The National Education Union is to hold a rally in Harrogate on Thursday as part of a day of national strike action.
Teachers are due to strike on Thursday this week and Tuesday next week as part of their ongoing pay dispute with the government.
The action has been called after 98% of NEU members rejected the government’s latest pay offer.
Thursday’s rally by Britain’s largest teachers union will be held at Cambridge Crescent between 11am and noon and will include guest speakers from unions and the education sector.
Gary McVeigh-Kaye (pictured above), North Yorkshire branch secretary for the NEU, said:
“The government’s recent offer was an insult and in no way represented a serious negotiated settlement.
“Offering our members a 4.3% pay increase, whilst inflation is still over 10%, does not even begin to address the real terms pay cut of 24% most teachers have experienced under 13 years of Tory government.
“To add insult to injury, this pay increase was expected to be taken from already stretched school budgets.”
Mr McVeigh said the NEU had attracted 60,000 new members since its January strike ballot and called on the government to engage in “serious negotiations”.
Picket lines have been formed outside many schools in the Harrogate district on strike days.
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has urged teachers to “get back to the classroom” and said a 4.5 per cent average pay rise would see the starting salary for a new teacher rise to £30,000.
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Thousands of teachers descend on Harrogate as new strikes called
Thousands of teachers are in Harrogate this week for the National Education Union‘s annual conference.
Delegates poured into Harrogate Convention Centre this morning for the four-day event, which began with news that teachers had rejected the latest government pay offer and were preparing for more strikes on April 27 and May 2.
Visitors were greeted by dozens of activists outside the convention centre handing out leaflets and distributing copies of left-wing publications such as Morning Star and Socialist Worker.
The week will see numerous fringe events take place in Harrogate as well as at the conference centre and nearby hotels.
Delegates arrive this morning
The NEU is the largest teachers’ union with 32,000 members from 1,700 schools.
Its latest pay ballot was rejected by 98% of teacher members in England on a turnout of 66%.
Dr Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, joint general secretaries of the NEU, issued a joint statement to delegates in Harrogate:
“This resounding rejection of the government’s offer should leave Education Secretary Gillian Keegan in no doubt that she will need to come back to the negotiating table with a much better proposal.
“These strikes are more than three weeks away; Gillian Keegan can avoid them.
“No teacher wants to be on strike. Nor can they accept this offer that does nothing to address the decades of below inflation pay increases making them the worst paid teachers in the UK.”
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Union predicts some Harrogate district schools will close due to strike
A union official has predicted some Harrogate district schools will close because of the impending teachers’ strike
Members of the National Education Union plan to strike on February 1 and stage further walk-outs in February and March.
Gary McVeigh-Kaye, branch secretary of NEU North Yorkshire, said all primary and secondary schools across Harrogate would be impacted by strike action. He said:
“It is likely that there will be a mixture of full and partial school closures. Furthermore, plans are being made to hold picket lines at schools across the area, though these have not been confirmed yet.”
Mr McVeigh-Kaye said teachers in North Yorkshire were “in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis” caused by a below inflation pay offer, school funding and a shortage of teachers. He added:
“Hardworking teachers have had enough and are now taking the only course of action open to them and withdraw their labour.”
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The Stray Ferret asked North Yorkshire County Council, the local education authority, what impact it expected the strike to have on schools, who is responsible for making decisions on school closures and what measures it was putting in place to cope.
It replied in a statement:
“Information about school staff’s union membership is not retained by North Yorkshire County Council, or schools, in line with national rules on data governance, although we expect to be provided with headline data from the union on overall numbers. It is a personal decision for those members whether they participate in the strike action.
“Individual schools will co-ordinate the impact of any strike action, but we will support them with general guidance on mitigating the impact on pupils where possible, alongside the Department for Education’s own guidance.
“Headteachers will also be provided with advice from their professional associations in managing strike action within the protocols for employers when responding to strikes.”
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has said she plans to meet union leaders this week to try to avert the strike.
Department for Education guidance says headteachers are expected to take “all reasonable steps” to keep schools open for as many pupils as possible during a strike,
King James’s School in Knaresborough is spending an extra £7,000 a week tackling covid, Parliament was told yesterday.
Covid has imposed additional costs on all schools, such as paying for supply teachers to cover teachers who are isolating.
But the scale of the problem at one local school was laid bare during a Commons education debate.
Andrew Jones, the Conservative MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, asked if the government would take into account variable infection rates when planning education budgets for tomorrow’s Spending Review.
Mr Jones said:
“The highest levels of infection lead to the highest levels of people having to isolate, including teachers, so there are increased budgetary costs from having to backfill teaching staff.
“King James’s School in Knaresborough, a secondary school in my constituency, briefed me that this is running at £7,000 a week, so schools are facing a significant challenge.”
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Paul McIntosh, acting headteacher of King James’s School, urged ministers to help. He told the Stray Ferret:
“In the present climate, it is unsustainable to keep spending the extra money on resources like additional cleaning and supply teachers in order simply to maintain the school functioning in a relatively normal capacity.
“We would greatly appreciate the government giving serious consideration to providing schools with additional funding in order to support us through these difficult winter months.”
Gillian Keegan, the skills minister, told the Commons debate the government had provided £75,000 additional funding for “unavoidable costs that could not be met from their existing budgets”.
She added:
“There will be a further opportunity later in the year for schools to claim for eligible costs that fell between March and July.”