Hard-left teaching union where members are like unruly children
Organisation preparing to instigate more strike action next week as it pursues a Corbynesque agenda
In a hall in Bournemouth, hundreds of members of Britain’s largest teaching union are behaving – in the words of their own president – “like children.”
Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s shadow education secretary, has displeased them by refusing to abolish Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, if Labour is in government.
In footage of the confrontation, you can see Ms Phillipson, who would probably have expected an easier ride, starting to panic. “To be supportive of inspection is not to believe it cannot be better,” she pleads.
“No!” shout the teachers, drowning her words as she tries to continue. “No Ofsted! Ofsted out!”
The chairman steps in, like some harassed form-master losing control of 3C in the last lesson before home time. “I’m not going to have this continued shouting out, OK? If you don’t want to be here, no one’s forcing you to be.”
Then the walkouts start, and they move to the back of the hall, yelling: “Say it loud! Say it clear! Ofsted is not welcome here!” Ms Phillipson is still trying to finish her speech.
Perhaps she should have put them all in detention.
Welcome to the National Education Union, which next week walks out on a much larger scale than this, from 23,000 schools across the country, in pursuit of a 12 per cent pay claim. Ms Phillipson’s treatment – hopefully not witnessed by any child for whom these supposed professionals are paid to set an example – is actually quite common at conferences of the NEU, or its predecessors, the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.
It emphasises the difference between the average teacher and the activists in what may be Britain’s most hard-left union. In the NEU, Corbynism never died, and personal unpleasantness is not the only one of its manifestations which remains.
No fewer than 13 members of the NEU’S national executive signed a statement by the Stop the War Coalition partly blaming Nato for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A packed Stop the War fringe meeting at the union’s Bournemouth conference was addressed by the NEU’S joint general secretary, Kevin Courtney, who, while condemning the invasion, also sought to make excuses for it.
“You don’t have to be on the Left to worry about that discussion about the eastward expansion of Nato,” he said. “The Russians were invaded three times from the West in the 20th century... and that has an effect on the mass psychology. The fear of being attacked from the West is real and present in Russian people.”
Only last weekend, the NEU hosted a Stop the War conference at its London headquarters.
Alex Kenny, an NEU executive member and STW national officer, told them how proud the union was to be an official affiliate and described how its teachers were working in schools to influence opinions on the war and other issues. “The Government don’t want us to do that,” Kenny said.
“They say you have to be impartial. But on some things you can’t be impartial, can you?”
As part of its work to “decolonise the curriculum,” the NEU works with an Islamic group, Mend, which has been accused of extremism and which ran a workshop at its black educators’ conference in November and described itself as “partnering” with the union in 2019. One of Mend’s senior figures supported killing British troops, and another described the then (Muslim) counter-extremism czar, Sara Khan, with the racist slur “Oreo,” brown outside but white within.
In one incident, Mend claimed that a Muslim student had his home “raided over a word googled for a worksheet,” something it now admits was “artistic licence.” It says Britain and Europe are so Islamophobic that we “may already be close” to the conditions that allowed the Holocaust.
Statements made by Mend and NEU activists have effectively undermined Prevent, the counter-extremism programme, including with false claims that it attacks “normal Muslim religious practice,” bans prayer in schools and targets young Muslims “for the views they hold on issues such as government foreign policy.”
Perhaps the most worrying part of the continuity-corbyn package is the NEU’S tolerance for language and behaviour that deeply alarms Jews.
One of its own staff, Ewa Jasiewicz, vandalised one of the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, spray-painting a site where 92,000 were murdered with anti-israel graffiti to protest at how the Jewish state had “co-opted” the Holocaust to serve “agendas of colonisation and repression.”
When it found out, the union rebuked Ms Jasiewicz but did not fire her. Later, it asked her to organise training in how to combat anti-semitism. The union said last night that she was no longer an employee.
In May 2021, the NEU’S national officer for equalities, Louise Regan, organised and compered an event in Nottingham at which speakers called for terrorism to destroy the whole of Israel. As one put it, “Palestinians have the right to resist by any means necessary... It’s not enough to simply offer solidarity and oppose occupation and apartheid... We must support the Palestinian right to resist, and we must support the decolonisation of Palestine, from the river to the sea... we don’t simply want a state in which Palestinians have equal rights with their oppressors.”
The speaker warned that “we must be careful not to adopt the language of Israel apologists. There is no such thing as ‘both sides’... and we must also not buy into their narratives about so-called Palestinian terrorism, and scaremongering about their favourite bogeyman, Hamas.” Ms Regan thanked him at the end. It is possible that this speech was actually illegal under laws banning the encouragement of terror.
More than a hundred Jewish members of the NEU have left in protest at its stance on Israel. Mr Courtney’s response to their concerns was lukewarm: “For people who see Israel as the homeland of a nation... there is a place for people with those views in our union,” he told the education select committee, rather as one might say that there was a place for people who believe in creationism. Ms Jasiewicz did “a good job working for our union,” according to Mr Courtney. Ms Regan, he said, was “fantastic.”
Yet even as the NEU campaigns for the right to education of Palestinian children, it sometimes seems less keen on the education of British ones.
During the pandemic, the union fought to keep schools closed, despite evidence that keeping pupils away from class did them much greater harm than Covid, whose risk to most young people was small. By some counts, British pupils spent longer out of school than those of any other European country, save Italy.
The union’s campaign against Ofsted stems from genuine concern among teachers, but also from its long-standing record of opposing most of the reforms – inspection, testing, public reporting on standards – which have contributed to improvement in schools over the last 30 years.
Among Ofsted’s crimes, according to the union’s campaign pack, are that it encourages heads to do “book looks” – checking that staff have done their marking properly – and “learning walks” - visiting classrooms to see how someone is teaching.
The notion that Ofsted might be intended mainly for the benefit of people other than teachers – children, their parents, and broader society, for instance – doesn’t yet seem to have occurred to anyone at the NEU.
Now, and potentially for months to come, the Covid generation will have its schooling interrupted for the third time in three years, though it’s still not completely clear what the union wants in return.
For all the talk of workforce militancy, the union’s strike mandate is actually quite slim: of the 290,000 English members it balloted, less than half voted to strike, and its teaching assistant members didn’t meet the legal turnout threshold. Turnout also fell short of the legal minima in the second and third largest teaching unions, the NASUWT and the headteachers’ union. Of the 750,000 teachers and assistants in England, only about a third will be on strike.
That hasn’t stopped the NEU’S Corbynistas hailing the ballot as the green light for a radical fightback against the Government.
Like their hero before them, however, they may find that the wider world isn’t so keen.
‘I’m not going to have this continued shouting out, If you don’t want to be here, no one’s forcing you to be’