Doug Mcavoy
Leader of the National Union of Teachers whose term was marked by bitter rows with the hard Left
DOUG MCAVOY, who has died aged 80, was General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers from 1989 to 2004 during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the teaching profession. Burly and bespectacled, Mcavoy was seen as a moderate, and as general secretary fought a running battle to wrest control of the NUT conference from the extreme Left in order to win back moderate teachers, and to forge an alliance with parents unhappy with government education policies.
Yet his problems were largely of his own making. In the mid-1980s, as deputy to the then general secretary Fred Jarvis, Mcavoy had been the architect of a prolonged and disruptive series of three-day strikes over pay. This classroom militancy cost the NUT not only members and money, but all vestiges of professional authority at a time when the educational world was facing rapid change.
In the early 1980s the NUT had dominated teachers’ pay-bargaining machinery and the Conservative Government’s acceptance of the GCSE exam was widely regarded by the union, which had always supported it, as a major campaigning triumph.
After the strikes, the NUT’S history was one of nearly uninterrupted disaster. It lost its majority on the Burnham pay negotiating committee and eventually lost its right to negotiate altogether.
Membership slumped from 258,107 in 1978 to 176,417 in 1991, with deputy heads and heads of department leading the exodus. Subscriptions fell, and a quarter of the union’s full-time posts had to be shed. During the late 1980s, the NUT watched helpless and unheeded as the Conservative Government pushed through some of the most far-reaching educational reforms of the last century.
Mcavoy’s conversion to pragmatic moderation dated from the general election of 1987 which, he had assumed, would be a walkover for the Labour Party. When the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won their third election victory in a row, it came as a tremendous shock.
The Conservative triumph and his declining membership forced Mcavoy to reappraise NUT strategy. “The decision has been taken by the electorate,” he acknowledged. “To try and pretend it hasn’t happened would be absolutely futile for the NUT and for the teaching profession.”
After becoming General Secretary in 1989, Mcavoy argued in favour of cooperating with the Government on new policies such as the national curriculum, so as to force the Government’s hand in other areas.
But although he succeeded in defending his position as General Secretary against challenges from the Left, and presided over a revival in membership numbers to more than 250,000 by the time he retired, his attempts to break the stranglehold of the Left ended in failure, and NUT conferences were marked by bitter rows between Mcavoy and the conference floor.
Once described as “Clive Jenkins with a Geordie accent”, Mcavoy looked every inch the pugnacious old-style trade union leader. He remained steeped in “Old” Labour assumptions about producer sovereignty, and never really understood the implications of Conservative reforms which had given
more power to parents. In 1994, when the Blairs chose to send their son Euan to the Oratory, a school in Kensington which had opted out of local authority control under the Conservatives, Mcavoy led the chorus of attacks on their decision.
Douglas Mcavoy was born in Jarrow on January 2 1939. On leaving Jarrow Grammar School, he went down the pits, but soon decided he wanted something better: he chose teaching and trained at Culham College in Oxford.
After qualifying, Mcavoy got a job teaching maths and PE at a secondary modern in Newcastle. The experience came as a shock to the grammarschool boy and he determined to become involved in union politics to change the system.
He had joined the moderate National Association of Schoolmasters, but soon switched to the more radical NUT, working his way up the union hierarchy while he was a lecturer at Newcastle College of Arts and Technology. In 1974 he became full-time deputy general secretary of the union under Fred Jarvis.
The two men had an uneasy relationship. Though Mcavoy proved his worth as a behind-the-scenes fixer, he was always the more radical of the two, and Jarvis never entirely trusted him. In 1984, when Jarvis was temporarily incapacitated after breaking a leg, Mcavoy’s hardline stance on pay precipitated a series of three-day strikes which continued over three years.
The disastrous impact of the dispute on NUT membership, and its contribution to Labour’s poor showing in the 1987 general election, taught Mcavoy a salutary lesson. By the late 1980s, however, he found his newfound moderation at odds with the mood of the NUT conference, which in 1988 overturned his appointment by the executive as General Secretary in succession to Jarvis by a majority of 10 to one. He was reinstated on a Right-wing ticket after the NUT’S first leadership ballot of its 190,000 members. The Left hated Mcavoy for “selling out” to the Conservative government, and for his well-documented appetite for the good things in life. No NUT annual conference was complete without a bad-tempered showdown between General Secretary and Conference.
In 1990 he was heckled and hissed during his closing speech, when he said that under his leadership the union would strike only as a last resort. The following year he attacked the “political posturing” of delegates whom he accused of using the conference to demand strikes that most members would not support.
Even some of Mcavoy’s moderate allies felt that these attacks merely gave his opponents the publicity they craved, and frustrated his campaign to encourage moderate teachers back into the union. In 1996 his failure to secure a resolution that would have extended union democracy gave further ammunition to his critics.
Mcavoy’s election by the NUT grass-roots membership should have strengthened his claim to represent ordinary teachers, but in reality his somewhat dictatorial style meant that he often seemed remote and out of touch. Surrounded by a coterie of advisers, he could be ruthless with those who questioned his judgment. “He loves winning arguments and doesn’t take prisoners,” one colleague remarked. “It’s almost a Thatcherite trait.”
Mcavoy’s judgment was called into question in 1993 when teachers voted for a boycott of the Government’s new tests for 14-year-olds. Though the boycott by all the main teaching unions delivered a substantial scalp in the resignation of the Conservative Education Secretary John Patten, Mcavoy’s handling of the dispute was clumsy.
When in 1994 the other main teaching unions called off the boycott after the Government had made changes to the tests, he continued to support the action for a further year before eventually backing down. Nigel de Gruchy, leader of the NUT’S main rival, the NASUWT, accused Mcavoy of stumbling from “farce to fiasco”.
In previous decades, Mcavoy might have expected support for the NUT’S opposition to Tory policy from the Labour Party, but in 1994 Tony Blair came out in favour of testing and league tables, pulling the rug from under his feet. That year he defeated a Left-wing challenge for the post of General Secretary by only 1,500 votes.
The following year, in some of the worst scenes ever witnessed at a union conference, the Labour education spokesman David Blunkett was jostled and harangued and forced to take refuge in a broom cupboard with his guide dog.
The conference went on to pass motions calling for strike action over class sizes and to reimpose the boycott of tests, and ended with Mcavoy accusing delegates of living in a “fantasy world of unachievable aims, impossible goals and unattainable targets”.
Mcavoy welcomed Labour’s election victory in 1997 and got on well with Blunkett, Labour’s first Education Secretary, but in other respects the change of government made little practical difference.
In 1999 Mcavoy led opposition to the Government’s proposals for performance-related pay, arguing that it would return teachers to a “Victorian system of linking pay to exam results”. The same year he won a third term as NUT General Secretary, beating off a Left-wing challenge by a comfortable margin of 17,062 votes on a turnout of just 29.8 per cent of the NUT’S membership.
But otherwise it remained business as usual. In 2001 the NUT, with other unions, voted in favour of a work to rule in pursuit of a 35-hour week and substantial pay increases. At their annual conference in 2002 delegates hissed and jeered both Estelle Morris, the first NUT member to be Education Secretary in 34 years, and, for good measure, her Tory opposite number Damian Green.
Later the same year, after Estelle Morris was replaced by Charles Clarke, Mcavoy decided not to take the NUT into the workload agreement signed by the other teacher associations, and relations with the Government plummeted. As the other unions linked arms at a photo-shoot with Clarke, Mcavoy invited journalists to a lunch at which he warned of class sizes of 80 – and hijacked the headlines.
At his last annual conference in 2004, Mcavoy tore into the Government for the best part of 40 minutes, but then his eyes started to well up and he departed from the script circulated to journalists in which he revisited his battles with the Left, who had “used their best endeavours to limit my exposure as your general secretary, to curtail both my powers and my time of office”. Instead, not wanting to depart in an atmosphere of rancour, he praised NUT officials with whom he had worked, leaving many as dewy-eyed as he was as he bid farewell.
Doug Mcavoy was twice married. His first marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1995, Elaine Derbyshire, who survives him with two sons and a daughter.