Militant teachers set to target parents yet again in anti-Tory poll battle
‘More money for every pupil’
TEACHERS will leaflet parents about Tory ‘cuts’ to mobilise them in the run- up to next month’s local elections, union leaders have announced.
The National Union of Teachers has called on its members to hand out fliers and put up banners at school gates criticising the Government over funding of schools.
It will mean teachers around the country will be targeting families during the sensitive ‘purdah’ period before the vote on May 3. A campaign website which is run by the NUT and endorsed by head teacher unions ASCL and NAHT has numerous leaflet and poster templates for teachers to download.
One says: ‘Our schools face a funding crisis – this is a national scandal. The Government know what’s happening but they have failed to commit the funding that schools so urgently need.’
It follows a similar campaign in the runup to last year’s General Election, when many Tories lost their seats and Theresa May lost her Commons majority.
Teachers then were accused of trying to sway the result by sending letters home in children’s schoolbags which criticised Tory education policies.
The campaign cost the union £300,000 – more than Ukip spent on the poll.
Announcing the action at the NUT’s annual conference in Brighton yesterday, general secretary Kevin Courtney called on teachers to relaunch their campaigning this month.
He said: ‘I want to repeat my congratulations to the 3,500 members who ordered leaflets during the General Election. Let’s do that again and on an even bigger scale… Let’s make sure that the local elections see candidates being quizzed about their attitude to funding this generation’s education properly.’
The union says its campaign is purely about getting election candidates to take on board school funding issues, and does not seek to influence voters on polling day.
However, it is likely to harm local Conservative candidates fighting for the 4,000 council seats across England if parents are told Tories are starving schools of funding. The ‘Schoolcuts’ campaign website has banners and posters available for teachers and also has template email and Facebook messages that can be sent out.
Mr Courtney said he was ‘pleased’ that some people had changed their votes in last year’s election because of the NUT’s campaigning. He said members had distributed over a million leaflets and more than four million people watched the NUT campaign video.
‘Candidate after candidate told us that school funding was top of voters concerns,’ he said. Official guidance states that during ‘purdah’ – the period between an election being called and polling day – schools must not use public resources to give one party an advantage. Conservative MP Henry Smith said during the last campaign that teachers were ‘engaging in the party political fray’ in a way that was ‘unacceptable’.
The NUT has no official political affiliation but has allied itself with Labour on most policy issues.
A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Core schools and high needs funding has been protected in real terms per pupil and will rise to its highest ever level – over £43billion in 2020, 50 per cent more per pupil spending in real terms than in 2000.
‘The budget for pupils with special educational needs is £6 billion this year. Local authorities now have more money for every pupil in every school.’
Children in the UK are among the most obese in the world because of a lack of cooking and swimming classes, the NUT said. It blamed the Government’s focus on ‘obsessive testing’ for squeezing out some non- core subjects from the curriculum.