BUILD UNITED NATIONAL ACTION ON PAY AND WORKLOAD

BUILD UNITED NATIONAL ACTION ON PAY AND WORKLOAD
Martin Powell-Davies (Lewisham NUT)
ALONGSIDE PAY, WORKLOAD REMAINS the key grievance for most classroom teachers.
As this year’s Conference motion states, the promised ‘work/life balance’ is just a distant ‘dream’, while for too many colleagues their daily burden is a stressful nightmare.
Delegates will be united in agreeing that the “Workload Agreement” signed by the ATL and NASUWT ‘social partner’ unions has failed to produce any significant reduction in working time. The Government’s own statistics agree.
But delegates have to draw the appropriate conclusion – as we have done over salaries. Talks with a Government that offers only empty promises will get us nowhere – unless negotiations are backed up by action.
The existing action strategy – encouraging individual school groups to apply for action – has had limited success. It requires a lot of determination from a school NUT group to take isolated action alone. The experience of national pay action may start to raise the confidence of members to call for ballots, but the desire for united action will remain.
The Union has to encourage as many school groups as possible to take co-ordinated action and make clear that it is prepared to ballot members in schools right across a Division.
Such action can help to limit some of the worst management excesses, for example in limiting staff meetings, excessive planning requirements and lesson observations.
But a real solution to workload lies in challenging the Government’s target-driven education policy and in exposing the need to employ more qualified teachers so that the workload burden can be genuinely reduced.
The target-driven culture that lies behind so much of our workload needs to be challenged. Scrapping league tables, SATs, performance pay and its associated bullying observations would not only reduce pressure on staff – it would free education from the testing regime.
Without the funds to bring in qualified supply staff, the DCSF advice that teachers should ‘rarely cover’ for absences can only be met by implementing their ‘remodelling’ agenda: to use unqualified staff on the cheap.
More teachers are also needed to help reduce class sizes and provide the additional non-contact time that would at last mean that staff could genuinely go home with an empty bag rather than another load of planning and assessment. This could also turn the empty promise of undefined ‘Management’ Time into guaranteed time to carry out responsibilities.
But national policy and national funding for additional teaching staff depends on national
Government. In short, we’ll only really tackle teachers’ workload burden by declaring - and winning - a national trade dispute.
Socialist Party Teachers’ proposal that the NUT pursues just such a national ballot over workload was only defeated last year after the ‘big guns’ of the Executive eventually managed to persuade delegates to pull back.
Unfortunately, even some on the ‘Left’ said we needed a ‘reality check’ for putting forward such a policy. But teachers know too well what their intolerable reality is like. Many Local NUT Officers also recognise that it’s not good enough for the National Union to expect Local Associations to take on the responsibility of organising school-by-school workload action. That’s why we are pleased that the proposal to prepare for national action on workload has gathered support over the year.
Some delegates - like last year - may argue that conducting a workload ballot will distract from action on pay. On the contrary, it will strengthen the response from NUT members.
The Union doesn’t have to hold a fruitless debate about what the top priority is for NUT members – pay or workload. Instead, the anger over both issues can be used to mobilise teachers to build solid national action. It is an approach that has been successfully used by Mark Serwotka and the PCS National Executive – surely it is one that the NUT Executive should embrace too!