aligns with my values and maintain the quality of education that you would expect of a maintained nursery school […] The frustration for me is that my values and expectations of outstanding early years practice has grown out of the very system that is now compromising them’.

The Lead up to Strike Action

The initial plan for the proposed restructure looked like a managed decline of the nursery, but not necessarily school closure. It proposed my nursery should lose half the staff team and operate out of one class (previously there had been three classes, including a dedicated two-year-old class) and our sister nursery was to lose eight of nine classroom-based staff. The third nursery school in the federation was to lose a couple of staff, but they had a bigger staff team and more money in the bank. Workers at this nursery chose not to support the strike action we would later take.

We wrote to governors expressing serious concerns. Key amongst them, that support staff were proposed to leave mid-year (May 2024), putting us outside the legal ratio with the remaining staff and the number of children we had on role. The proposed staffing, combined with an instruction to work out of one class, also did not meet statutory obligations on space requirements in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Staff governors were excluded from governing body meetings, meaning their expertise and concerns were not fed in. Several governors told us that they didn’t agree with the restructure and seemed distressed. One said she had not agreed with it, demanding her name to be removed from the restructuring plan.

In response to staff questions and concerns at the first whole-federation consultation meeting, we received an email from the Chair of Governors telling us that staff/the union were virtue signalling and making spurious statements. It seemed this was in response to staff describing the work of an MNS and how this went above and beyond a typical private nursery or nursery class. This set a tone from the federation leadership that felt cruel. During the meeting several falsehoods were presented to us, seemingly so we would think ourselves lucky that the nurseries weren’t being closed. They said all nursery schools would be closed in two other London boroughs. The meeting was recorded to be shared, but we weren’t surprised later on when they wouldn’t.

Balloting and Striking

During the lead up to our indicative strike ballot, all classroom-based staff in my nursery became union members. After a previous restructure and additional staff losses, fear of further cuts and growing workloads were in the forefront of everyone’s minds. As a small school we had a small union membership, but the collective dedication to fight the cuts seemed to be key to the union taking us seriously. One new member had worked at the nursery for over 20 years and had never been in a union before! It was important to us to ensure all our union members could take part in the strike financially. Shockingly, nearly all our support staff had second jobs.

On Feb 20 th there was a notification to conduct a formal ballot. My nursery staff were by now all NEU members and set on voting for strike action, but we were less sure about how members at our sister nursery would. During the ballot campaign, nursery budgets were being controlled more tightly than ever before. I saw our Deputy Head buying staff loo roll. Staff even had to buy our own gloves for nappy changing, and at one point we had to put out towels for children to dry their hands. One worker saw our Executive Headteacher shaking her wet hands in the office and asking for paper towels to be ordered, only to be told by the admin team, ‘no, there’s no money’. There were days when the building was very cold, on one occasion, I wrote to the Chair of Governors to say the building was 9 degrees Celsius and we were having to get the children to wear coats indoors. The response I had was one line, ‘these concerns are operational, and the Executive Headteacher would respond’.   It was really scary, there seemed to be no limit to what they would cut. We were given just the basics for caring for the children, rather than providing high quality education.

But we won the ballot. Our first strike days were named for March 2024. On picket lines we had a range of different supporters including parents, ex-parents, and ex-leaders of the nurseries. Members of other nurseries also turned up, explaining that: ‘Your fight is our fight’. It was humbling and emotional to feel that solidarity from people we’d never met before. At our sister nursery, I was told that staff in a different union had been advised they had to cross the picket line and go into work. This meant that their staff team was unfortunately split, with most workers having to leave their colleagues on the picket and follow their union's advice.

In April 2024, I attended my first union conference as a speaker on a panel of women who had been involved in strike action. In the discussion section, I was shocked when speakers, mostly men, did not engage in anything the women had spoken about, but made long political points. At the conference, I was surprised to hear that women workers, the majority of our union’s members, rely on a system that alternates male and female speakers for women to have a voice at conference . Having worked in an all-female staff for the last 17 years, misogyny in the workplace was not something I had thought much about. When I expressed my surprise at how men would take up space in union discussions, a long-time member of the union told me that ‘misogyny did not exist in the union’ as they had the alternating speaker system in place. Taken aback, I said this system was in place because there was misogyny, it did not mean it wasn’t there anymore. I also met with organisers and other early years members and developed plans of action. The general secretary even agreed to attend our picket line. This gave everyone a boost and made us feel like we were doing something important.

Parent Partnership

Parents at the nurseries were informed of restructure at the end of January 2024. Support from the union’s national organising team – a group of women not contracted to support early years campaigns but believe it to be important so do it anyway – included occasional access to photographers and videographers. Several short films were released of parents expressing concerns about the cuts. Posts were shared across social media. In one short film, one parent said with the cuts you would, ‘Destroy the nursery from the inside out’ and that you ‘Cut staff and facilities, you cut away the quality of the nursery’. This was an important point as research shows that quality of nursery provision is key in delivering early education that makes a difference, especially for children experiencing disadvantage.

The proposed cuts to our nursery were happening during the largest expansion of funded childcare that England has ever seen. During a union organised picnic, a parent that we did not know turned up to say that she had applied for a place at the nursery school for her child with needs and had been told that there were no spaces. This was a shock to the staff who had been told that the cuts were necessary due to falling rolls – now it seemed that the local authority was actively turning away children! There were other rumblings, staff overheard that two-year-old parents were being told on the phone the nursery was full for September. A list of families newly eligible for the expansion of funded places was left on my desk. When I asked if these parents would be contacted to try and fill the nursery and potentially save jobs, I was told it was not a priority. Watching our local School’s Forum meeting confirmed what we feared, it was recorded that our Executive Headteacher had said that numbers of children were being kept low in order to remove staff.

Guidance from NEU’s national organising team was key in building parent support too. We ran a letter writing session (with a staff-run creche) at the local library which we planned for the morning but ended up continuing all day as parents kept turning up. Organisers employed by the union proved to be a useful link between parents and staff who could not speak openly with staff at the nursery gates.

Unclear communication from the federation and leadership team impacted on parents. The union informed the local authority of 9 days of further strike action on the 16 th of May, but the governors did not inform parents until the 24 th  of   May, and then only told them about the first 3 days. We were never sure if this was ineptitude or deliberately designed to create tension between parents and workers, although if it was, it had the opposite effect. Parents began reaching out to MPs and local councillors to try and secure support. One parent said that they would be hard-pressed to get them to lay the blame at the feet of the staff despite the strikes. They witnessed the dedication of staff to the people they held dearest – their own children. Support like this from parents was heartening and helped us feel valued.

Barriers to Organising

Campaigning is creative work and being creative when you are exhausted (and scared) is very challenging. As interest grew in our situation, it became apparent to us that we were not going to be able to grow a campaign unless we cut back on all the extra hours we were working. One of our most effective strategies was collectively working to rule, including not staying in the building outside of contracted hours and observing lunch breaks. As workers who practice sensitive, emotional connections with very young children, this was very challenging. We regularly held each other to account if we were seen to be breaking our agreement. If I was tempted to stay a little longer after work to do a few emails, two or three people would come up to stop me and say, ‘We agreed...” I knew that by breaking our agreement I was letting them down and vice versa. We’d all been working three or four hours extra most days. Having more time allowed us time together to write letters, develop campaign materials and leaflet the local community.

More broadly, the fractured nature of the early years sector makes it very difficult to organise. Most workers in private nurseries are un-unionised. There can also be tensions between parts of the sector. Most MNS workers proudly ally themselves with the education side of their work and don’t like being called “childcare”. This in turn can upset private nursery workers who feel that teachers can make them feel ‘less than’ whilst, by nature of their roles, experience power privileges of higher pay and better union representation.

Within our union, early years members are a small group and MNS workers a smaller proportion of that. In MNS settings, there are typically one or two teachers, a headteacher and several support staff who all may belong to different unions, or in some cases none. This fragmentation makes it challenging for staff to coordinate effectively and engage in collective action. Labour have increased fracturing with the introduction of the School Based Nursery plan which sees massive investment in early years within academy schools.

Pushed Out

During a conversation with a senior leader I was informed that they had decided to shrink mine and my colleagues' role into one. I was told that, as I was the more experienced ‘lead’ teacher and more expensive, I would not be kept on. This was news to me as there was meant to be a formal interview process to decide. This never happened, so I pushed to appeal their decision.  

During my appeal and that of another member, our regional officer did not attend and my local union officer was referred to as a ‘retired volunteer’. The local authority did not allow them to speak in the meeting. I had spent a long time preparing and the process felt designed to intimidate. I fought my case and was told my appeal would be upheld. This initially felt like a win, as we thought it might stop or slow down the redundancies. However, in one of the most frustrating moments for me personally, I realised that challenging them in this way just gave them a chance to right their wrongs and continue with the process. Their initial decision to make me redundant was highly stressful (I still feel like I am recovering from this!). I had to go through with the redundancy interview, which stirred up high levels of stress again. As my regional officer later told me, “Sometimes it’s better to let them make mistakes”.

Myself and my colleague (who had felt that she was safely in line for the job) now had a late interview, which went ahead, led by members of the local authority. The decision had obviously already been made though, and I was told my employment was set to end. I requested my interview notes and the way my answers had been negatively recorded would have been funny if it all wasn’t so stressful. I had been employed by the nursery for the last 17 years and worked my way up from Teaching Assistant to Higher Level Teaching Assistant, to nursery nurse, teacher, lead teacher and deputy head before a step back to lead teacher again. A job I had been completely in love with had become hell, and even though I knew it was going to be a massive loss, it was also a relief that it was going to be over.

Win or Lose?

After 6 days of strike action the union asked ACAS to intervene, but the nursery federation and HR refused to discuss any other solutions. This was an approach that the local authority and federation stuck to, they just refused to engage. There were no negotiations and a lack of a response from local councillors during the strike. At a hustings, our local MP said she would meet us. This was in the summer of 2024, shortly before the redundancies were to take place on the 31st of August. When we joined the meeting, we were told she had gone on holiday and we would only meet with her team. This felt like the final insult, and we were all left to start to deal with our own endings - redundancy, retirement, new work and, for all of us, a much-needed period of recovery.

On August 31 st 2024, 20 posts were deleted across the three nursery schools. Since the strike, duties previously completed by teachers such as parents’ evenings and report writing are now done by support staff. Our sister nursery, in one of the most deprived areas of the borough, does not currently have a single teacher on their staff list and only one member of class-based nursery school staff listed. I have been told that they have merged the day nursery with the nursery school.

As the strike had a profile, at rallies and union events, we were repeatedly asked, ‘Did you win?’ And I found myself repeatedly saying, ‘no, we lost’. But, since our strike, three other nursery strikers are now on our local union committee. Not one of us was politically engaged before, and now we nearly all are. We have all been involved in early years events at the union and regularly keep in touch. So, this doesn’t feel quite like losing.

The more I have become involved in the trade union movement, the more I focus less on the binary of winning and losing. I draw on the holistic, relational practice I learned as a nursery school teacher — one that gives up power to give voice.

Chatting recently with a nursery striker, I asked her what she had learnt during our campaign, she responded:

“I learnt that solidarity is amazing. Who you know helps. And togetherness is key”.

More Reading and Listening:

Childcare Voices Podcast: www. shows.acast.com/childcare-voices  

Grow Your Own Childcare Histories: www.c hildcarehistory.org.uk/map/

Education Uncovered/Public Childcare Now: www. educationuncovered.co.uk/analysis/comment/nurseries-in-schools-academisation-of-early-years

Early Education (on saving MNS): www. early-education.org.uk/campaigns/save-our-maintained-nursery-schools/

Post Pandemic Childcare: www.postpandemicchildcare.org

Day in the Life Working in the Factory School

Eleanor Davies

Parent, Teacher, Joint District Secretary of Lewisham NEU and NEU Executive Member

It’s a sunny day; my teaching partner is on maternity leave and has had her baby. It’s all good. My school is a local authority primary school at the centre of a council estate in South London. The bright morning matches my mood. I’m looking forward to teaching my children. They are true representatives of modern London, with a myriad of different backgrounds, cultures and home languages, united in the social collective of my class and school community. I love our interactions - the little quips, jokes and shared moments of learning -  and watching them develop and stretch themselves. They use their unique and truly individual world views, their fascination with the possibilities around them, the potential of their existence, playing together, to solve the problems with which the world confronts them. I’ve been teaching for many years in this school and have many tried and tested opportunities ready for our teach-play-learning and I am excited to see what the children will make of them.

But those opportunities feel increasingly out of step with the way I’m meant to teach. My first lesson of the day is phonics, I’m prepared thoroughly - too thoroughly. My mood dips as I remember the pre-prescribed lesson plan and check my pre-prepped flashcards. Have I remembered the pre-prescripted mantras? I double check, and rewatch the phonics scheme video. It tells me how to sit, which mannerisms to use, advises me on how long to smile, when to speak and what to say. It’s all too much to remember. I’m in robot mode. But rather than being K9 in Dr Who or HAL in 2001, I’m a primary teacher in South London.

The whole phonics scheme was designed by external experts and sold to my school as a package that includes observations, designed to check teachers are using the materials ‘properly.’ We all dread observations, during which we have to pray that our classes stop poking and fidgeting and become little robots themselves. The outcomes are measured: the children will be satisfactorily drilled and grilled, but will they ever learn to love reading and listening? Will they discover the joy of sharing stories and characters? The ability of the written word to transport them into another internal world? Hardly. That’s not what phonics is about. Its achievements are measured numerically, on a spreadsheet. Dickens’ financially obsessed school boss Gradgrind would be proud. Knowledge is poured into their poor unsuspecting heads. Not that characters like that exist in these schemes, the highlight of which are the profits earned by their privatised providers. The scheme is entirely void of creativity: it’s their way or the highway. Individualisation, skill, reconfiguration to the needs of the cohort? Forget it. Collaboration is destroyed, collectivity undermined, and suspicion fostered by competition between teachers for the highest scores. Ok enough of that. It’s only the first 30 minutes – then I can get back to child-centred learning where the magic happens.

Time to check my emails.

The first one is from my teaching partner; her baby is gorgeous. A real cutie. The second email is from my headteacher – it’s OFSTED [18]  preparation. We’re in the inspection window. OFSTED have announced a new more punitive framework. Who saw that coming? Certainly not my union, the National Education Union (NEU). They’re permanently, determinedly asleep at the wheel, pursuing ‘social partnership’ with the Labour government, hoping for ‘constructive engagement with the minister to yield real positive results.’ Or at least that’s the story. The tragic suicide of a teacher has not abated OFSTED’s mission to pull schools into line, to systematically punish schools that fall outside the line. The email tells us all that our rooms must be constantly “OFSTED ready”. SLT will be doing learning walks - don’t worry, they assure us - they’re just checking “that OFSTED will see the best of us”. Everyone’s on edge - constantly looking over our shoulders – worried that a negative assessment followed by a support plan and capability are just around the corner. Please don’t let me be pulled up for marking in the wrong colour pen, or not marking enough, or marking too much. Children must always be attentive - no thinking time - no daydreaming - no dreaming full stop. No mistakes. Is their handwriting good enough – why are their letters not correctly formed? Do they know the “letter families”? The anonymous OFTSTED inspector will visit our classrooms as observer, arbiter, and judge.  We aren’t allowed to interact: just keep a stony face and make yourself perfect in every way. But what is perfect? They won’t say. Is this living or surviving? Or not surviving.

I refresh the picture of my teaching partner’s beautiful baby girl. The third email informs me my teaching assistant is off sick - there’s no money in the school budget for cover so I will be on my own all day. The fourth demands I complete another form for some extra classroom funding; it’ll only take 10 minutes. Another 10 minutes that I do not have.

I get through the morning. It’s stressful without a second adult - not quite the morning I had planned. Lunch. I don’t have time to go to the staffroom - I hardly ever see my colleagues these days. The staff room kettle remains unused. We retreat to the safety of our rooms. It's a sanctuary in a sense. Catch up on marking at the end of the day - can’t find a green pen. Will anyone notice if I use a pencil? It’s a risk, but I take it because of time.

On my way out a colleague tells me about an observation they had today. Their feedback was negative - 15 years teaching experience is apparently not enough. Their behaviour management needed work because two children were calling out. She let children go to the toilet in the middle of the lesson and she didn’t recite her learning objective. Well, she did, but not enough, or maybe it was too much? She can fix it for the second observation, or before the third - the final one before the meeting to discuss her support plan. She’s struggling to breathe and is considering going to the doctor.

It's raining as I leave, my optimism of the morning drenched under a cloud of data, competition and lack of funding. Not sure this is sustainable. Ping! It’s WhatsApp, a photo of a 1 day old baby girl - there is hope.

Fighting for our class: Working and Organising in Further Education

A former FE worker

Introduction

For about twenty years I worked in further education (FE) as an English teacher for adult students. FE is a type of education and training after secondary school that is distinct from that of universities and other higher education institutions. FE is where people do primarily vocational courses, such as in construction, catering or childcare, as well as pre-university study. Students in FE can also study Maths and English, including offering literacy classes for those who cannot read or write. In this sense, FE is generally for underserved populations.

For the most part, the students I taught came from widely diverse backgrounds, and they often struggled with a lot of difficulties in housing, with their health and so on. It always felt special to me when one of my students would come into the classroom and proudly tell me about something they’d done by themselves in English. For instance, a student once told me about how she had needed to make an urgent call because her child was very sick. Despite being scared, she had managed to answer all the questions in English and the health care worker understood everything she said. According to her, she had been able to do that thanks to our classes together.

Funding for FE has long been precarious. Immediately after the financial crash of 2008 the government cut FE funding by 40%. In general, the government has treated this part of the sector and its students as people to kick when they wanted or needed someone to kick. When funding cuts were made to our department, you could see the attitude from staff to the students become harsher. With the funding criteria more and more difficult to meet, students’ difficulties and struggles in life were treated less and less sympathetically. Instead of being seen as a group of people that needed an education and support, they began to be seen as deficient and as the cause for our loss in funding. The result of this was more students being kicked off courses for ‘bad-attendance’, when most of the time students weren’t able to attend a class due to things like caring responsibilities, health issues or travelling for a parents’ funeral, which were more likely to affect the communities that make up FE.

Working in the Sector

At my FE college, I was working on what was called an hourly paid lecturer (HPL) contract, which is basically a zero-hours contract. Around 35% of the teaching staff at the college were on these contracts, and we got paid approximately £5000 less a year than permanent staff for doing the same amount of work. This is because we were not paid during the college holidays, and we could have our hours reduced with no prior warning. For each new academic year, the permanent teachers were timetabled first. Those of us on hourly paid contracts then received our timetables, made up of everything that was left over. This meant we ended up with a patched-up timetable: you might be teaching from 9.30 to 11.30am, and then again from 6 to 9pm, for example. There were some minimum standards for how permanent teachers could be timetabled, but for precarious staff anything went. The two different contracts had a lot of small differences that added up to a lot of injustice over time. For example, for permanent staff, the employer would pay the full course fees for work related study - further teaching qualifications and so on - but not for staff on zero-hour contracts. As it was necessary to do a lot of cover teaching to get enough paid hours, as well as to take over courses if a teacher left, we were often teaching unfamiliar material.

Along with these real, material issues, there was a tangible feeling of being part of a ‘second class’ while on these contracts. You weren’t seen by the employer as an equal part of the team - you were expendable. This attitude also carried over into the union too.

Workers, Cuts and the Union

In our FE college, my union was the University and College Union (UCU). While the UCU only organises workers in specific roles in FE, rather than all the workers in the sector, membership was still open for more than just FE teachers. All FE workers who work directly with students are eligible to join UCU. This includes classroom assistants and support workers, who can be a substantial part of the workforce in FE colleges: often there are specialist departments for students with learning difficulties, literacy problems and disabilities. In inner city London, classroom assistants are predominantly from ethnic minority backgrounds and the work tends to be more physically demanding. In my college, there was a negative attitude towards these workers being in the union from some of the other union members. This went as far as some UCU reps telling support workers that they could not join our union when they asked.

With increased austerity, working conditions were progressively getting worse.There was more pressure to get specific measurable outcomes, and thus less time for students to learn things that were actually useful. To make matters worse, the workload increased, with  fewer workers expected to do the same amount of work as before.

At the same time, redundancies were run continually for several years and the union reps had to be, not only, organising the resistance to them, by means such as strikes, but also putting in an effort to support people who were in severe distress due to fears of losing their jobs. Throughout all this, our reps themselves were also at a risk of being made redundant. This made it an emotionally difficult time for a lot of people. Our college had intermittent strikes against redundancies throughout this period, but some other FE colleges had even more brutal restructures with massive job losses leading to all out strikes in them for several weeks.

Part of the government’s reasoning for making such severe cuts to FE was that employers at that time were not having difficulty recruiting staff with the skills we trained, and therefore the government did not feel the need to spend money on skills training. This is an approach akin to not putting oil in your car because it's running ok so far. Looking at the current staffing crisis in the NHS, I often remember when our employer wanted to close Access to Nursing, a popular and successful course with a waiting list of many hopeful students. The perspective that was considered important was always whether the employers  were able to get staff, and never all the wider benefits of adult education to the community.

My union branch was pretty militant and had a good culture of taking action. We had several strikes and many other times we threatened strike action which got management to back off on one thing or another. However, very little helped against the fact that the funding was cut by 40% and remained that way. If you provide an important service but the government has decided they don't really care if this service exists anymore and therefore won't fund it, what do you do as the workers? How do you fight that? The immediate battle was always with our employer, but our employer, although bad, wasn't ultimately making many of the decisions. Under Britain’s restrictive anti-trade union laws, you can't strike against political decisions, you can only strike in a conflict with your employer. We didn't have a way, as one college, to force the government to change its policies. What you can do depends on the wider community response to the crisis, not just on your own actions as workers. My branch was good at joining any local anti-cuts activity, organising several community focused demonstrations and meetings. In many ways I feel like we did everything we could realistically do.

Becoming a Union Rep

After ten years of working as a teacher in further education I got elected as HPL rep, when my UCU branch decided that we should have a specific representative for casualised workers. My work as a rep involved representing workers in disciplinaries and redundancy rounds, organising strikes, and sorting out issues for members. Our college management had an attitude about not letting staff on the casualised contract have time off for union activities, even for elected roles, so it was difficult for me to access union training and wider structures. FE was my first ‘professional’ job. Prior to that I had worked in childcare, retail, catering, and cleaning. This contributed to me often feeling inadequate and anxious about doing my job properly. This didn't help when I had difficulties with being the union rep, as I often felt inadequate about that too.

In our branch at that time, there were twelve elected people on the branch committee, and often only one would be on a casualised contract. This was despite the fact, as I mentioned above, that we were 35% of the workforce. There were often no classroom assistants or student support workers on the committee due to the negative attitudes in the union towards including these workers.  There were other reps in the union who did not agree with the bad attitude some union members had to classroom assistants and student support workers, and wanted to organise with them. Together, we started reaching out to the classroom assistants, which was difficult at first, but we gradually built-up trust with them and soon we had a better relationship.

We discovered in the middle of one dispute that there was a lot of mistreatment going on by managers towards black workers, which the union had not been aware of. This was taken seriously by the branch and these workers were supported by the union to challenge this mistreatment. This led to more workers joining the strike and coming to the picket lines: I remember during one strike, these workers turning  up at the picket and people cheering .

Fighting Casualisation and Sexual Harassment

A long running struggle over the casualised contracts had been going on and off for years already, before I even started at the college. What made this affair so complicated was that a lot of these workers were part-time and had jobs in other workplaces - as did I - so this organising involved me coming in before or after my working day elsewhere to look for these casualised workers and talk to them. We started holding regular meetings of the precarious staff and drew up demands. We wanted a pathway to being put on permanent contracts, which should be formally written down, so that managers couldn't just pick favourites when timetabling. We wanted minimum guaranteed hours and to be included in formal redundancy procedures, not to just lose hours with no process.

I was finding my feet as a new rep and getting into our campaign for casualised staff when two things happened: first, our employer threatened to lay off loads of the casualised staff, including me; and second, I started getting sexually harassed by one of the older union reps. I don't think these two things happening at the same time was a coincidence. I researched into this , and found workers are more likely to be sexually harassed if they are on precarious contracts. [19]  I was in a vulnerable situation both because my employer was threatening to remove my post and because I was pushing the branch to take this issue more seriously and not ignore the college’s casualised staff.

The sexual harassment I was subjected to badly damaged my confidence. I had less belief in my own abilities to do the right thing, and I was also stressed when I had to be in the same space as my harasser - we worked in the same department, so that was a lot of the time. The issue with threatened redundancies meant I was also facing losing my job, and the lack of union focus on casualised workers meant I had to take initiative in the campaign against that. Within the place where I should have felt supported - the union - I was instead being harassed. It was made even more difficult by the fact as I was demanding that the permanent staff treat the threat to precarious staff as seriously as they would treat a threat to their own jobs and ballot for strike action, which many union reps were not happy about. Once somebody even said in a union meeting that ‘the college does need some disposable workers.’ Having to argue with people about taking action when I was in the middle of a crisis of confidence was very difficult.

Eventually I told another union rep and she spoke to the harassing colleague and scared the life out of him. The next day at work I could see he was terrified when he saw me. Ever since, I have had no more trouble from him. But I was left in that situation for far too long before that without support from the union, and it had a harmful effect on me.

Unfortunately, the college did not get rid of casualised contracts, though the position of workers as they moved onto the permanent contracts was improved a lot thanks to union action. Finally the branch voted for strike action over the treatment of precarious workers, and then eventually put demands about the casualised staffs’ contracts into the negotiations when we were actually on strike over something else. We then really dug in our heels until we got it. Now, thanks to this, when people do move from the casualised to the permanent contract, their pay and conditions are much better.

The Future of Organising  

I have written quite a negative account here. We did a lot of good things that I’m proud of. Around the time I left the college, casualised and support staff were now fully seen as part of the union and joining in with strikes. We got people some life changing pay rises, and we had incorporated joint action with the community into our normal disputes practice. Unfortunately, the continuing lack of funding had caused another round of cuts to education in our borough. Because of further job losses and management’s attitude, victimisation of the union has got worse. The struggles we undertook were in very adverse conditions and there were real personal hardships involved in both our wins and losses.

Part of the challenge of organising in FE is that in many jobs it is very difficult to have much power on  the job. In some workplaces workers have a lot of power due to the nature of their work, such as tube workers, bin workers, or anyone whose withdrawal of labour stops other people working. But many other workers don't have that power and have to rely on a broader mobilisation happening alongside workplace action. This community mobilisation has happened since the financial crash of 2008, but very patchily.

It has come to light recently that sexual harassment is a widespread issue in unions, so this was not just an unfortunate experience of mine. People who are sexually harassed are often in a position of disadvantage to the harasser. They are younger, or precarious, or lower in some hierarchy, which the harasser then takes advantage of. The unions need a strong response not just to harassment in the workplaces but to improving their own structures and practices. This is a difficult conversation to have, but I want to point out that there were two important political issues here. Firstly, that sexual harassment is just wrong, full stop. Secondly, it also makes other aspects of organising harder. I have been frustrated at the way some of my left wing and trade union comrades have failed to understand these realities, instead often acting as if feminism is just a niche issue or a distraction from the real work of class politics and trade unionism.

The lessons here are not just for those working in FE, but for everyone in the labour movement. Unions need to be not only focused on what they see as the ‘core’ workforce, but also pay attention to lower paid and more marginalised or precarious workers. A lot of the ‘business-as-usual’ way unions do things exclude those workers, sometimes not on purpose. If you would like those workers to be involved but they ‘don't turn up to meetings’ then you probably need to do something different. Involving these workers is more effort but it makes the activities of the branch so much more real and meaningful. It is definitely worth it, as so many workers now are in more precarious situations. If the union movement doesn't work in a way to involve them then it won't win for anybody.

A Right to Language? Working in Deaf Education

An Anonymous SEN Worker

d/Deaf Education in Britain

There has been a lot in the news recently about how Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools are dramatically under-resourced and the devastating impact that is having on those children’s educational experiences and attainment. However, very rarely does a story about the provisions for specialised d/Deaf education break the news. I have been working in the sector for over six years and in that time I’ve been a notetaker (for deaf, small ‘d’ means not culturally Deaf, so likely they lipread, have cochlear implants, and don’t use British Sign Language (BSL)) and a communication support worker (CSW) (for Deaf, or ‘big D’ Deaf, meaning culturally Deaf, likely to be a BSL user and member of the Deaf community) in mainstream, state run further education colleges. I have also been a mental health support worker for Deaf adults, and a teaching assistant and 1:1 for a three year old with complex needs on top of deafness. In that time I have worked for a number of agencies and for Camden council, as well as for a Deaf charity.

The history of d/Deaf oppression via education becomes clear when you search the word ‘Oralism’. It’s beyond the scope of this article to elaborate on Oralism in any depth, but Deaf education has been blighted by the belief that suppressing sign language and teaching deaf children to lipread and speak is favourable. This has resulted in consistently poor literacy skills for d/Deaf individuals. I know of only one Deaf school in London (possibly in the whole of the UK?) that actually teaches in BSL, has Deaf teachers and a positive Deaf environment. The other d/Deaf schools offer something called ‘Total Communication’ (another ideology inevitably developed by hearing educators) which is a combination of Sign Supported English (SSE) and lipreading. Deaf educators and spaces that teach Deaf cultural, social and linguistic awareness are woefully underfunded and in terms of educational infrastructure, are constantly at risk of being underfunded into non-existence. Because the d/Deaf population is both large and small, approximately 150,000 BSL speakers in the UK, but up to four million d/Deaf or deafened, this group is underrepresented because it’s an ethically and ideologically complicated picture.

Technological advances in cochlear implantation have led to this being the first thing offered for parents of babies born deaf and the government do not (and have never) properly subsidised the teaching of British Sign Language. Deaf and hard of hearing children are cochlear implanted and sent to mainstream schools, and many Deaf adults speak about how isolated and difficult they found this to be. All this leads one to question, what does it mean to have a right to language and culture if you are deaf? I have found working in this sector massively interesting as both a peripatetic worker (meaning I travel from workplace to workplace) and contracted worker but found there is very little in the way of unionised organising for better working conditions. Deaf people have made gains recently in the development and launch of a BSL Curriculum, but in the absence of any extra government subsidy for the training of BSL teachers, it remains to be seen how this will be implemented into the education sector.

Working in the Sector

Everyone asks me, ‘oh interesting, how did you get into Deaf education?’ and the answer I usually offer is, the pay was OK. I was fed up working as a personal assistant to artists, and other piecemeal jobs, and the job my friend told me about, working as Deaf support, was paying roughly the same pay. I started at £18 per hour for notetaking work, got offered a free Level one British Sign Language course, offered by the agency (usually £500 or more) and I was able to go into different further education colleges and support d/Deaf students, with no training at all. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was doing extremely easy work, provided at minimum expense and maximum profit to the employer and not really at all tailored to the needs of the individual students, who often had complex needs on top of being d/Deaf. I loved it and found being in further education in state colleges gave me an insight into how the next generation are ‘coming up’. Spoiler alert, it’s a bit of a shit show.

My lack of training in this first job was really just a lack of effort on the part of my employer to ensure that I was able to adapt my work to meet the needs of the students. I think I did a written assessment and a touch typing test, but I am empathetic and care deeply about access to education, so I did my best and tried to build relationships with the students in order to adapt the notes as much as possible so that they would be useful to them. As a peripatetic worker it took a long time to connect with my co-workers in the same colleges, but I did work with the CSWs who supported the same students I did notetaking for. The best part about it was that I was a free agent, going to classes, all I had to do was text the agency administrator when I arrived. It’s no wonder I loved this work.

An average workday could look something like this: I turn up at the college in the morning and after the bureaucracy of actually getting access to the grounds (it took about two years of working regularly at one college before I got an ID card just to be allowed in, like any other staff), I would meet with a student outside their classroom and try to have a bit of a catchup. This would depend on how busy it was, and also on my own BSL skills, which took time to really develop. I would then be working alone, or also with a communication support worker. More often than not the student didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and just wanted to participate and blend in as much as possible; but that’s easier said than done if they relied upon BSL to access the content of the lesson. They would be looking at the CSW all the time, rather than the teacher, and they need to have all group discussion mediated through the CSW. Students would rarely ask anything specific from their note takers, and there was never any time for feedback on how useful my notes actually were for them, so it required me to try and gain an understanding of their literacy level and try to adapt my notes accordingly. I could be note taking   in Higher  National Certification classes for Construction, for example, and trying to transcribe and make sense of very complex, information-dense lessons. Doing this work could be quite exhilarating, engaging such a range of topics and subjects, but transcription work for two hours is obviously quite exhausting.

I would work with one student for the morning, then have to rush in my lunch hour by bus for more lessons in the afternoon with a different student in another college. You would learn almost nothing about the student before you arrive to work with them, basically just their name. You would never be informed about the decisions being made on how work was being allocated and the situation of the students you were being assigned to work with. I’ve had employers claim that they cannot give me any details in advance about the individual I am travelling across London to support, in work, or at school, ‘because of GDPR’. Terrified administrators think I’m going to sell the data of these students for an extra buck on my train journey to support them. Absurdity reigns. At one agency I was working for, it was a bit of an open secret that if you'd been working there for a while and you were the favourite, then you would be given the students perceived to be ‘easier’ to work with. I remember overhearing these types of power plays when I would visit the office; ‘if the worker doesn’t do what I want her to do, I can make her life really difficult’. I would overhear that and think, oh no, what am I getting into? What is this all really about? The students themselves almost certainly had no say in the relationship that they were entering into with support workers and note takers, and there was little effort to tailor lessons to their individual circumstances. CSWs, although often in training toward full interpreter status, would be put into situations well beyond their competency to support a student, like trying to interpret English for Speakers of Other Language lessons who didn’t have British Sign Language as a first language either.

This work could be very alienating, on many levels. For many students, until I or another CSW arrived, they might spend the whole day not communicating to another person in their own language of BSL. We were the only people around they could really speak to, and build more extended relationships and recognition with. We were also kept very apart from the rest of the staff, and there was never any incentive to sit down collectively and think through curriculum or delivery of lessons in a way that might positively impact the student. Large colleges just didn’t seem very interested in building relationships with the d/Deaf community or engaging them in any way. In a rational system, all related staff would gather together at the start of a term to work through a plan together; but it was a system conducive only to optimisation for the agency, and never for creating a supportive educational environment. Many students don’t know what their rights of access are, so they would just have to put up with what was ultimately a very shoddy experience of education. What I’ve learnt through my work is that illiteracy is a huge issue for fully BSL speaking and non ‘oral’ speaking Deaf people, and there aren’t the resources or structures in place to support them completing meaningful education or getting them into work. This is when the job would feel really horrible, if you are compelled to reproduce these dynamics; the work was often care-adjacent in terms of support, and you just were never given the resources to actually support students.

Conditions and Organising in the Sector

It turns out that my work as a note-taker was to be a short-lived era. The colleges eventually noticed that these workers seemed too happy, and maybe too relaxed? Or more likely their budgets for supporting students with additional access needs were squeezed, and certainly they decided it was too expensive. The agency I worked for no longer provides this service and I suspect they lost the contract after the COVID-19 pandemic. I caught a fleeting moment of the good times in 2019 to 2021 when the small agency I worked for still had contracts with some colleges in the local area. The agency was based out of a state run primary and secondary residential d/Deaf school and I like to think that it might have provided some continuity of care for the students who were transitioning from secondary to further education. Now it seems that the market has been dominated by two mega HR companies, Reed and Ranstad, that purport to provide the same service for less money which was £12.00 per hour when I last checked in 2024. I cannot bring myself to do this work at this rate.

There are complex class dynamics at play across the sector, which shape the types of work being done, who is receiving support, and through which means. BSL is ultimately financially pretty inaccessible to learn: training BSL levels one to three (basic competency) can cost upwards of £4,000 in courses, so often it is wealthy, elderly or middle aged, and middle-class people who have taken up learning and working in BSL as something close to a hobby, alongside the increasingly small set of young workers who have chosen it as a vocation through one of the very few Deaf Studies degrees left in the country. I worked for a while in a BSL-only speaking school, with the aim to improve my own BSL, but the work I was given wasn’t particularly useful for developing my conversational skills, and many workers in the sector are not necessarily trained to the right level to actually support who they are assigned to work with.

There is no union of peripatetic workers, particularly the CSW workers who often work with no training in quasi-interpreter roles, with adults or young adults who need access to courses in higher education colleges, so knowledge about poor conditions is not widely known or discussed. Given it’s such a small sector, people are very wary of being critical of the structures of work, as everyone knows everyone and it’s easy to develop a bad reputation. When I was working at colleges, the active unions for teaching and admin staff had little interest, or ability, to collectively organise with myself or other CSWs, as we were agency staff not directly employed by the school. The gap between us and the rest of the staff that was felt in the classroom is thus often reproduced in the union structures themselves, and we are kept isolated.

Interpreters themselves have a much stronger union, and so are able to ensure much higher costs for their services. This is important, of course, but it can also produce a dynamic in which the cost of interpreters is prohibitively expensive for many within the Deaf community. While it’s important that the Interpreters have a very strong union, it can tend to produce a dynamic in which Deaf people can only access their services if they are backed and funded by institutions. We end up in absurd situations where large, institutionally-backed events have interpreters when there aren’t actually any Deaf people in the audience, as there has been no effort for outreach into the community to get them along to the event. A politically ‘right on’ organisation with lots of funding for accessibility will be able to pay for a load of interpreters for their event, but most Deaf people can’t rely on an interpreter for their medical appointments. Interpreters also don’t work within school or colleges, at least that I’ve ever seen, so note-takers and CSWs remain without any protections or ability to really support one another through something like a union.

Alongside the wider privitisation  of this part of the sector it’s important to note, for example, the state of Access to Work as it currently stands. Access to Work is the governmental grant that funds individual Deaf workers’ access to interpreters at work, but the system has not been functional for a long while. [20]  Unsurprisingly, the initial application forms are prohibitively long and complicated, and then once the grant has been accepted, receiving payment for interpreters can take months to process. I’ve heard of interpreters sometimes waiting for a whole year for payment. This means that interpreters might avoid taking on jobs with those people that rely on state support, so yet again, the non-wealthy Deaf get the worst deal. The government is currently in the process of reforming Access to Work and produced a green paper consultation in the summer of 2025. The DWP apparently want employers to take more responsibility for providing access to Deaf and disabled workers, under the Equality Act, but we all know that this will mean that employers just won’t employ disabled people if it comes at a cost to them (see the excellent resource, Deaf Access to Work website for more information on that). The structural problems which we see in education therefore continue to filter up into the workforce, as d/Deaf continue to face marginalisation and workers attempting to support them experience precarity.

The limits of the current system are obvious to anyone working within it, and my ideal arrangement for this system would be to cut-out the middlemen as much as possible; the workers themselves should run the service and be in direct communication with the service users, so the relationships can be more directly tailored toward their needs. There is only one existing co-operative as far as I know, called Signalise in Liverpool, who work primarily to offer services for customers in the NHS and councils, and their system ensures Deaf clients have far more control over which interpreters they get for intimate situations such as doctors appointments, which is much better than the agency system. But these projects are not widespread.

I’ve tried to organise with other workers over the last few years, but it’s proved very challenging - the nature of the work means that you might never meet anyone else working for an agency, and consciousness about working conditions and rights amongst workers in the sector is a barrier to organising. I have increasingly, instead, channeled my energies into facilitating spaces for individuals in the Deaf and BSL community to have political discussions, such as on the complexity of sign language in terms of developing a political education. I’ve been involved in a project, for example, to help expand signs used for radical concepts, where there is a need for more visually indicative signs; everything currently gets reduced to a small set of signs, like a raised fist for socialism, anarchism and communism (although capitalism is signed as a fat belly!). The work of the Deaf Anarchy  project is really fantastic on these topics. I’ve found it more useful to support spaces and projects on these topics to meet like-minded people, with a hope that this political work might provide the foundation for a more coherent campaign of worker and union organising, and the means for building a strong network.

Anyone who studies BSL will learn about the ways in which Deaf education has suffered and what it could be with the right funding and consciousness raising. Workers in the sector need to stand together to demand better, specialised provision and improved access rights for d/Deaf children to choose the interventions and adaptations they deserve. Empathetic communication support workers need to organise together to refuse under-paid, under-informed positions of ethically dubious double exploitation. We should demand to be brought into conversation with the teachers and heads responsible for the child’s educational opportunities and given the right training to be able to support them as best we can.

In the Deaf school I worked in I think I reached the apex of exploitation within the sector. I took on a role where I was responsible for assisting with complex educational, communication and medical needs of a deaf three-year-old with autism. I received one day of training, in the current en vogue STEAM [21]  and was basically left to get on with it. Although part of a team, I felt completely overwhelmed by the demands of this role and little to no pastoral support for navigating it. This is perhaps a more typical experience for any 1:1 Teaching Assistant that works within mainstream schooling with a child with SEN. If I were to go back to Deaf educational provision, I am keen to work as a freelance personal tutor, providing support for those in further education who have suffered at the hands of a mainstream environment and possibly been politicised in the process, opting to become ‘Full Deaf’, or stop speaking, unplug their cochlear implant and choosing to communicate only via BSL. How they will pay for my tutoring, or discover my services is, of course, another thing. I have a long term plan to organise with other workers to set up a co-op with Deaf and Hearing others who have worked in the sector and reject the exploitative agencies and depressing state school situation.

Please email editors@notesfrombelow.or g if you work in the sector, or simply want to support organising within it, to get in contact with the writer of this piece.

Challenging the State: Building a Rank and File in Higher Education

Rank-and-file  university w orkers

This is a collectively written contribution from a group of rank-and-file university workers in the UK. It covers our attempt to build and mobilise rank-and-file power across unions that represent workers in the UK Higher Education (UKHE) sector. We are all members of the University College Union (UCU), which represents academic and professional services staff in Higher and Further education nationally. We discuss how our union works, rank-and-file successes, and our current campaign for a precedent-setting sector-wide dispute with the UK government over the funding of Higher Education. The campaign developed from a series of ‘university rank-and-file day schools’ which we continue to participate in. The day schools have been a significant form of our organising. They centre in-person discussion, a mix of informal and formal coming together, a principle of eating together, and of meeting in explicitly convivial political spaces outside our workplaces.

Knowing the Issues

The disputes in British Higher Education have rumbled on for so long now that many of us have gone from students affected by strikes to workers and union members actively organising strike action over the past 8 years. Throughout this period of industrial disputes, we have had many different roles, from student supporters to casualised union members on the fringes of branches providing the legwork of getting the vote out, to insurgent branch committee members wrestling for control of moribund branches, to finally leading branches within local disputes and driving national union policy in our sector.

Our experience is varied and encompasses many different vantage points of how our union functions and the different levels of agency members feel within disputes. The rank-and-file approach we have adopted in our organising is not merely a political-ideological preference, even though many of us may be ideologically aligned with a ‘socialism from below’ approach. [22]  It has also been a practical response to a chronic lack of communication and information sharing from our central union. For lay members, accessing information about how our disputes are progressing, what our negotiators are actually arguing for on our behalf, or what the other unions within the dispute think, is almost impossible to understand. Even now, as experienced senior union reps and officials, we struggle to find or interpret what is being argued for in our name.

Factionalism is a major obstacle to members' understanding how our union works and trying to organise within it. Factionalism in the union has the effect of keeping us in a holding pattern: what appears as opposition keeps us defaulting to bureaucracy and a top-down trade unionism. We have become caught in cycles of one faction posing a poorly worked-out industrial strategy, fighting the other faction to implement it, and the other resisting or eventually pulling us out of it. We are marched up and down the hill, with little input or debate beyond a polarised factional blame game. The most frustrating outcome of this factionalism in the union is not the confusion created by their divisions, but, in fact, it is the unspoken agreement factions have had in sidelining the voices of members. This has been particularly devastating when it comes to the scandal of casualisation that lower-paid and younger members face. And has foreshadowed the union’s inability to challenge cuts to departments, which have triggered a wider redundancy crisis across the sector. This inaction and unresponsiveness from the dominant factions to the issues so many members face at work leaves the deep anger many of us feel untapped and unorganised.

A shared rejection of factionalism, along with the failings of the central union to connect members across branches let alone unions, has been a key starting point for those of us trying to exit the doom spiral of the sector. It has been patently clear that we must take responsibility for building our own rank-and-file structures for communication and action, independent of both the union bureaucracy and the factions that (re)produce it. Between us we have been involved in a number of attempts to build this kind of infrastructure for members to organise and act.

Before the day schools, there have been attempts to cohere rank-and-file efforts, either by creating WhatsApp groups, email threads, or issue-specific campaigns. These tended to get stuck at the question of what to do about the bureaucracy, ending up falling back into the factional tug-of-war over elections, rather than building the capacities of rank-and-file members to act on their own initiative. In the midst of continued strike action across 2021-22, and with a ballot going out to extend the mandate for industrial action going out in March 2022, a group of rank-and-file members identified a need in UCU for a more organised Get the Vote Out (GTVO) strategy. In March, branch activists from across the union held a ‘GTVO Rank-and-File training workshop’ online. It aimed to support members to streamline their branch’s GTVO process by sharing the strategies of branches that had successfully upped their voting turnout. One of the outcomes of this workshop was a WhatsApp group in which members could continue to share best practices in efforts to get their branch over the threshold for industrial action, with members at branches who’d already crossed the threshold even stepping into lesser-resourced branches to help with their GTVO efforts. As UCU moved through a series of aggregated ballots that would see industrial action run well into 2023, the WhatsApp group amassed more and more members, and its purpose morphed over time.

At its best, the group facilitated the sharing of resources and information across geographically separated branches, leading to things like a map of facilities time allocations, which starkly showed the unequal resources of branches and empowered branches to argue for more facilities time. As with many large WhatsApp groups, the discussion sometimes became directed by factional investments, or turned into long-form dissections of, or arguments about, our union’s executive structures and elected officials. These structures are often wrapped in secrecy and a hierarchy of insider knowledge, as no minutes or voting records are produced from them. Once our extended period of industrial action was behind us, the notion that the group represented a rank-and-file approach to organising for the future of the sector felt increasingly distant.

A number of us who have gone on to organise and participate in the day schools saw the value of what this WhatsApp group had achieved as a space for cross-branch organising. We were keen to replicate it, but recognised the need for an in-person component. The COVID pandemic had shifted branch and organising meetings online, and even as restrictions lifted, online calls often continued as a preferred default. This was great for inviting wider participation (those with caring responsibilities or who didn’t live near their place of work could join or listen in), but it also presented obstacles - cameras off, writing in the chat, and dodgy wifi connections all made it difficult to find the space needed to rebuild branches and trust after exhausting industrial action, and to have bigger conversations about wholesale changes in the sector.

The University Worker is a rank-and-file bulletin started in 2018 during the USS pension dispute. It is printed out and handed out on the picket lines and published on the Notes from Below website. The bulletin has been an information-sharing and agitational tool, and a longer write-up of the bulletin’s history can be found in issue 17 of the Notes from Below. [23]  The bulletin has acted as a political centre, drawing together workers in the sector aligned with rank-and-file politics. Reading the bulletin, it was clear that as the situation in our sector deteriorated further, with a wave of redundancies sweeping across universities, our unions woefully failed to address the moment. They lagged behind in even recognising and naming the crisis that was unfolding, one which has now become the dominant feature of the sector. The urgency of the redundancy crisis and the absence of unions in addressing it nationally meant that we needed to go beyond a bulletin and take responsibility for organising across our branches and unions to fight back.

After long conversations on picket lines and in the pub, there was a clear sense of what needed to be done. Cultures of communication across branches, where best practice and innovative approaches can be built on, were already happening, but without any organisation or shared strategy. We know that our management bodies talk to each other, that when one has some nasty scheme locally to push the boundaries of how much labour law can be flouted, this spreads to other workplaces and workforces like a virus. We also know that union bureaucrats looking for an easy life by suppressing activity, learn from each other too. Knowing what the issues are is one thing; building an organisational solution is another.

The Day Schools

We organised our first day school in March 2024. It came in the wake of both the UCU general secretary election and a continuing lack of response to the crisis in higher education. The format of the day school took inspiration from the Workers in Palestine event a few months before, which brought together workshops and talks. During a period in which in-person meetings still had some post-COVID novelty, this longer format provided much-needed face-to-face organising space.

The first day school  was relatively straightforward: we booked a room, spoke to people about what might be useful in an event, and started promoting it. The first session focused on discussing the funding crisis in higher education. This is an issue that deeply shapes our experiences of working in higher education, but was rarely discussed in union spaces (other than “of course, we’re in favour of free education, but that’s not part of this dispute…”). The second session was a practical workshop on how to organise against redundancies. The results of the session were later written up into a shareable document. [24]  After a collective lunch, we returned for a session on Palestine and international solidarity, led by Workers in Palestine. For the final session, we hosted a discussion on how to build rank-and-file power at a university. This first day laid down the blueprint for the day schools that we would continue to develop. They involved a mix of discussions and practical sessions, with a focus on trying to develop resources that could be used more widely.

It is also important to note that we wanted these meetings to feel very different to the union spaces that many of us organise in locally. First, they were open to anyone who worked in the university, rather than just members of a specific union. We started the first day school  with a caveat for participation: “If you want to complain about the national leadership or talk about factions in the bureaucracy, this isn’t the space for that.” Instead, we wanted a participatory space in which we could think collectively about the problems we were facing. In terms of developing the day schools, this meant experimenting with how we could share knowledge and strategies with each other. In part, this is why these had to be “day schools” rather than just “meetings.” If we had met for an hour or two, we would not have been able to get into the topics in the same way.

We organised day schools roughly monthly, skipping some months depending on the time of year and other activities. We deliberately avoided booking any of the day schools in university spaces, and encouraged new attendees to participate in organising and running new sessions. To aid this, we tried to allocate time at the end of each day school to plan our next session, setting up a smaller group of volunteers to lead on organising. Attendance fluctuated a great deal, but gradually we began to develop a core group of rank-and-file members whose workplace organising informed the topics covered in the day schools. This included funding cuts, redundancies, casualisation, Palestine solidarity, industrial organising, and building cross-union power. In order to understand the state of union organisation across the sector, we developed a survey of branches. In collectively assessing the responses within the day schools, we realised that not all institutions had active union branches with basic structures, and that day-to-day participation varied massively. We also realised that some people found it difficult to access the information and advice they required to organise effectively. We wanted to equip people with the kind of knowledge that would facilitate workers’ self-organisation. This involved encouraging others to share their experiences and collectively produce resources informed by prior struggles. For example, in the workshop on how to organise over redundancies, we discussed the technicalities of the process of building towards a local strike ballot, as well as the political barriers people might face, from both inside and outside of their union. The emphasis on a bottom-up approach to organising informed the resources which were produced as a result, these included a guide to building an anti-casualisation network and campaign, as well as an organising guide for rebuilding branches. Our overarching aim has been to facilitate rank-and-file union organisation, by this we mean a form of organisation which is worker-led and enables democratic, participatory engagement in decision-making, strategy, and campaigning.

The Secretary of State Dispute  

At the start of 2025, we shifted the focus of the day schools. Redundancies were escalating across the sector, and the absence of any national union strategies became particularly stark. In advance of the January day school, we put out a call for written submissions to discuss how we could respond to the growing crisis. Sharing writing in advance of the day school allowed us to begin working through concretely what was possible and what we could do. We held the January day school at MayDay Rooms, a social movement archive and event space in the centre of London. After getting drenched waiting in the rain for whoever of us had the keys, we sat around a long table in the kitchen. The first session of the day was discussing the papers that had been sent in. The papers collectively registered an existential crisis in HE, all trying to work through what the sector is actually for, the political economy of the university today, and given the dismal answers people came up with to those questions, why save HE? Our discussion that day was circling around the need to develop a national campaign that could take on the question of funding.

Rather than fighting redundancies on a university-by-university basis, we wanted to find a way to deal with the cause of the crisis, not only the symptoms. We discussed that such a campaign couldn’t develop only in the room; it required getting organised with comrades in other campus unions, with local communities in the areas where we work, and of course with students. We need to be collective not only to materialise and fight such a dispute, but to begin to work out what we want to win, what university we are fighting for. In our own branches we also would need to navigate the bad feeling after the recent collapse of the UCU Four Fights campaign. The collapse of that campaign had multiple spectacular fallouts: from the redundancies we had met to discuss, to branches facing hundreds of days of salary deductions as a result of a brutal employer response to the marking and assessment boycott. As we talked, some of us started making lunch. We stopped and ate together, took a break on the roof terrace, got to know each other a bit better, chatted informally about our experiences in our branches. The second half of the day was led by comrades from anti-casualisation campaigns led by postgraduate researchers and teaching associates. Their struggles were inextricable from what we had discussed earlier in the day, and they brought more knowledge and fronts to our fight - from questions of whether or not UCU would support wildcat action, to the relationship between our employers and external research institutes and companies.

All this is about funding. The challenge we had was to work out how we could actually strike  over something like funding. Under UK law, political strikes are illegal. We therefore had all been told - from both the left and the right factions of the union bureaucracy - that it simply wasn’t possible to do something like this. Instead, we needed to strike over pensions or pay, but “wink, wink”, we all would know it was actually about much wider demands. At the end of the January day school, we set ourselves the task to find out how a national dispute could be feasible.

A group of us started searching for examples from other public sector unions. We also read through the Trade Union and Labour Relations ( Consolidation ) Act 1992  (TULRCA), to try and understand whether there was unexplored industrial and legal terrain we could exploit. And we found that under s244 of TULRCA, a dispute between a Minister of the Crown and workers can be treated as a dispute between the employer and workers if the dispute with the employer cannot be settled without a minister intervening to exercise a power conferred on them. According to the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the Secretary of State for Education has statutory powers (via the Office for Students) to alter the fee cap and make grants. We also found that in 2016, the National Union of Teachers had successfully defended their right under s244 to hold a one-day strike against the Secretary of State in a dispute over funding for Sixth Form (post-16) Colleges.

The strategy of pursuing a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over the funding model for HE developed out of discussions at the January day school. We then organised a series of further meetings to discuss the strategy and how to begin a campaign around it. These discussions were distinct from the day schools in that they were held online, for no more than an hour, usually in the evening. As a rank-and-file collective, we agreed that such a strategy required legal advice, for which we raised funds through our respective branches. We commissioned legal advice and drafted a branch motion on carrying the trade dispute to a motion at the annual UCU congress. The motion committed the UCU to urgently explore opening a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over HE funding; coordinate with other HE unions and students to build wide support for the dispute; and campaign to build awareness and support for the dispute. Work on the motion and fundraising for the legal advice involved further conversations with members, branch representatives and branch committees. This resulted in many UCU branches (including Queen Mary, Goldsmiths, Kingston, Essex, UAL, Durham, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford, Nottingham, and UCL) passing local motions in support of the UCU Higher Education Sector conference motion (HE14).

Getting a motion on the agenda for the national congress was one step in the wider strategy. Members continued to present the motion in their branches to build support for it at congress, and to use the motion to hold much-needed discussions about areas of branch and national work that urgently need reflection and action - industrial strategy, sector funding, and branch resources. We also learnt from the kinds of discussions branches were having about what excited and what concerned members about the motion. Different branches have wildly different cultures, and although all UCU HE branches were facing some kind of issue that the motion addressed (mass redundancies and the overall degradation of our terms and conditions), these challenges were differently felt, differently challenged, and taking up different kinds of branch resources. Sharing the conversations in branches helped those of us who would be presenting the motion at congress to understand what we would be walking into in terms of support and opposition, and what concerns our statements for the motion would need to address. It also kept us committed to the purpose of the day schools: to make a participatory space for thinking through and collectively plotting responses to the problems we face in work.

The annual UCU congress takes place in a large convention centre in a city somewhere in the UK. On the second day of the congress, the union splits into its two sector conferences, Higher Education and Further Education. In the sector conferences everyone is sat at long tables facing the stage where a mix of elected officials and union bureaucracy preside over events. Delegates go to a podium to present the motion; then follows a debate chaired by the president, which takes the form of delegates speaking for and against a motion, for no more than two minutes each. This set-up is barely conducive to getting through the agenda, and it is definitely not a space in which you can hold a consensus-building discussion in the round. It is a debate-style system that favours those who feel comfortable holding the floor and responding in the moment. As a scene, it can feel deeply alienating for many delegates: you watch lots of people who have worked closely together over many years (but are organised into opposing factions) run up and down the aisles in heightened urgency to get their motions passed. The agenda is long, and most branches will have had little or no time to discuss the hundreds of motions and their consequences before sending delegates. Our preparation for the May 2025 Congress included discussion about how congress itself works to make sure anyone attending for the first time would know what to expect. We knew we would have limited time to present the motion, so we decided to hold a fringe meeting for the evening before the sector conference. The meeting followed the format of the day schools and took place in a social non-institutional venue (this time a bookshop). Everyone attending congress was welcome. We made flyers about the motion and the fringe event to hand out at congress and on WhatsApp. Those of us based in the city encouraged members from the other local university union branches to come to the meeting. At the meeting, we presented the context and details of the motion and then had an open floor discussion. Members from across the union attended. It was a generative and positive discussion. After the meeting, we went for pizza. Several people at the meeting said they found the discussion energising, and they had never attended a union meeting like it. This makes sense given what we have learnt in previous day schools and from our survey about the variation in branch cultures.

The motion passed overwhelmingly. Lots of delegates we did not know came up to talk to us about the motion, and acknowledged the care we had taken in how we presented it, navigating the divides within the union that often structure congress voting. Other delegates wanted to talk more about the next steps, or their concerns about how the motion would be taken forward, or not, by the Higher Education Committee. The motion was, both before and after it passed, being used by various elements of the union as part of already existing agendas. Everyone from the General Secretary to UCU Left spoke to the press about it, attempting to frame the motion in relation to the previous UCU strategy. These discussions and machinations helped us start to think about what might be needed after congress to get the dispute to happen, and the kinds of meeting and organising spaces we would need to support the dispute and our wider unity.

The long-term success of the strategy and dispute still very much depends on a broad rank-and-file campaign. We therefore called a series of national meetings across June and July to explore how to organise a trade dispute over funding in HE. This felt like a daunting task, especially given how many of us are engaged in local disputes, fighting redundancies and cuts within our branches. However, it was clear from these meetings that many of us realise the underlying causes of our local struggles, as well as those over pay and conditions more broadly, are structural, and the current HE fee-based funding model is core to that. While pursuing a dispute over funding is something distinct from our local disputes, it is also about linking up these multiple defensive struggles we are involved in and getting on the front foot to challenge the root causes going forward. In a moment of crisis within the sector, this feels vital.

As a result of these recent national meetings, multiple UCU branches have passed a post-congress motion, committing to help organise a national dispute over funding. In addition, a series of new regional and cross-union rank-and-file groups and day schools have been established to contribute to this organisation. By collectively working on this strategy in this way, we hope it will not only further our fight for HE but also energise the form of participatory, worker-led organisation across branches that has given rise to this campaign. Together, we are building a cross-branch, cross-union reps network in higher education.

Turning the Tide: Organising Against Militarism in Schools

Disarm Education

Disarm education is a campaign by educators, parents and students to stop the collaboration of places of education with arms companies and weapons manufacturers.

What is Disarm Education?

Disarm Education is a grassroots campaign by educators, students, and parents to stop the collaboration between schools and colleges with arms companies and weapons manufacturers. We firmly believe that students and young people should not be exposed to the production of war and violence should not be normalised through education.

The campaign has two simple demands. That it is the duty of students, educators, and parents everywhere to resist the normalisation of war machinery in our places of work and education by:

Uncovering the ties between schools/colleges and arms companies

Establishing agreements in schools/colleges to prohibit or end any partnerships with companies producing arms.

The campaign follows a strategy of targeted boycotting by specifically schools/colleges to end ties with the 30 arms companies that currently have UK operations (beyond marketing and civilian industries), found using the 2022 SIPRI Arms Industry Database. This means seizing to advertise or promote work experience, apprenticeship and careers opportunities, not inviting arms companies in to deliver workshops/talks/assemblies, disinviting arms companies from careers roadshows, ending both financial and non-financial sponsorships, and not using materials or resources produced by arms companies.

Over the last three years, we have seen war proliferate globally. In Palestine, an active genocide is taking place following 78 years of systematic ethnic cleansing. In Sudan, a counter-revolutionary war fuelled by the global arms trade has led to as many as 400,000 being killed, with the scale of human destruction so great that in El Fasher city the bloodshed could even be seen from aerial satellite imagery. And in Ukraine, we have seen the expansion of NATO’s military presence come to heads with the Russian invasion, with an estimated 1.5 million casualties as a result of the endless military proliferation.

Where there is war, weapons manufactured and sold by Britain are present. The loss of human life and the destruction of the social fabric caused by war only brings an endless supply of profit to weapons manufacturers and arms dealers. Revenues from arms sales and military services by the 100 largest companies globally reached $632 billion in 2023, yet another increase from the year before. The endless cycle of war is systematically encouraged by these merchants of death.

The campaign was born in response to a call from 30 Palestinian trade unions in late 2023 for global trade unions in relevant industries to:

Refuse to build weapons destined for Israel

Refuse to transport weapons to Israel

Pass motions to this effect

Take action against complicit institutions and pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel.

As educators and trade unionists organising in the NEU, we recognised that the call was supported by the NEU's sister unions: the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) and the Union of Kindergartens Workers. This was a direct call on education workers to end the collaboration between their institutions and weapons manufacturers.

We were also moved and inspired by organic student action across the country. As a direct result of school council walkouts in December 2023, Luton Sixth form suspended all ties with Leonardo due to the company’s involvement in the genocide in Gaza. Previously, the company provided work experience and early careers advice to students. In East London, hundreds of students boycotted an assembly delivered by Wes Streeting MP over the Labour Party’s complicity in the genocide. Up and down the country, we have seen students resist the draconian efforts to censor solidarity with Palestine in places of education by wearing keffiyehs, sporting Palestine badges, and demanding that it is discussed in the curriculum. We were also inspired by historical student-led anti-war campaigns, for example, thousands of schoolchildren across Britain organised school walk outs as part of the ‘School Students Against War’coalition in protest of the invasion of Iraq in 2001.

To respond to the call from Palestinian trade unions, we ultimately narrowed the focus of the campaign to focus on ending partnerships and ties with arms companies. This is because schools are essential to normalising the place of arms companies in an increasingly militarised society, and more significantly, necessary for arms companies to keep building their workforce.

In recent years, there has been some success in organising against arms companies at universities. University students have successfully resisted the presence of arms companies at university careers fairs and in 2024, John Healey, the Defence Secretary made a statement reproaching these campaigns for slashing recruitment figures.

However, our campaign recognised that arms companies begin their recruitment offensives much earlier. Careers ‘outreach’ activities begin as early as primary school to entrench pro-militarist values and to normalise these companies as simple career opportunities. Focusing this campaign on ending careers partnerships with arms companies thus has a very material impact. Firstly, it exposes arms companies for what they are: merchants of violence and death rather than engineers and innovators. This weakens their social licence to operate. Secondly, it builds consciousness in educators and in students as the ideological project to normalise war is exposed, forcing us to interrogate what working with these companies ultimately results in. Finally, if enough schools and colleges establish commitments to end working with these companies, we massively reduce their pool of potential future workers.

The British Arms Industry Globally

The past few centuries have seen military technologies produced in the UK used to threaten, hurt, and kill people across the globe by Britain itself and the states we export weapons to. Time and time again, the British military has launched wars encouraged and supplied by the arms industry. The arms industry has close ties to both the British armed forces and the political class. A foundational principle of trade union organisation is internationalism: the idea that an injury to one worker, anywhere in the world, is an injury to all.

Over the last two years, the British arms industry has directly contributed genocide of Palestinians: The entire rear fuselage and tail assembly for every F-35 fighter jet used by Israel is built in Britai n  through companies such as BAE systems, Leonardo and Martin-Baker. Elsewhere in Britain, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin develop munitions used to decimate Palestinian life into oblivion, all for the benefit of their shareholders' pockets. Since 2008, Britain has licensed £560 million worth of arms exports to Israel.The full scale of military production is even higher, due to the 'open' nature of many export licenses.

The British arms industry’s contribution to the genocide in Palestine is part of a longer history of involvement in global violence and conflict. This is a continuation of the logic that meant British weapons, equipment, and logistical support was supplied throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the BAE tanks and jets sent to the Indonesian government in the East Timor genocide; and the British aircraft, bombs and missiles sold to the Saudi-led coalition that has killed an estimated 377,000 people in Yemen. In Sudan, as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commit human atrocities on a mass scale, British arms companies cash in through supplying weapons that are exported via Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

As trade unionists and workers living and working in a country that for centuries colonised, pillaged, and murdered people across the world, we have a responsibility to fight against global injustice. Dismantling the British arms industry is core to bringing down the systems of global inequalities constructed through European colonialism and imperialism. Central to this is weakening a social licence to operate partly constructed by partnerships with schools and the recruitment of students.

The Arms Industry in Schools and Colleges

A key demand of the campaign is to uncover ties between places of education and arms companies. We have sent freedom of information requests to over 16,000 schools across England. While the full extent of the relationship between schools and colleges is still being uncovered, from the initial research two key themes emerge.

First, British schools and colleges have been pushed into these partnerships after decades of underfunding of the education system. Schools and colleges have been forced to collaborate with private businesses to fund the curriculum and maintain resources. These businesses in turn have had unprecedented control of curricula, pedagogy, and governance structures. In a capitalist system, the role of education transforms from a means to instill young people with the pursuit of knowledge to instead producing the future workforce. Places of education also directly reinforce dominant ideologies, values, and beliefs. In this case, the partnership between schools and arms companies reinforces the state’s production of war and violence.

Second, for arms companies, places of education are a means to recruit and shape the workforce. Early recruitment initiatives allow arms companies to mould  the qualities they want to see in their future workplace. The diversification of manufacturing portfolios by arms companies obscures their central function, the manufacturing of weapons, used to kill millions of people across the globe. Partnerships in schools and colleges orientated around STEM gives these companies legitimacy, a way of cleaning up their image and positioning themselves as world leaders of engineering and technology.

To illustrate this, we can consider a company like BAE Systems. BAE collaborates extensively with UK schools and post-16 institutions. On its own website, BAE boasts spending approximately £100m in education, skills and early careers activities in Britain annually. The centre point of this is the ‘STEM Roadshow,’ supported by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, which has led to 5,000 school visits, reaching over 1.3 million pupils.

In these career roadshows, companies like BAE demonstrate advanced technologies to entice students while obscuring their central function. For example, the theme of this year’s STEM roadshow is Artificial Intelligence, where pupils made songs and music videos with a robot dog called Lexi. This doesn’t show students how these robot dogs are currently being used in the battlefield.

Companies also focus on topics such as space, electricity, robotics, computing and coding while not necessarily revealing how these same technologies are used to manufacture weapons. In 2025, BAE announced £3.5m in funding to continue the programme for a further five years. BAE employees sit on a number of governing boards across schools in Cumbria, and in 2015 it became the  non-financial sponsor  of Furness Academy in 2015. Senior BAE employees maintain two  positions  on the school’s governing body.

Another example is Babcock International Group. They are the  38th largest arms company  in the world, with 74% revenues coming from arms. The company has partnerships with Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd, a state-owned aerospace manufacturer that supplies the Israeli military. Babcock Learning and Development Partnership was formed in 2012 and ran for 10 years as an agreement between Devon Country Council and Babcock to provide school support services, including attendance monitoring and pupil assessment. They also provided a range of education services, resources, training, conferences and online learning. In addition, Babcock has a team  of over 100 STEM Ambassadors who work with local schools and colleges, as well as work experience and apprenticeship programmes, who by their own claims have reached over 30,000 students in the UK.

A final illustration of the nature of the relationship between the arms companies and schools comes from Lockheed Martin, the principal contractor for the F-35 aircraft. In 2022, Lockheed Martin announced a £600,000 “skills development deal” for educational institutes in the North East of England alone. Perhaps even more perversely, in 2023 it  produced activity packs for British STEM week which included a colouring in exercise of an F-35 fighter jet, aimed for primary age students.

Alternatives to the Arms Industry

Two common arguments that we encounter in the campaign is that 1) arms companies provide career opportunities to students and 2) we need these companies to sponsor a declining STEM education.

On the first argument, fundamentally, we believe that every child should be entitled to a life of learning, dignity, and freedom, wherever they are born. Opportunities for one group of students here in Britain should not come at the expense of the deprivation and destruction of the opportunities and lives of young people across the world, which the arms trade is responsible for.

Militarisation is damaging the futures of all students, not just the young people growing up in conflict zones where military equipment is being deployed, but also in our own communities across the UK. It locks us into cycles of conflict and compromises our ability to address pressing global challenges, like climate change and widening social inequality. It diverts funds away from social goods, whilst directly contributing to the climate and ecological crises that will define the rest of our young peoples’ lives. We know that military jobs have a lower economic multiplier effect than other forms of investment into public infrastructure such as rail and healthcare.

An alternative to the militarisation of our economy is a ‘just transition’ programme. The same STEM skills that weapons manufacturers desire are needed in a hugely increasing industry: renewable energy. As far back as 1975, workers at the Lucas Aerospace company proposed that their skills in weapons manufacturing be used for ‘socially conscious’ manufacturing, such as medical equipment and renewable energy. Since then, many former weapons manufacturers have transitioned to creating items for civilian use, including sustainable energy. In 2014, 16,000 in the UK were employed in offshore wind energy: in 2025, that number sits at around 55,000 - an increase of almost 250%.

On the second argument, we recognise that there is a crisis in STEM education. In Britain, there is a chronic shortage of STEM teachers. The most recent recruitment statistics show only 63% of the recruitment targets for Maths teachers were met, going down to 36% in Computing and 17% in Physics. There is also a shortage of 150,000 STEM researchers and technicians which comes at an estimated cost to the UK economy of £1.5bn. Despite recommendations from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) to address this shortfall, by “increased funding for the further education sector, with a focus on supporting infrastructure and teaching”, we have seen a sharp decline in funding for the FE sector.

The defunding of STEM education is a part of a broader picture of education cuts. Cuts to education funding in 2026 are the equivalent of salaries for 12,400 school staff, or 5,700 teachers and 6,700 support staff. The gap in government funding means that 75% of schools will be forced to make cuts next year.

The crisis in STEM education can’t be mitigated by a few arms companies. As the Stop School Cuts campaign demonstrates, we need to restore 14 years of funding cuts to education to see better teacher retention, improved classroom sizes and better outcomes for students across the country. We can’t rely on unaccountable arms companies to replace the role of government in providing a fully funded STEM education for our students. Giving arms companies this role means that we remove accountability and transparency from the curriculum whilst giving these merchants of death the power to shape teaching and learning to fit their workforce needs.

Organising so far

In April 2025, the NEU voted to affiliate to the campaign in its national conference. This means the largest teaching union in Europe voted to campaign against the militarisation of our schools and colleges. To achieve this, we passed affiliation motions at supportive districts in Hackney, Waltham Forest and Oxfordshire where there was already a strong organising presence. The NEU is mostly organised through “districts”, so to prepare for the vote, we began to develop a presence at this level, through speaking at branch meetings, joining the trade union block at national Palestine demos, collaborating with other left NEU groups, and hosting an organising workshop prior to the conference vote.

To develop the campaign nationally, we have now shifted our focus to developing the campaign in districts and workplaces while continuing to host workshops and meetings at national conferences and events. Since April, 15 districts across the country have voted to affiliate to the campaign. Affiliating allows the campaign to provide workplace reps with organising resources and training, as well as gives workplace reps the support to build the campaign more locally.

Passing district affiliations gives workplace reps organising support and cover. We have already seen success in this strategy in a school in Manchester where an organiser took the campaign to their workplace. The NEU committee in this workplace ran a termly workshop for members on political issues affecting education broadly, and following the national affiliation, they held a workshop on the increased presence of arms companies in schools. The organisers promoted the meeting across the school and included a survey to gauge members opinions on arms companies and tangentially the armed forces in schools. The meeting had a positive turnout with some members attending their first ever union meeting. This resulted in the workplace branch affiliating to the campaign, meaning that reps and the members will now organise towards getting the school to commit to being free from arms companies.

Practical steps to organise institutions to commit to being free from arms companies will depend on their context. In regions where arms companies have minimal presence, reps could work with members to create open letters and petitions to their senior leadership teams to break ties - this was successful in the aforementioned school in Manchester, where 50 staff members signed an open letter to cancel a workshop hosted by the RAF. In regions where there is political support for anti-war causes such as the genocide in Palestine, reps may work with local solidarity groups and parents to build leverage to end these ties. Where arms companies have a strong presence, a longer-term strategy will be required with cross-union liaison and worker outreach to push for a worker-led just transition programme - some of this work has already begun with campaign groups such as Workers for a Free Palestine.

The key to developing this campaign in workplaces is by building union strength more generally. Regular workplace meetings which engage members on issues linking pay and conditions to broader political struggle will be integral in demonstrating the relationship between inequalities in the workplace and global injustice. Success of the campaign will rely on SLT and governors deciding to not work with these arms companies anymore: strength and leverage relies on members collectively organising for this, with the support of students, teachers and the wider community behind them.

The current Labour government is using imperialism abroad alongside inciting increased nationalism at home to secure the interests and profits of arms companies at record levels, while the working class are faced with stagnating wages and degraded standards of living. The demand to divest from supporting endless wars abroad, or the production of weapons used to drive war, is in direct relationship to the demand for better working and living conditions. Between 2022 and 2023, major strike action led by education workers across Britain led to a revised pay offer by the government, demonstrating that industrial strength is a driving factor in winning economic demands. Beyond the confines of a single institution, education workers make up about 27% of the public sector workforce - this industrial base has the power to demand a redistribution away from increased militarism to investment in the public sector. Likewise, the anti-war movement in the last two years, has mobilised millions of people across Britain to take political action and it is the work of each trade union organiser to draw this section of the working class into our unions. Strengthening an internationalist position in our trade union organization will be fundamental to developing working class organisation by building positive power - the role of trade unions thus is not confined to dealing with grievances and managing disputes but rather to build working class self-governance both domestically and abroad.

The Path for a Demilitarised Education

So far, the campaign has focused on developing in NEU districts and workplaces. Beyond affiliation, rank-and-file workers will need to develop worker committees and develop density of support in their workplaces to push institutions to end ties. As workers in the Lucas Aerospace combine pushed for alternatives to arms production, these workers committees need to demonstrate viable alternatives to collaborating with arms companies - this includes campaigning on both a national level for better funding of STEM education, and on a local level of working with organisations that don’t harm people and the planet. This will be integral to ensuring that there is an industrial base for the campaign and that there is a material focus driving the campaign forward.

To develop this into a mass campaign, alongside developing in our workplaces, we will now need to turn our attention to engaging parents and students. We have already seen organic support amongst community organisers to boycott arms companies in schools. For example, Hastings and District Palestine Solidarity Campaign launched a ‘Schools Out for General ‘Genocide’ Dynamics’ campaign to give parents, careers, and students tools and resources to demand their schools stops hosting the arms company in East Sussex. Connecting workplace-level organisations with local internationalist ones, such as PSC branches, will be integral to developing the campaign amongst parents and students. This will provide important leverage to the campaign when taking the demands to SLT and governors.

A key challenge for the campaign will be passing this in workplaces which are heavily reliant on subsidies or support from arms companies. This is regionally concentrated in areas where the arms industry has a heavy presence, for example, Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. To address this, we know we need to have a dual strategy of developing industrial strength within the NEU whilst also supporting arms workers organising against arms manufacturing within their own unions. We can do this through worker outreach and supporting internal efforts to push for arms conversion.

We recognise that this campaign will not be easily won without an alternative to the increasing militarisation of our society. A joint trade union and political approach will be necessary to curtail the subsidisation of the arms industry, at the expense of social welfare and investment into public infrastructure. Industrially, we need to win the argument that cuts to funding for health, education, transport is a political decision which prioritises warfare over welfare. The primary setting where we can do this is in our workplaces and trade unions.

We have already seen wins in schools and colleges across the country. The tide is turning against never ending war and ever increasing militarisation. If we have 1, 10, 100, or 1000 fewer workers working on arms manufacturing then that is a victory for the campaign. As educators and trade unionists, we believe that education should create a space which allows collective liberation to flourish. Schools and colleges should be spaces of critical thought and creative collaboration. A space for educators and students to raise collective consciousness together, to challenge injustice, and to build an imagination of a better world for all.

‘A Lesson in Class Struggle’: Working in a South London School

Matthew

Matthew is a former teaching assistant in a secondary school.

Introduction

This worker’s inquiry is based on the year I spent working as a teaching assistant in a secondary school. This school had only opened a few years prior, as part of a mid-sized academy chain based in a predominantly Black and South Asian, working-class area in South London. In many senses it represented the archetypal school in contemporary Britain - but it also had its own particularities that allowed for the opening up of novel paths of struggle.

This inquiry is slightly dated - I quit my job as a teaching assistant around three years ago, and have not worked in a school since. A lot has happened in that time, including a round of national school strikes, so naturally, there will be things that are not up to date. However, I hope recalling my experiences can still offer some use to those continuing to work and organise in the sector today.

The Workforce

Teachers

First, I want to give a general overview of the composition of the workforce within the school. When people think of school workers, they usually think of teachers. Teachers are obviously a huge part of school workforces, but they are by no means exhaustive. In my school, teachers made up just over a third of all staff. They were all university educated, mostly white and under the age of 40. The gender split, however, was fairly even. Around a third were either trainees or newly qualified teachers (NQTs), meaning they were required to do additional assessments outside normal teaching duties.

This hints at the level of attrition that existed within the teaching workforce - teacher turnover stood at almost 40% during the year I worked there. Turnover rates were usually higher in those subjects in which the school was already short staffed: in our grossly understaffed ‘Modern Foreign Languages’ department, every single member of the department who worked there had quit by the end of the academic year. The record for a resignation was just three days after originally starting.

Teaching Assistants

After teachers, the next biggest group of workers in the school were teaching assistants. This is the job that I did. We made up about 15% of the school workforce. Again, we were all university graduates, and gender wise, fairly balanced. However, we were mostly in our early twenties, and racially the most diverse part of the workforce. Turnover amongst TAs was particularly high - in the year I worked there, it stood at over 80%. By the time I had quit, I was the second longest-running worker in our department, longer than even our line manager.

We also earnt some of the lowest salaries in the school: around £18,500 a year when I started (including our additional central London weighting). Part of the reason this wage was so low was because, unlike teachers, we were employed on ‘term time only’ contracts. This meant that we were technically not working full-time, and therefore, not on full-time pay. Second jobs were common. Some of the TAs would work at the school’s ‘summer school’ to earn extra money over the holidays. Others had evening gigs working in hospitality or did freelance tutoring. We all found it increasingly hard to live on our wages - even more so for those who had caring responsibilities. I was regularly in overdraft debt, at the end of each month often praying the gates would be left open at my local station so I could save my £3 train fare. Grifting free lunches from the school canteen became so rife that the school management had to introduce a new registry system to put a stop to it.

Other School Workers

The remainder of the workforce were made up of various other small workforces - such as cleaners, caterers, welfare officers, IT, admin, facilities workers, as well as art and music technicians. Some of these, such as cleaners and catering staff, were outsourced to subcontractors. Others, such as admin and IT, had several “apprentices”, who could be paid less despite often doing exactly the same work as others in their department. There were also music teachers who worked various days in the school on freelance contracts.

Within the school workforce, there was a high level of stratification. Teaching assistants, by the nature of our job, had a lot of contact with other members of the workforce, particularly teachers and welfare, but also maintenance, IT and catering. This didn’t necessarily mean tensions were smooth between us and all these groups. Relationships between teachers and teaching assistants could often be fraught, with a tendency for some teachers to treat us as their inferiors, rather than coworkers. There were, of course, also teachers who made a significant effort to break this divisive and demanding attitude, for whom I had a lot of respect.

Many other teams were more isolated. Administration, maintenance and IT work, whilst they interacted a lot together, was fairly cut off from the rest of the school. Although teachers and teaching assistants interacted with them at lunchtimes, caterers were also fairly isolated from the rest of the workforce, due to different working hours and subcontraction. Cleaners were the most isolated in the school: partially again because they were outsourced, but also due to differences in language and because they only started work at 4pm, when most other workers had left or were finishing work.

Attempts to bridge these divides then were not easy, with it taking effort and care to build relationships between workforces. The fact that very few workers other than teachers had previously been recruited into the school’s union branch didn’t help this situation.

There also existed a final group of workers at the school: construction workers. Continuing building works meant that construction workers were a constant presence on site. Unfortunately, they were almost completely separated - both physically and technically through in their subcontraction - from the rest of the workforce. However, there was an interesting example of working-class solidarity that emerged from this workforce during my time at the school: when an anti-vaxx demonstration was held one day outside the school during hometime, and demonstrators began to assault students and staff who were trying to get home, the construction workers on-site immediately downed tools and came down to the entrance, forming a human shield with teachers to defend them. Whilst this could be put down to an act of basic human decency, the willingness of these workers to stop work, despite potential repercussions, to come to the defence of others was extremely encouraging. Thinking about how to integrate this workforce, their demands, and their industrial power into school worker organising is then a notable question for those of us who understand the importance of industrial unionism.

The Senior Leadership Team

The ‘Senior Leadership Team’ (SLT) also made up a significant part of the workforce: there were as many senior managers as there were teaching assistants. Here I am including vice-principals, deputy heads or headteachers, defined by their main responsibilities being to manage staff and “student behaviour”. At the time, all senior managers at my school all earned at least £60,000 a year - with the headteacher on six  figures. [25]  The SLT played a highly repressive function in relation to the workforce and student population. This was best highlighted by their social status within the school. They avoided using the staff room, were generally not welcome on Friday at after  work drinks, and when I visited the picket line at the school during the last round of school strikes, they were almost exclusively the only members of staff who went into work. In this sense, their class position within the workforce was pretty clear-cut. However, this also often manifested itself the other way round: for example, part way through the school year, the teaching assistant team were sent an email banning us from using the kitchenette we shared with SLT.

The Students

It’s important to recognise that it is not only the composition of the workforce in the school that is important. The student population are also incredibly important to consider, particularly in considering how militant movements may emerge in schools. Examples in recent years - such as the role of student protests in the anti-racist struggles at Pimlico Academy in 2021 [26]  - demonstrate the importance of students in initiating new struggles, escalating ongoing struggles, and often highlighting political blind spots within the workforce.

In my school, whilst the workforce was mostly white, the students were overwhelmingly from black and south-asian backgrounds. Whilst, like many places in London, the class demographics were slightly more mixed, the students were still overwhelmingly working-class, the majority living on the large council estates near the school, and high levels assigned ‘pupil premium’.

School students can often be unfairly viewed as apolitical, blank canvases to be influenced by older activists. However, in my experience, this is totally untrue. Large numbers of students were tapped into a number of political issues: Black Lives Matter, feminism, and LGBTQ+ liberation. It was a running joke on PHSCE  days, where social issues would be discussed, that students were the ones educating the teachers on these topics. A level of politicisation amongst the student body is perhaps exemplified by the actions of several year 7 students, who during the Sheikh Jarrah protests, removed the Israeli flags that were a part of a display in their playground.

On a more day-to-day level, I also witnessed students engaging in the struggle against schoolwork. For example, our school had a “three strikes and you’re out” rule, where students were given two warnings for minor disruptions to lessons - such as talking, moving around the classroom, or shouting out. On their third “infraction”, they would receive a detention. In many classes, students worked together, using up their two warnings to disrupt the lesson before another student took over. This way, lessons could be continually disrupted, preventing any work from being done, whilst no students received a detention due to the spreading out of their warnings. Whilst perhaps slightly frustrating a member of teaching staff, acts such as these represented the working-class creativity and resistance that existed within the classroom. Rather than being a politically neutral body, the students were a group who could, and did, take collective political action.

In an attempt to appeal to some sort of unique behavioural pedagogy that could be packaged up and sold in seminars by the academy federation, students were subject to increasingly authoritarian forms of management. One of the recently hired assistant heads at the school, whose particular remit was “student behaviour”, loved to boast about his military background. These authoritarian behavioural measures included being lined up and walked to lessons in silence, a culture of shouting at students, and heavy-handed isolation policies. Students were frequently sent to outside pupil referral units (PRUs), and whilst working there an internal PRU was set up within the school. This was grimly described by our deputy head as a ‘doom room for students who could not be trusted in the general population of the school’. Students were sent to the internal PRU not for any particular infraction, but rather for being generally regarded as a ‘bad student’. Within the unit, groups of students would be isolated in silence from the rest of the school for a week or two, with no particular school work to do. If you talked to the person next to you, slouched, turned around, etc., you were shouted at. The morbid idea was that this verbal abuse would encourage some sort of Pavlovian response, magically transforming these students into silent, perfectly postured children. A majority of the teachers backed the introduction of this unit within a union meeting, arguing for it as part of “workplace safety”. However, amongst the teaching assistants, it horrified us. Initially the school had wanted us to staff this unit with, however we collectively refused and the school was forced to hire a new separate member of staff instead.

The educational value of school was bleak for students too. Little beyond the bare minimum of core subjects were offered to students, and vocational training was essentially non-existent. Class sizes were packed out, with staff given little time to prepare for classes. It is unsurprisingly then in this situation, that student absenteeism was rife. Whilst a sombre situation, I only hope this experience in absenteeism taught the students some useful skills for when they will enter the workforce.

Unsurprisingly, the environment in the school often created conflictual relations between students and workers. Even those parts of the workforce that could more effectively bridge this divide were still involved in this daily conflict. In some senses, the old ultra-left slogan from May ‘68 felt pervasively accurate: ‘all teachers are cops!’. This harsh and authoritarian environment was produced by management from the top-down, but was also often also reinforced by workers from the bottom-up. Fomenting subversive teaching styles, that refuse the disciplinarian logic that the school tried to implant in its staff, felt important for bridging this divide and paving the way for more joint struggles by students and workers: against managerial authoritarianism, and for a better resourced, more holistic education.

The Work

As a teaching assistant, officially our role was to prepare and execute 1-on-1 ‘ interventions ’ both inside and outside of classes. However, in reality we were there partially as a box-ticking exercise, and partially to fill gaps in the general work of the school.

An average day would start with arriving at 8:30am, often diving straight to the staff room to make a cup of instant coffee before arriving fashionably late to our morning briefing with the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo). We would then have a full day scheduled of six 50-minute lessons, supporting students in the classroom. A couple of times a week, after school ended at 3:15pm, we were then meant to either undertake an afterschool duty - such as running a homework support session or our assigned after school club. On top of this, throughout the week we had lunch and break duties. In theory, you were meant to meticulously patrol the playground upholding all the school’s ridiculous rules. However, in reality, this largely consisted of wandering aimlessly around the playground wearing a high vis jacket. The working day would also usually involve a series of smaller tasks. For instance, taking students with physical accessibility needs to their lessons in the school lift, or escorting certain vulnerable students out of lessons to a quiet space where they could relax.

We were assigned to assist lessons first-and-foremost based on whether or not any students within each class had an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan), who the school received additional government funding for, and were therefore legally required to give a certain level of additional support. This level of support, of course, did not happen, as it was mathematically impossible to assign a teaching assistant to each lesson in which a student had an EHCP. Therefore, within this group of students, differentiation was made between those who required full-time support, those who could cope with support just in their core lessons [27] , and those who could survive with even less than this. Rather than supporting students flourish, our job was reduced to scraping together whatever we could to simply help students get-by.

Within the classroom, different students needed to be supported in different ways. For instance, some could do their classwork with ease, but just needed help concentrating on the task in front of them. Others struggled with the work itself, and needed more in-depth support in re-explaining key concepts from the lesson at a more accessible pace. For the most part, a lot of the tasks we did in lessons felt like firefighting - we were not helping students truly learn or grow, but rather just helping them get through that lesson, without touching on the base issues that meant they struggled more than others. For instance, working with students who couldn’t read or write felt particularly ridiculous. We were instructed by the school to sit in their lessons and write notes from them (which they couldn’t read afterwards anyway). Rather than creating personalised 1-on-1 interventions that could support them in learning to read and write, we were instead there to create some sort of facade that made it look like  they were doing work for whenever OFSTED came into the school.

The teachers we worked with in lessons also dictated much of what we did and often added to the frustration of the job. Some teachers were happy to let us do whatever we felt was best, whereas others set strict guidelines on which students we were meant to work with and when we could work with them. One teacher even tried to ban me from speaking to students in his class as it was ‘too disruptive’, an instruction I politely ignored. This often made us feel infantilised: TAs and teachers were meant to be colleagues, on equal pegging in the classroom but fulfilling different roles. Yet often we were treated as subordinates. Sometimes this attitude was stated explicitly: I was once told at the pub by a coworker, who was a teacher, that it was right teaching assistants were paid substantially less due to our lack of qualifications. This was despite the fact that multiple TAs in our team were qualified teachers with multiple years experience in the sector.  

As teaching assistants, we often discussed the capitalist logic behind how our work was organised: senior management were more concerned with the quantity of our work, of how many lessons with how many students they could mark us off as being present in, with little concern with regard to the actual quality of what we were doing. We were being overworked for the little-to-negative gain of our students.

In this sense, the day-to-day work we were doing was incredibly alienating. Being a teaching assistant is not well paid nor is it easy work, and therefore most people chose to do it partially out of a desire to do something socially useful. To then be forced to work in a manner which not only felt pointless, but sometimes even actively harmful, was gut wrenching. Nothing represented the hollowness of our work more than the training sessions  we were regularly sent on. In these, we were repeatedly taught: working in lessons with students without any preparation was proven to have worse pedagogical outcomes than not working with those students at all. It was reiterated to us over and over again in these training sessions that we should be spending no more than 50% of our time in the classroom, with the remaining time focused on preparation work and 1-on-1 sessions with students. Yet, our management, who forced us to attend these training sessions, were still compelling us to work almost 100% of our hours in the classroom. It quickly became obvious that sending us to these training courses was just another box-ticking exercise in of itself.

We were also continually forced by the senior management team to take on responsibilities far beyond our remit and job description. This included being told to monitor a severely diabetic student’s injections and dietary needs, without being given any corresponding medical training; being asked to write a schoolwide fire safety plan; and one HLTA [28]  being made to cover as an art teacher for a whole half-term without any additional remuneration. This situation made us feel not only exploited, but extremely vulnerable and worried about the safety of the school.

The Union

Despite being a relatively new school, there was a fairly strong trade union density. There was also only one union present - the National Education Union (NEU) - giving the workplace an advantage over older schools that tend to have a mix of different unions for teachers and support staff. However, although the vast majority of teachers were in the union, only a few support staff were. Nor did the high level of teacher membership translate into much action. Whilst taking strike action over working conditions was a constant conversation between staff members, the outcome of these conversations always ended with people agreeing “to the rep about it”, after which any initiative would fizzle out.

The structures for getting involved in the union were opaque, as we had no local committee for our school, just a borough-wide branch that met once a month and discussed mostly abstract motions. When I started, I spoke to one of the reps and told them I was really keen to get involved in the union. However, for the most part, I was parred off. What made things even more complicated were the composition of the reps. We had two reps during the time I worked there: the first was my line manager, and the second was another head of department (who later became a member of SLT). This was problematic, to say the least.

Throughout the year I worked in the school, only one local workplace meeting was called. Before this meeting, our school rep cornered me in the pub and warned me not to “moan and complain” about working conditions at the union meeting the next day, as they wanted to keep the meeting positive. The meeting then the next day was dominated by patting the union on the back for winning the introduction of the internal PRU. Whilst union branch cultures vary from school to school, many seem to follow a similar trend of primarily focusing on teachers’ working conditions - and within that primarily “health and safety” demands that rotate around the expulsion and further repression of students [29]  - with little discussion about the issues faced by the broader school workforce, or the wider social responsibility our struggles as school workers hold.

Self-Organised Struggles

When I started my job, despite my somewhat negative interactions with the school’s union, I still tried to recruit the other teaching assistants into it, with partial success. However, our collective interest in involving ourselves in the union U-turned pretty early on in the school year.

One day we arrived at work to the  news that management had restructured our timetables. Originally, we had four free periods a week scheduled in, for us to use for planning and preparation for our work in the classroom. In our new timetables, we would have no free periods. We were immediately outraged, and before having to run off to our classes, we had a conversation about what we would do about it. It was agreed we’d arrange a meeting with our union rep and file a collective grievance. However, after just a day, the process already felt too frustrating and slow-moving for us. One teaching assistant then proposed an alternative strategy: why don’t we just keep taking our free periods as and when we needed them? The management of the school was so chaotic that, bar a few particular classes, no-one would notice if we didn’t turn up to all our assigned lessons. Even if they did clock on, so long as we all did it, they wouldn’t be able to take action against us. We took up this direct action strategy, and as predicted, none of us were ever disciplined, and we retained our free periods - and in fact often took even more than we had previously had.

This experience definitively changed our collective approach. From then on, we placed less faith in the union to solve our problems, and instead we took upon ourselves to solve them. Following this first campaign, we then took action against the introduction of clocking-in technology. Partway through the year, school management had announced they were introducing a digital log-in at the staff entrance, that involved tapping your ID card. They claimed this was purely for fire-safety reasons, but we knew it would be used to track our attendance at work. It was agreed that none of us teaching assistants would clock-in using this system, and we also encouraged as many other staff as possible to join us. A significant minority of the workforce indefinitely refused to clock-in, rendering it impractical as a monitoring system. Again, none of us were ever penalised in any way for taking this action.

Taking part in these informal, self-organised campaigns against workplace changes bolstered our confidence. As teaching assistants, we were also not too worried about getting fired. Although our work was not particularly ‘skilled’, there were hardly many people lining up to do this extremely low-paid work. Finding a new job at another school was really not difficult. We began taking bolder subversive action in our day-to-day work. We refused to do tasks assigned to us if we thought they were just bureaucratic exercises, or not part of our job description. We refused to maintain certain discipline expectations that we saw as too authoritarian and repressive. We had created a form of moral economy within our work team. We aimed to do the work we felt was important, and do it well. But where we saw our work as being not useful, and in many cases even actively harmful, we would not do it, so long as it didn’t create more work for any of our other colleagues.

For a period, our workplace was in a state of low-level guerilla warfare: with senior management on one side, and us as self-organised workers on the other. However, to our own confidence, none of us ever received any disciplinary action for any of these actions. In fact, in an attempt to get us to be better workers, the school did the opposite, and gave almost all of us a 12% pay rise. The one teaching assistant excluded from this pay rise was neurodivergent. We saw this as a discriminatory move by management to exclude a worker seen as more docile due to their neurodivergency (they weren’t, and were in fact one of the first teaching assistants to have joined the union). We made it explicit that we saw this as unacceptable, and that we would back them up in complaining to the school management. The situation was quickly rectified and they received the same pay rise as the rest of us.

However, our activity eventually ran up against its limitations. Although we were self-organised to a high enough degree to prevent management incursions into our working conditions, this organisation always remained somewhat informal: formed in staffroom and pub conversations, rather than any formalised structure or committee. Arguably for this reason, we never managed to expand our self-organisation far beyond our team of teaching assistants. In some ways too, the action we were taking, whilst incredibly empowering, was also a form of self-management: we skipped certain lessons so we could better prepare for others, never going as far to refuse work completely and go on strike. Instead of allowing this self-organisation to be built on, and use them to launch bigger and more ambitious struggles, we instead allowed it to fizzle out.

After six months of our self-organised campaigns, the majority of my then co-workers quit, being exhausted by their jobs and the constant struggle against them. However, in one final act of resistance, they organised themselves to space out each of their resignations by about a week each. This drove our senior management up the wall, leaving them to clear up a mess time after time, not knowing each time if the resignation wave was over or if another was yet to come in a few days.

Following these mass resignations, our workforce was restructured. A new level of line management - in the form of a “deputy SENCo” - was created. New management practices were implemented, and a new workforce was selected to replace those who had left. These new teaching assistants were, for the most part, very different demographically from those they had replaced: they were generally older, more likely to have dependents, and with longer career histories in the education sector. As a result, our political composition was suddenly contested, to be recomposed or decomposed, with the forms of solidarity that had perhaps come more naturally to a young and mobile workforce up in the air. In these first few weeks, those of us that remained fought to instill a counter-subjectivity into these new colleagues, in terms of acceptable work attitudes. Through this, we managed to keep some of the gains we had made through our prior self-organisation, such as maintaining the taking of free periods regardless of official schedules. Other norms that we had formed prior to the recomposition of our workforce were lost.

Conclusions

What can I conclude from this experience then? The first is that organisation is key. Dissatisfaction, anger, and an idea of taking collective action is widespread in the sector. However, often so also is disorganisation. Not necessarily in terms of simply being in the union etc. (secondary education has one of the highest trade union densities in the country), but in terms of a self-organised workforce capable of taking rapid action across its various divisions in job title. To a degree, the technical composition of our work as teaching assistants allowed us to take unofficial action frequently and with immediacy. However, a lack of structure to this organisation - to bring it into the light and make it visible - meant that the struggles we were involved in failed to spread outwards across the school workforce and reproduce themselves in the long-term. Whilst it was an excellent lesson in class struggle, that has stuck with me far beyond leaving that job, we were nowhere near organised enough to even begin to be able to offer a model that could be reproduced across other schools, and ultimately build a form of working-class organisation capable of taking on the capitalist state as a whole. It is a deep personal regret of mine that during these fairly active self-organised struggles, we did not seize the initiative and form a more rooted, longer lasting structure, such as an unofficial workers’ committee or even a school workers’ bulletin.

Secondly, schools are important hubs of working-class experimentation and creativity. Secondary schools, in particular, are often large in staff numbers, but not unmanageably so. There is both a high level of disaffection with management, and a high level of interaction between certain workforces, that, in theory, makes joined up action easier to organise than in many other workplaces. The success of a model of worker self-organisation in one school could also easily spread to dozens, hundreds, thousands of other schools within the education system, given their basic similarities as workplaces and connection through the state. Communists therefore should take them seriously as sites of class struggle with potentially serious ramifications. In this sense, again, I also have huge regrets of quitting my job at the time I did, rather than sticking it out in my school for the long haul and being able to try and implement the lessons of my experiences so far.

Thirdly and finally, students must be taken seriously as part of our struggles. Not in the sense of making a school system that is ‘fair’ or ‘meritocratic’ for them to engage in, but rather by taking them seriously as political agents in their own right, who can and do contribute to the broader class struggle. Taking their lead on thinking through what an actual liberated education looks like is so important - not just to furthering our struggles, but to retaining our humanity in a job that can so often crush your spirit.

UCORE: School Struggle and Strikes in the US

Ellen David Friedman

Ellen is chair of the Labor Notes board and a facilitator of UCORE, the United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators.

Can you tell us about what UCORE is and how it came into being?

The acronym UCORE stands for the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators. It took us about two years to build the network before we even came up with a name for it. It is a network characterised by as much informality as possible. It is not a union, a federation, or an NGO. It is not really an organisation. It doesn’t have bylaws, a constitution, or officers. There is a modest budget, but it is just used to help bring people to conferences. So, in essence, it is a network.

In the United States, there are two major unions. First, the National Education Association (NEA) is far and away the largest union in the US. It is more of a federated model because public education in the US is a municipal, not a federal, responsibility. The structure of teachers’ unions reflected that. But the NEA has 2.8 million members, making it the largest labour union in the United States. The other major teachers’ union is the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the breakdown between the two is largely that the AFT was founded and grew in major metropolitan cities. So most of the big cities in the US were originally AFT locals, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, and they began collective bargaining long before the NEA. The NEA was a professional association before it began to turn in the direction of collective bargaining.

But in any event, there had been many, many years of incredible acrimony and bloodshed between these two unions as they competed for membership and hegemony in various ways. That period is over, and there is hardly anything that constitutes competition between them that affects the life of the rank-and-file member. In fact, there has been a long development of merged locals. Some cities are now merged, like Los Angeles, that are affiliated with both the NEA and the AFT. Then, some states have engaged in a complete merger, for example, Minnesota. So the existence of two different unions is not a big factor or problem in teacher organising. UCORE is made up of caucuses within local associations, local teacher unions, and, in some cases, statewide bodies and affiliates. Regardless, some are AFT, and some are NEA; some are merged, and it doesn't matter in practice.

What is the organising history of these kinds of teachers’ unions?

Both the NEA and the AFT definitely have a craft background. Membership for decades was limited to people whose jobs required a state licence, such as classroom teachers, social workers, librarians, school nurses, and special educators. These require at least a bachelor’s degree and a licence. This began to change at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. A landmark civil rights law was passed in the US that guaranteed free, full, and equal public education for all children, regardless of any disability. All of a sudden, millions of new jobs had to be created to accommodate this student population, which previously had mostly been sort of shunted off into separate institutions. NEA and AFT locals can certainly represent what we sometimes call para-educators or teaching assistants. Some of them do, but in almost all cases, it will be in two different bargaining units. They may belong to the same local or a different local. It has something to do with state law, something to do with culture, and something to do with racism and classism. They are definitely a new body of workers in the last forty years who have been unionising. For UCORE, our history is about twelve years old, so it comes after that, organising with both kinds of workers.

Are there quite different kinds of conditions across the state and municipality within which workers are organising?

Yes, there certainly is! For example, I think there are only about thirty-five states where collective bargaining is enshrined in state labour law. Then, only seven states allow teacher strikes. In the vast majority, they are not considered legal. In every state, there is quite a range of what is permitted and what is prohibited. In a lot of the southern states, for example, the law will be very clear: “Collective bargaining of any sort is prohibited, so don’t even come and talk to us, we don’t want to hear from you.” In other states, it is patterned after our National Labour Relations Act, which is our private-sector labour law. This can mean a sophisticated legal framework and protections. So as you can imagine, what the presumed norms are can be really different. What are the rights? What are the expectations? What kind of relationship can you have with your employer? But I will say this: the contradictions of this current moment of the decay of this cycle of capitalism have created far more similarities than differences. So even where the law exists and seems quite good, it is clouded and ignored so universally across so many settings that you might as well be lacking any legal rights at all.

How does that connect to the history of schools and education workers in the US?

Well, maybe some of the most relevant history is quite broad. However, these are some important anchor points. Collective bargaining in the private sector was enshrined in law in 1935. For public sector workers, it is a subject of state rights, so it can be very varied. Every state has a different set of laws. Collective bargaining laws for teachers, in general, did not appear on the books in various states until maybe the late 50s, but more into the mid-60s and early 70s. This obviously was also a reflection of the dynamics of post-war industrial capitalism. As the US began to de-industrialise, starting in the 60s and accelerating in the 70s, other sectors grew, including public services and other forms of service work. This increasingly replaced basic manufacturing.

Alongside this, there were several intense waves of organising and militancy emerging in the teaching sector. And when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s outside New York City, it was not unusual to hear about organising very contentious contract campaigns and strikes. New York State still has the Taylor Law, which prohibits public sector strikes. Most public sector workers can’t remember when that was passed, but at the time, you saw television coverage of teacher union presidents in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York being led off in chains and handcuffs to jail. There was also this tumult and drama around teacher strikes. There was also a material necessity for these struggles, because wages for public school teachers [30]  in the post-war period remained quite low. It was, and remains, primarily a female profession. It was bifurcated: young working women came out of college, but when they started a family, they left the profession until their kids were old enough to start school.

It was a time of great militancy, but also conflict with the public. Generally speaking, parents, politicians, and the media were very polarised against these strikes. That period of militancy was obliterated by neoliberalism, starting towards the end of the 1970s. By the 2000s, a style of bureaucratic, service-oriented business unions had really settled in. It was part of a labour peace agreement, so wages came up, and teachers were now considered middle class. The prevailing attitude was that this was a cushy job: you had the summers off and stopped work at three in the afternoon. There was not only public sentiment against thinking of teachers as workers, but they were also thought of as privileged professionals. That was very much internalised, and many teachers felt that.

Then, as things happened, both material and political conditions began to create circumstances, particularly in urban areas, that teachers found intolerable. This included inadequate resources, buildings falling apart, increased class sizes, and an increasing burden being piled onto schools as the state withdrew from its caretaking function in society. So tremendously needy, desperate communities were looking to the schools for everything that was needed. This included behavioural counselling, dealing with drugs, dealing with student violence, broken homes, housing, precarity, race crises, and immigration crises. When they land on the doorstep of the schools, rank-and-file members were looking to their union leaders to say: “All right, what are we going to do about all this?” At this point, the union leaders are bureaucrats who are very tied to the Democratic Party, but are not paying attention to their members. And so this, I think, sparked the possibility of insurgency. That is the bigger background and history.

So, how did starting UCORE relate to these differences and challenges?

UCORE is part of the US caucus tradition, which differs from the British tradition. Its roots are not that ancient. Our caucuses were a very important feature of labour politics in the 1970s. Some of us, myself included, who grew up in that moment, including the founders of Labor Notes and the founders of Teamsters for A Democratic Union, were aware that if your union is to become a force for controlling members, rather than helping to build power for members, then this is what you do about it. You aim to democratise your union, reform it, and build a struggle orientation through a caucus. Caucuses are acknowledged and protected under our national labour law. It varies in state labour law, but they are understood. It is therefore acceptable to criticise your union leaders, to form an opposition slate, to run against incumbent leadership, and to demand financial transparency. In order to do this, you must have elections, and virtually all states will require that if there is collective bargaining, you must permit members to vote on their contract. So with some of those democratic handholds, the idea of rank-and-file democratic caucuses was not unusual.

As conditions began to worsen, I think it is fair to say two things happened. First, members of my generation who are still leftists and still active in the labour movement would say, “hey, what do you think, maybe we should do something about this?” About 15 years ago, when the caucus movement started to pick up again, that was an important influence. But, second, and perhaps even more important were younger teachers. These were teachers who had grown up under the dark cloud of neoliberalism, but perhaps were even younger and had different ideas. They were mostly socialists of some sort. They had a critique and an analysis about what the union should be, that they should be autonomous and in an adversarial relationship with the employer, and not be confused by the fact that they were working in a public setting for the public good, and that they should have the right to think and act collectively as workers. Many of the early caucuses were absolutely sparked by young left teachers. Many of whom, I think it's quite accurate to say, were trained and possibly we could say “dispatched” by the ISO (International Socialist Organisation). Although it has since dissolved itself, at that stage it was producing a kind of serious, disciplined cadre working as teachers with the idea that this is what we should do.

Could you tell us more about the caucus model?

One of the benefits of the caucus model, and I hope I’m not being too partisan, is that Labor Notes has survived this long, dark period since it was founded in 1979 during a moment when caucus politics were very robust and enlivened. Many of the initiatives we took, both in terms of stories and publications, on what to highlight in our work, in conferences and consultations, were around us. The point really is finding a part of your union that can be democratised in any way. Maybe you’re just one teacher. Maybe you start with one building, or even just one wing of a building. Maybe this can spread to a local, a district, or a state entity. But we were very, very clear in Labor Notes that you should start at the bottom and build up. So in the early days of UCORE, for example, some people came in and said, “What we should be doing is running a slate against the national leadership!” And pretty much everyone said, “No, no, that’s not what we’re doing, you can go and do that.” For us, building from below was critically important, as well as varying tactics and strategies. We thought everything was worth considering and had to assess what might work in practice. We encourage a lot of caution in relation to elections. When people say, “Our executive board is corrupt, and we have a slate we want to run against them.” Our response is usually, “Why don’t we talk about this first?” We ask many, many questions about who they have spoken to, how many other people agree with the problems, what they think, what efforts have been made to pressure the executive board, which network or organisation they are part of, whether they have a plan, and how much they know. We discuss many practical questions. Many of our caucuses have started with simple aims, such as getting our local branch to hold meetings. We think about how to accomplish that. This is a start for democratising our union, getting a functioning local, and taking the first steps.

What does this mean for UCORE as an organising model?

There are three important parts to it. One, it is often harder to win an election than you think, because even if your incumbent leadership are lazy and stupid, you will find out they are much better organisers than you thought as soon as you challenge them. So that is often hard. The second is that if you run and win, it will be much harder to transform your local than if you had done earlier work to build relationships and get people ready to fight. And, finally, between the founding of Labor Notes and this latest period of return of labour militancy, we have seen so many reform slates be elected and then just be wiped out because they were not prepared. They had no base and did not know what they were getting into. They were red-baited, undermined, or they could not get it done. Then you really set back, because people are now much more cynical.

How does UCORE organise on a practical level, particularly with teachers so spread out across the US?

We have a simple answer to this. Since we established the network, it took us a little while to figure out who would be involved, what we would do, and how it would grow. It started with the reform of the Chicago Teachers Union and the caucus of rank-and-file educators. This was about a decade ago that we coalesced enough to start building UCORE. We have held two Zoom meetings a month since then, pretty much steadily. On the second Tuesday of each month, we would have a steering committee meeting. This was a reasonably small group, a dozen or so people from the most mature caucuses. On the fourth Tuesday of each month, we have a national call in which all members attend. You could be in a caucus or be thinking about starting one to join. These national calls are generally topical. They could be debriefing an important strike that had happened, discussing what to do about high-stakes testing, or something like that. More recently, we’ve moved from monthly steering committee meetings to quarterly, but we still have national calls every month. There is so much happening at the moment that we wanted to give the steering committee members a little bit of a break.

In even-numbered years, we organise a one-day UCORE conference on the day before the Labor Notes conference in Chicago. In odd-numbered years, it's a three-day conference that rotates among cities where caucuses take turns hosting. These have been held in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Jersey, Durham, North Carolina, and other cities. In addition to that, we also sometimes have gatherings and regional conferences if there's enough of a cluster. We've had one in West Virginia, a couple in New York, and one in California. These happen when enough people want to get together and do it. Additionally, UCORE is always available for various consultations. For example, if teachers are preparing to go on an illegal strike in two weeks, we might find people who have been through this before and put them in touch.

UCORE is organised horizontally. It is hosted by Labor Notes in the sense that they have provided light administrative support. For example, sending out reminders and the Zoom link for our calls. I participate in the facilitation (as a Labor Notes board member) with two members of the Labor Notes staff. The substance of those calls is what happens when you bring people together for the exclusive purpose of saying: “What’s going on?” We ask each other, “What have you been working on? Why did you decide to work on that in this way? What choices have you made about strategy? How did it go? What were the results? What did you learn? What can you teach from that?” This is what we do in the calls. The substance can cover everything from what we mean by Black Lives Matter in schools? What do we mean by the school-to-prison pipeline? What are you doing about the growth of homelessness among students? What are we doing about ICE raids, and how are schools responding to that? As well as, how do you try to achieve paid family leave in your contract? And so it goes across the whole range, teaching each other through our own experiences.

How did you come to organise like this?

I think for some of us, myself included, it came out of the politics of the 1960s and 70s. We had many years of experience to reflect on. We had the whole period of building organisations, the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist experiences, and the chance to think about what worked and what didn’t work. Especially in the US, being so close to Latin America and the influences there, we have an anarchist tradition, even if it was obliterated a hundred years ago. Coming out of this were currents rethinking the left. Labor Notes was one of those poles, oriented towards the idea of not recreating the problems of the past, but leaning into ideas of more distributed leadership, power, autonomy, and so on. But many other ideological elements were competing. I was surprised by this at the third UCORE national conference.

Some of us who had been serving on a coordinating committee developed a proposal for a constitution, bylaws, and some officer structures. When we presented it, the response was just “yeah, I don’t know. We don’t think so.” It wasn’t fierce opposition. We tried again the next year, and the response was the same. In retrospect, I understand that people know so much about capitalism instinctively, but one of the things they just hate is having bosses of any kind. If you set up an organisation that is too hierarchical, it just doesn't feel right to people. It was interesting because it was so instinctive. However, we had the luxury of doing that because we are not a union. UCORE is a network. In a union, there must be processes, decision-making procedures, and who holds legal and financial responsibilities. We've been an experiment, a laboratory for what it looks like when these principles are allowed to run free and see what you get. People say, over and over again, they feel like the UCORE spaces are the ones they most want to be in. They are the most generative and the most helpful because they help them think and sustain themselves in the work.

What kinds of successes have there been?

I am ridiculously enthusiastic. I get excited about the person who wants to have the first conversation with a co-worker, as well as the strike of 35,000 teachers. I am so enthralled by people becoming organisers. My criteria for success are that outcomes come from a process as democratic as possible, given the conditions. This is even more evident during periods of crises, such as strikes or the existential threats we are now facing. In the US, there is a concerted attempt to utterly destroy civil society. So, the question is how much can those democratic principles get you through? How can they help us during a crisis, remain available as we emerge from it, and sustain us during periods that otherwise seem inactive? This is a different measure of success. It is not whether this strike achieved an above-inflation wage increase. It is about what we are trying to achieve and how we help others achieve it.

That said, there have been some amazing and important examples in both ways of thinking about success. There are the reforms of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the second-largest teachers union in the US, and Chicago Teachers United (CTU), the third-largest. Both have undergone democratic reform through caucuses that began a decade ago. CTU has retained the caucus as it is now the leadership caucus. In UTLA, the caucus has not been sustained for a variety of reasons. They are still a progressive and democratising union, but without a functioning caucus. Both are tremendous successes that have inspired a vast number of workers, not only teachers. New York City has one of the most mature caucuses, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), but it may never achieve leadership. We refer to their union, the United Federation of Teachers, as a single-party, authoritarian state. You have to take a loyalty oath to join the Unity caucus to be a steward. This caucus is large, with several hundred members. The UFT covers about  200,000 active and retired members, and MORE almost functions like a parallel union in some respects. MORE does its own stewards training, and they run members for stewards or building reps. They run at district, branch, and borough levels and have elected leaders. They organise social events and reading groups. They push and push the existing leadership. That is a model that we call “leading from below.”

There is also Educators for a Democratic Union, which is the statewide caucus in Massachusetts. They have held state-level leadership for almost ten years. There are about 3-400 affiliated local unions in the state. This includes virtually all public schools except Boston, as well as the higher education system by and large, community colleges, and state universities. It is a big state-wide union with many locals. They have succeeded in permeating this model of militant democratic unionism from above and below. There are now dozens of locals with leaders involved in non-legal strikes that are achieving great success.

There are these victories within varying levels of internal democratic success. However, there have also been some colossal losses. After the 2018 Red State Strikes, which were utterly illegal strikes involving as many as half a million teachers in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma and elsewhere. No one was fired or disciplined for these illegal strikes. Hundreds of millions of dollars that had not previously been flowing into schools were then allocated by state legislatures. This was a tremendous success, but in almost none of those cases, despite strong efforts by UCORE, were we able to help them figure out how to translate that into union reform.

Why do you think it is important to keep organising with education workers?

I made a personal decision in the mid-1980s to apply for a job as an organiser for the NEA in Vermont. I had that job for 20 years. I did this because we were in the throes of neoliberalism. I had an intimation that many of the things we had built would be sort of washed away in what we thought of as the labour-management peace accord. De-industrialisation was already well advanced. I thought, what is going to be left to build upon for the next cycle of struggle? I decided it would be teachers  for several reasons. They are in every city, town, and suburb. Every community must educate its children somehow. Even when you are subjected to deep privatisation, you are still teachers. There may be a different management structure, but you still do the same work. Teachers are still densely unionised. Many of the unions are not good, but a lot of them are good enough, or even great. They have an inherently democratic DNA, because education is a public good. There are elected school boards at the municipal level and publicly passed budgets. You are in consultation with society, taking care of their kids, so they give you their money and elect people to govern you.

The education sector permits an unusual kind of access to external support and alliances. If you are in a steel plant or a coffee shop, you will have customers, maybe even loyal ones. Even with hospitals, there is a clear dependency, but with public schools, it is different. There is nothing else like public school workers saying, “Something is wrong here, and we need to talk to people outside of these four walls.” Then there they are: the parents, community, taxpayers, and the public bodies that are elected to govern you. This has been an important feature of this movement, trying to make non-transactional, non-performative relationships with parents and the community.

All of this tremendous fabric of democracy seemed to me to offer a buffer against the forces of the concentration of capital and its evil twins: authoritarianism and kleptocracy. So, I thought, why not see if it's possible to strengthen the sector and be a sort of anchor for the rest of the working class? Fast forward, and that is what has happened. Teachers are the cutting edge of militancy. It has been built, sustained, and can be learned from. I think the assessment still holds. The attacks are deep, you know this in Britain too, and privatisation is well advanced. There are controls on our freedoms. But we would have been less able to resist if we had not been building this current with teachers. This could be a life raft for both teachers and the working class.

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[1]   Casey (2020) The Burston School Strike . Project Gutenberg.

[2]  Tropp, Asher (1957) The School Teachers: the growth of the teaching profession in England and Wales from 1800 to the present day . London: Heinemann, pp. 110-112

[3]  This added the condition that all schools receiving government funding pass an annual inspection.

[4]   TES. 100 years of unions . 20 May 2011 .

[5]  Oram, Alison (1996) Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900-39 . Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 145-146.

[6]   Hallas, Duncan. 'Pay revolt hits schools', Socialist Worker, 20 November 1969.

[7]   1969-1970 strike . Warwick Modern Records Centre. Undated.

[8]  However, this support rapidly declined as the grip of the International Socialists, later Socialist Workers Party, tightened around the network, and it eventually folded in 1982. See: Seifert, Roger V. (1984). ‘Some Aspects of Factional Opposition: Rank and File and the National Union of Teachers 1967-82’. British Journal of Industrial Relations , Vol. 22(3), pp. 372–390.

[9]  Hobbs, May (1975) Born to Struggle .  Plainfield, Vermont: Daughters Inc. pp. 76-77.

[10]   Socialist Woman Special: Lancaster Cleaners' Campaign . July-August 1973.

[11]  For a first-hand account of this, see Dave Chapple’s Somerset School Cleaners and their trade union, NUPE, 1973 to 1984 .

[12]  This strike is beautifully recounted by its participants in the three episode podcast series 'Nursery Workers Bite Back' by Childcare Voices.

[13]  The functions schools play have also been discussed in length in “ The Kids Are Aight: A School Workers’ Inquiry ” from issue 20 of Notes from Below.

[14]  Another historical example of this were the students of Liceo Parini, a secondary school in Milan. During an occupation of their school building in 1968, they drew up a special edition of their school magazine, La Zanzara . As well as listing the negative conditions of student life, it also dedicated a section to the concerns of school workers, such as " the subordinate position of teachers in the educational system ". For more, see: Tarrow, Sidney (1989) Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[15]  Figures from HESA and Luminate show that between 2015 and 2025, graduate unemployment has increased by around 3%, while youth unemployment (16-24 year olds) is the highest it has been since 2011-2012.

[16]  21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 have seen the highest rates of teachers quitting the profession since the changes in data collection in 2010 at over 37,000 every year.

1 in 10 of these have only managed a year in the job. Workload is cited as the main reason for quitting.

[17]  Officially the average class size is 22.5. But this includes 6th form, SEN classes, PRUs and other places which drastically reduce the average. Speak to any teacher, and they will be mainly teaching classes of 30, if not more.

[18]  The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. They are a government department that ‘inspect services providing education’

[19]   TUC submission to Parliament, 2018.

[20]  See ‘We’re Not Waiting to Be Saved: Access and Exclusion at the New Frontier of Austerity’ by Rana Aria & David Isaac in Hammering the Sky: Collective Action in Care (Notes From Below Issue

25) for an extended write-up of workers’ experience of the Access to Work system and the reality of funding cuts to the program.

[21]   STEAM in EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) is an integrated, play-based approach blending STEM and arts that aims to foster creativity through exploration

[22]  Draper, Hal (1966) The Two Souls of Socialism .

[23]  The University Worker. 'UCU and the University Worker: Experiments with a bulletin', Notes from Below , Issue 17. 28 April 2023.

[24]  The resource can be found on universityrankandfile.org.uk  under Resources.

[25]  Inflated senior pay has become rife in the sector, particularly within academies who can set their own rates. It was recently reported that Sir Dan Moynihan , the CEO of the infamous Harris Academy Federation, has become the first academy trust boss to take home over £500,000 a year.

[26]  On the struggles at Pimlico Academy, see An interview on the Pimlico Spring on angryworkers.org.

[27]  Maths, English and Science.

[28]  Higher Level Teaching Assistant - a teaching assistant who has some additional responsibilities and often a minor supervisory position, although they are only paid minimally more than regular teaching assistants.

[29]  A recent example following this trend was a strike by NASUWT members at a secondary school in Lincolnshire , which was resolved after the school management expelled 86  pupils. Whilst physical and verbal abuse are very real issues in schools that do affect school workers’ conditions, there is also a responsibility for school workers to tackle these issues in manners that recognise the wider social causes of this violence, rather than reproducing it through carceral non-solutions such as exclusions and PRUs.

[30]  “Public schools” in the US refer to what would be called “state schools” in Britain.