Teachers in all four corners of the United Kingdom have been taking part in industrial action over pay.
Education is a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Mickley Grange is in England, which is where I will be focusing my attention.
The two main teaching unions, the National Education Union (NEU) and National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), balloted their respective members, but only the NEU passed the legal threshold needed for action to take place. As a result, NEU members in the same region as Mickley Grange have just taken part in their fourth day of strike action.
I am in the NASUWT, so have not legally been able to take part in strike action. Had the NASUWT achieved a sufficient mandate, then I would definitely have taken part in the strike. The NASUWT has just announced its intention to re-ballot members. Should the re-ballot be successful, then I will definitely strike.
The dispute is about pay. Most teachers in England were awarded a 5 percent pay rise backdated to 1st September 2022. New early career teachers - those within their first year of qualifying - received a pay award of just under 9 percent.
Personally, recognising that the country is currently between a financial rock and hard place, I would have been content with 5 percent, but for one significant fact - it was unfunded. In other words, schools had to find that 5 percent from within existing budgets. At a time with spiraling costs that is very difficult to do without making economies elsewhere. The biggest cost in a school is always its staff, so redundancies might be necessary to balance the books.
Inflation is currently running at 10.1 percent, which is down from a peak of 11.1 percent in October 2022. This means the 5 percent pay award received by most teachers has been wiped out twice over by the increased cost living - in other words teachers are actually 5 percent down in real terms. This has been the situation for several years now, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculating that the salary of an experienced teacher has fallen by 13 percent - the equivalent of £6,600 - in real terms over the last decade.
I think the unions missed a trick by narrowing the focus of the ballot to pay alone. Terms and conditions of employment, working conditions and workload are equally important. Over the last decade it would be entirely fair to say that teacher workload has increased beyond all recognition. The actual teaching is now only a small part of being a teacher. Over the last few months I have acted as a social worker, financial advisor and marriage guidance counsellor. I have been scrutinised to within an inch of my life by senior colleagues far less experienced and qualified than I am. I work in a classroom where there are quarter inch gaps beneath each window frame, the floor gives way under foot and students sit shivering at the height of winter. I work in a school where you are expected to do your own printing and copying, because the machines never work - but the fact they never work is an unacceptable excuse for failing to meet unrealistic deadlines.
There are also an increasing number of shitty little jobs that should be nothing at all to do with a teacher, yet we are expected to do all the running around. To give a recent example, two students had a falling out on social media and school was left to pick up the pieces. This had happened at the weekend, in their own time, on their own devices, yet first thing Monday morning an irate parent was on the phone complaining and demanding action - risk assessments, timetable changes, class moves.
Of course the Mickley Grange bosses being as they are, they're too lacking in moral fibre to say "well that's nothing really to do with school". They instead adopt the approach of nodding along in blind agreement and capitulating to every whimsical parental demand.