Covid: teachers don't want rhetoric we want action
NEU join general secretaries Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney interviewed
To hear the joint general secretaries of the National Education Union talk, you would have no illusions about the failure of the government to respond to covid-19 and the omicron variant. Teachers “get really sick of Nadhim Zahawi, saying I've done everything humanly possible to keep classrooms open because that's patently not true.” “Our members think that there's a lot of talk, but not a lot of walk.” Teachers are “putting the effort in, they're taking the extra risk, they want schools open, they want kids there, but the government's not standing behind them.”
At the end of the first week back for schools, I spoke to the joint general secretaries of the National Education Union, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney about how their members are responding to the latest situation in schools. This first part of the discussion, focuses on covid as well as the NEU’s pay campaign.
A second part covering issues of trade union organising, digital campaigning and political strategy will be posted later this week.
The NEU is a model of how a trade union merger can work. Combining the Association of Teachers and Lecturers with the National Union of Teachers into a single union, it is led by Bousted and Courtney whose visible joint presence underlines the success of the merger. Under the two general secretaries the union has established a reputation for highly effective workplace campaigning and the ability to combine traditional face-to-face organising with digital campaigning and a very dynamic political approach.
Teachers, pupils and parents have once again been put at the centre of some of the sharpest debates about the response to covid-19. Last week the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, came under fire for saying "we must do everything we can" to keep schools open, whilst the government had failed to implement adequate measures – such as air purifiers and improved ventilation for the classroom.
Meanwhile there has been backlash from some Tory MPs against pupils wearing masks in schools – including from the Education Select Committee chair Robert Halfon.
So, as the first week back was coming to an end, we first discussed the NEU’s assessment of the situation for teachers, pupils and parents on the ground.
Mary Bousted was clear that remote education is not a satisfying experience. “I think [teachers] were really aware that disadvantaged children find it much more difficult to learn because they didn't have the kit. They didn't have a quiet place to learn. They didn't have parents who could support them too often in their learning. So the key thing is everyone wants education to be back person-to-person. But what our members are also saying is that they get really sick of Nadhim Zahawi, saying I've done everything humanly possible to keep classrooms open, because that's patently not true. And our members see a government which is hopelessly compromised, between wanting the ends without willing the means.”
She adds that the government “dithered over mask wearing where the evidence clearly is that mask wearing suppresses transmission”, delaying over air filtration units and then responding with far too few of them: “we don't want the rhetoric we want the action. And the fact that they've done nothing to look at workforce issues and capacity issues, they've been really slow on vaccination: it's still the case that less than half the secondary school pupils are vaccinated. And lateral flow testing is lower now than it was in September or previous March.”
Mary Bousted reflects the concern that the absence-levels for teachers will rise. In December, she says, they were at eight per cent. “In the immediate future, there's only one way for those to go which is up and that will mean education disruption.” Although vaccination has made a huge difference during the omicron wave, “if you've got it, you've got to isolate. And so it just seems that there is going to be real problems coming in the next two or three weeks with large numbers of staff isolating and leaders having to send year groups home as they were having to do in December because of particularly teacher absence.”
The NEU’s complaint is that the Department for Education is repeatedly too slow, or as Bousted says, “always behind the curve”. The DoE “always is hoping that it'll be alright on the night”. Yes, ventilation units will cost money, but the cost is worth it, especially when viewed in the context of the government’s corruption scandals: “Look at how much has been wasted on crony contracts. So, I think our members think that there's a lot of talk, but not a lot of walk.”
Kevin Courtney adds that teachers “know that they are at more risk of contracting coronavirus than other occupational groups. At least when the ONS last reported, last term, it is 37 per cent more likely.” So teachers “want government to stand behind them. When they are taking that extra bit of risk, they want the government to be supporting them.” Adding to Mary Bousted’s comments about Nadhim Zahawi claim to be doing everything possible, he says: “it's just completely untrue, he’s doing nothing like everything possible. They bought 7000 air filtration units - presumably that means they know that they work in some circumstances. And there are 300,000 classrooms. So maybe some of the classrooms are well ventilated enough that the air filtration unit would add nothing to it. But that's not what our members think about it: they think their classrooms are quite hard to ventilate.”
One issue the NEU wants action on is CO2 monitors in classrooms. These demonstrate through CO2 levels the degree of ventilation in a classroom and therefore whether disruption caused by the spread of covid is likely. NEU reps last week fed back that 58 per cent of teachers do not have regular access to a CO2 monitor. For Kevin Courtney, resolving that is “an example of something that could be done, that would reduce the level of virus transmission.”
“The other thing that members are very concerned about in this term, is that education is going to be really disrupted, that will make their working life more difficult.,” he says. “So they think they're right to feel that government isn't standing behind them. They're putting the effort in, they're taking the extra risk, they want schools open, they want kids there, but the government's not standing behind them.”
Bousted argues that the government’s inaction is in part because of arguments from pressure groups like Us for Them, and influential Tory MPs: “you've got people like Robert Halfon, the chair of the Education Select Committee - there should be a plan for schools and needs to be a concerted effort, but don't put masks on, and so on. The reason why they are so weak about this is because they're constantly looking behind them about where the arrows are coming from.”
I put it to the NEU general secretaries that in media terms, the government will be hoping that the pressure for ventilation, filtration - and all the other improvements for schools - will subside because the flashpoint at the start of the term is now passing. To what extent do they think it's possible to keep up the pressure for the measures the schools need?
Kevin Courtney: “I guess that's going to depend on what happens to the epidemiology. And we were not epidemiologists. But I guess that we both think that cases are going to carry on going higher as we come back, that we are at one in fifteen school children had the virus according to the ONS data for the 28th of December. So that's two kids in in the average classroom, and this virus, omicron, is very transmissible, so you expect that number to go up. And then then how quickly does it fall back again?” He estimates no quick resolution to the disruption caused by omicron. “I think that there's going to be substantial disruption throughout the whole of this half term, at least until February half term, and it might go on beyond that. But we're looking at disruption across that length of time.”
And there is concern that the government does not want to move on the measures schools need. “I think you're right that the government is hoping not to have to spend money on ventilation and filtration, because they hope that this period will be short-lived,” says Courtney. “And they don't care about the level of disruption in education fundamentally, except as a badge, that we haven't closed schools, they don't really care. Just like the way they are talking about the NHS, that we're just going to ride the wave, they don't care about the stress that causes to nurses and doctors. They don't care that somebody who needs a hip operation isn't going to get one - just that the NHS didn't close and that's all they care about, and we're riding the wave. So they don't care about the level of disruption there'll be in schools and it will be substantial this term, this half-term, at least. They're hoping they'll just ride that out and they won't have to spend the money. We think that these ventilation measures are an investment, not just for now but for the future: for another wave of another variant, for 'flu, for colds. Ventilating means that you have less disruption generally.”
Returning to CO2, Kevin Courtney points to a Harvard study that shows the benefit to pupils of reducing CO2 in the classroom, beyond the question of covid itself - with higher CO2 impairing cognitive functions. “So it's not just for covid, it's for education, so it's a worthwhile spend anyway.”
Teachers’ campaigns will not go away: “we are going to try and carry on getting the pressure. We are going to ask members to report to us the CO2 levels on the monitors in their classrooms. And we're going to try and replay those figures to politicians of all stripes, saying it's wrong that we've got these sorts of CO2 levels, we need you to act on it.”
The pandemic has highlighted the very serious problems with assessment is approached. (Here, Mary Bousted is typically quick to praise NEU staff for analysing the trends caused by Michael Gove’s education reforms).
“In 2016 - this was the last year of the old GCSEs - a secondary pupil in a school teaching the least-deprived pupils was 68 per cent more likely to achieve expected grades than pupils in schools teaching the most-deprived pupils. In 2019, that's three years later - following reforms to GCSEs - a pupil at a school teaching the least deprived pupils were 106 per cent more likely to achieve expected GCSE grades than pupils in schools teaching the most deprived pupils. So that's a 40 per cent increase, in inequality.”
That bleak picture of how assessment has developed under the Tories is bad enough. But then the pandemic hit. “Well, it's fallen over twice, hasn't it?” says Mary Bousted. “The government is saying, Nadhim Zahawi said [last week], I can absolutely guarantee exams will take place in the summer term. We all hope they do because the alternative is teachers having to do it last minute on the hoof again, as they've had to do for two years, which has been completely awful. The government's got a track record now, haven't they, of ‘yes, it will happen’. So you have to you have to ask with this omicron variant, where comes his cast iron guarantee of certainty that this will be the case.”
Kevin Courtney: “And we'll find children in the most disadvantaged schools have had the most time off because of covid as well, so they've had the most time lost to direct face to face education. They still need measures to help them in the in the race to get the exam grades.”
Against the backdrop of everything that vital workers such as teachers have had to deal with over the last two years, pay remains a major controversy for the profession. Teachers’ pay has been hit hard over many years. NEU officials are now consulting their members over pay. I asked what the NEU’s message to the government and employers was at this stage.
Kevin Courtney: “Partly, obviously a pay freeze when inflation is 2 per cent is absolutely no different to pay limitations setting pay at 4 per cent if inflation is 6 per cent - you're still 2 per cent worse off.” The government, he says, “have at last started to realise that they have to do something about teacher recruitment and retention. So they are going to introduce a starting salary of £30,000 for beginner teachers outside London. If it happens the way we think it will, that's an eight per cent pay rise in each of two years for teachers at the very bottom of the teacher pay spine. When it was first mooted by the Tories in the run up to the election in 2019 it should have come in by now and it's delayed by the pay pause they had, and it's now in a place where inflation has eaten away at it already.” For this reason and because a decent salary is required to attract graduates into teaching, “they will need to do that - they probably need to go even further than the £30,000.”
Kevin Courtney adds a concern about the overall pay structure: “we are worried that Nadhim Zahawi is saying he wants a flatter pay structure - that's nice words, a flatter a pay structure - but what he means is not giving the same level of pay rise to more experienced staff. And we want to say to the government that teacher pay has dropped by seventeen per cent compared with 2010.” The message that follows from that is clear. “So we're saying to government they cannot just think about teacher recruitment, they have to think about teacher retention. We do think it's true that the main reason people leave is the unfeasible workload, which is not long hours preparing exciting lessons for your kids, it's long hours preparing evidence for a bureaucratic system that doesn't trust you - that's the main reason people leave.” But resolving pay would also contribute to keeping teachers in the job: “at the very least people should be paid properly, and they're not even being paid properly. So that eight per cent that's going to teachers on the bottom of the pay spine, that should come in for all teachers at all points on the baseline. And that would be a start towards putting back the decline in pay that's happened.”
Teachers’ pay is ultimately about the pupils too. Decent pay will ensure experienced teachers are recruited and retained in subjects that at least in theory the government says are important. Kevin Courtney: “There is a specific set of arguments that the government also has to be made to respond to around why have they missed their teacher recruitment targets for eight years solid in the run up to the pandemic. During the pandemic year, they hit them and now we're already back to where we were before the pandemic. We only recruited twenty per cent of the number of physics teachers that the government's own model said they needed, similar figures for design and technology, missing out in maths, missing out in business studies, in computer studies. Where is the high-wage, high-skills economy coming from if we're not going to have teachers who are teaching design and technology, who are teaching physics, who are experienced teachers in those areas? It's not good enough that kids in state schools have physics teachers who aren't qualified as physicists. Doesn't happen in Eton.”
In addition to the message to government, there is another message from the NEU. “We want to reach out to employers in education as well,’” says Kevin Courtney, from academies to local authorities: “we need other employers, local authorities, to start speaking out as well in public to talk about the difficulties they have with recruiting and retaining teachers and for them to join our chorus [that] there needs to be a fully-funded significant set of pay rises, which at least match inflation, because otherwise we're letting down the children.”
In the rest of our discussion, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney discuss politics, digital campaigning and trade union organising. It will be posted later this week.