Picket Lines and Pay – Julia Slawska, Ursuline High School

Over 23,000 schools are expected to be affected on the 1 February strike, with 3 more national and regional strikes planned for March. This comes as the UK faces its largest scale strike day in over a decade, with nearly half a million workers, including train drivers, civil servants, and lecturers also walking out.

A strike is typically defined as a refusal to continue working because of an argument with an employer about working conditions, pay levels, or job losses. This dispute is mainly over wages; NEU joint general secretaries, Dr Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, say, “This is not about a pay rise but correcting historic real-terms pay cuts. Teachers have lost 23% in real-terms since 2010.” In the midst of the current cost-of-living crisis, this year’s average 5% pay rise for teachers actually amounts to a 7% cut, when accounting for inflation.

Furthermore, teachers are leaving the profession in droves like never before – about a third leave within 5 years of qualifying. The NEU cites long hours and poor pay as the main factors for this – “one of the worst recruitment and retention crises ever seen in education.” Inadequate school budgets, growing class sizes, and increasing workloads are only adding to the mounting pressures faced in schools.

And it’s not only teachers impacted – children are at risk of missing out due to lack of teachers, and even when present, increasingly they are supplies or covering outside of the subjects they are qualified in.

Sympathy to the cause has even been won over from parents – the NEU’s membership of over 300,000 teachers is connected to 10 million parents alone – many of whom understand that children’s education is being harmed, not by industrial action, but ultimately, by the last decade’s erosion in teacher pay and conditions.

One parent in South-West London, Ms Depczynska, commented, “Teachers and schools are really fundamental to generations of children  – teachers can influence children for the rest of their lives, and it’s important they’re rewarded fairly for the work they are doing.”

So far, the government says it has already agreed to an extra £2bn in school funding, but strikes may even continue into the summer term if the dispute is not resolved.