Fight against School Closures

EDUCATION IS under attack. 30,000 children could lose their rural schools in the first stage of the government's new closure plans. Campaigners are worried that more than a thousand small schools in England and Wales could in the longer term be threatened with closing.
This is one of the ruinous effects of the 'market' on education. In cities and towns as well as villages, every time a school's number of pupils goes below a certain level, many local councils talk of closure. Whatever happened to Labour's supposed commitment to smaller class sizes? Why not use the opportunity of declining school rolls to bring down the size of classes?
Socialist Party members Jim Reekie and Jake Moore report on the angry response in Shropshire to these threats.
ON 23 January, Shropshire's local authority announced plans to close 22 rural primary schools with another 16 earmarked for merger. Many individual school campaigns are already underway against these attacks.

They will demonstrate together outside the council's offices before the councillors' cabinet meeting.

The county council claims that all those schools in Shropshire with 92 pupils or more would be deemed 'viable'.

Local Tory councillor Ann Hartley claimed that other schools would close, based upon falling pupil numbers and that this was the "only option".

But these are village schools that have been there for years, serve the local community and many are in fact over-subscribed.

These plans will further undermine communities, some of which have already lost local post offices and hospitals.

Days after the county council's decision, Shropshire Socialist Party was out campaigning and petitioning against these planned attacks. Our petition against this market-style madness struck a chord with Saturday shoppers.

The mood was one of outrage that schools would be closing because of a lack of funding. One worried parent summed it up appropriately: "The three main parties are now all the same. They're all happy to spend billions on wars, then there's no money for our services such as education and hospitals."

A united campaign must now be built across the 22 affected schools and beyond. With the correct strategy in opposition there is potential to take on the government's local and national plans to cut education further.

We also argued the need for a new workers' party that would stand for public services and against cuts, closures and privatisation.

These school campaigns, alongside those against cuts and privatisation in other public services, can help play a role in forging a new mass worker's party in the future.

Strike ballot on pay

From Classroom Teacher
Linda Taaffe writes


The National Union of Teachers (NUT) national executive has announced a decision to ballot all its members for the first national teachers' strike for 21 years.

This is because teachers need a pay increase at least in line with inflation. The last two years have seen teachers' pay rise less than inflation and the prospect now is for a further three years of pay cuts against a background of rising costs for basic necessities.

The government says the School Teachers Review Body's recommendation of a 2.45% increase for September 2008, followed by 2.3% in 2009 and 2010, is above inflation. But they are fiddling the figures. Real inflation is reckoned to be 4% and rising!

With no let-up in the pressures on teachers, especially our long hours, which mean some teachers are working for as little as £10 an hour, there is a mood to have a go. But a real campaign needs to be launched to get a massive 'yes' vote for action.

The ballot starts at the end of February, closing at the end of March. This period must now be used to build teachers' confidence and win over those who are unsure.

The executive has decided to change the previous policy for "discontinuous action" to a one-day strike, apparently to woo the more faint-hearted executive members.

Discontinuous action would have been a more serious national strategy. The leadership would have had the flexibility to call a one-day strike, and then further action, hopefully with other public-sector unions - a demand that the NUT put forward prominently at the TUC.

Although still possible to organise further action, it would require further ballots.

But a one-day strike would be an enormous step forward. It would rattle the government. It would bring teachers into national struggle, many for the first time.

It would be a signal to other workers, the teachers being the first of the public sector 2008 pay round. Against a background of stockmarket volatility and New Labour digging in its heels, we cannot afford NOT to have a serious fight back.

Action and change for teachers

A group of teachers who backed Martin Powell-Davies’ recent stand in the NUT Vice-President election met on Saturday January 12th . The meeting discussed what needs to be done to build action to defend teachers’ pay, cut our relentless workload and to halt the break-up of local authority education.

A leadership we can rely on

One thing that still holds us back is the lack of a fighting union leadership that teachers can rely on to build the united action we need. Martin’s campaign helped keep up the pressure on the NUT Executive to call the promised national ballot for strike action on pay. We hope that the Executive will vote to get the ballot under way when they meet at the end of January. By then the Government should finally have announced the miserly salary awards that they expect us to put up with for 2008-2010.


Building support for classroom teachers

Most teachers, struggling with the daily grind in schools, will know nothing about the debates within the Union. But they know they need support in standing up to the demands of bullying managers and the pressures of observations, league tables and performance management. Hard-pressed school reps know they need support in organising their school group and explaining union campaigns in a way that grabs classroom teachers’ attention.
Many hard-pressed Union Secretaries and officers will feel the same way. Too often left on their own to try and build school-by-school action in isolation, ground down by a rising mountain of individual casework, they also need support in building strong local Associations that can defend teachers and also to help bring in new members, especially young teachers, into activity.
It’s this vital task, of helping to develop a strong network of classroom teachers, school reps and campaigning union officers that the meeting agreed had to be our first priority.

A campaigning newsletter

We agreed to build our network by launching a new campaigning newsletter, “Classroom Teacher”, to circulate to schools, both by e-mail and as printed copies that teachers can distribute to their colleagues. It will focus primarily on the main pay and conditions issues facing classroom teachers and the campaigns we can build to defend ourselves.

The newsletter plans to be sharp and snappy, written by, and for, classroom teachers, reflecting the daily pressures we are under but also building confidence that together we can take action to turn the tide. We plan to put names to the articles reflecting the range of teachers involved in the network. At the same time, we hope to have room to include some more detailed commentary for teachers who also want to read something a bit more analytical about the problems we face. We also want to invite teachers to send in their own articles and comments and to be a real part of a growing network.

We hope that the newsletter can develop in to a larger bulletin – which will mean appealing for finances too. It will certainly be regularly produced so that ‘Classroom Teacher’ will be there in staffrooms at least every half-term for teachers to read.

A first flyer has been produced based on a Lewisham NUT newsletter “Too Much Work, Too Little Pay” which went down well at a recent national NUT Secretaries meeting. A further leaflet on the pay campaign should be out shortly.

The ‘Classroom Teacher’ network

The newsletter will advertise an e-mail, blog and website which will allow teachers to get in touch with the campaign and also post their own comments on the blog. There is also a Classroom Teacher account on youtube.

We have also set up a classroom teacher e-group which will allow members of the network to easily contact each other and exchange views and information.

We hope that teachers will forward our newsletter to colleagues and develop its circulation. We
want to make sure we know where it is being read, get feedback on what teachers have thought of it but, above all, get new teachers to join the network and write their own comments and articles.

Where there is support, we will also organise national or regional meetings around particular issues or campaigns so that we can bring teachers together and help plan a way forward. We can also produce material to be distributed at NUT Conference, although our main focus is going to be on classroom teachers rather than national NUT events.

We hope this initiative can help build a network of classroom teachers working together to defend our colleagues and to build a union ready and prepared to take action to change our pay, our workload, our union and our schools.

Contact:
classroom.teacher@yahoo.co.uk
Martin Powell-Davies 07946 445488