The school cuts campaign is a lesson for the profession on how to change public policy. Its powerful message chimed with the public mood better than the government’s manifesto and has recruited many people to the teachers’ cause and, in the current political climate, has every chance of achieving some success in prising open the Treasury purse.

The Queen’s Speech has set out the government’s agenda for the next two years, and the good news for schools is that it contained very little new policy. So maybe, just maybe, we shall be given the chance to start to embed the excessive number of changes set in train by Michael Gove during his tenure at Sanctuary Buildings.

No additional secondary moderns, no growth in 11-plus tutoring, no lifting of the 50 per cent cap on selection by faith schools, no cancelling of free school lunches - and the possibility of more funding can be regarded as much as a victory for teachers and parents as a defeat for the Conservative government.

A high proportion of the voting population has a personal interest in the education system doing well, either as sixth formers, students, parents (actual and prospective), grandparents or teachers, and they do not take kindly to what they perceive to be attacks on schools, any more than they welcome the prospect of government policies adversely affecting their health, wealth or happiness.

So it takes a high degree of arrogance - and, presumably, too many of the wrong sort of people in its focus groups - for the government to go to the country with a manifesto that contained several education measures that had a directly adverse effect on so many of the people whose votes it hoped to win.

On selection, the proposed increase in grammar schools and secondary moderns rarely made it into the headlines during the election campaign.

If this proposal comes up again at an election, it is profoundly to be hoped, as Ed Dorrell argued here last week, that we hear the positive argument for a comprehensive system of secondary education - a good secondary school in every community - rather than merely what a bad idea it would be to increase the number of secondary moderns.

Getting the public on-side

On school funding, education unions mounted perhaps their most effective campaign during a general election through the school cuts website, with the stark message of the average funding cut on the home page and an easy one-click to find the cut to anyone’s local school. There could be no better way to get the public on-side.

While a government may feel that it can ignore teachers’ opposition to funding cuts, it is altogether a different matter when parents and grandparents tell parliamentary candidates on their doorstep (although it is a long time since I have seen one of these in the solid Conservative majority area where I live) that they will vote for another party because the school funding cuts will harm the education of their children.

Public policy is rarely changed by industrial action, especially when the general public is inconvenienced by the action. People may be supportive of teachers, nurses or doctors and even sympathetic towards their cause, but few are persuaded by strikes or work-to-rule. That usually leaves the government in a strong position to ignore the pleas of these professionals. Changing public policy in any field, but especially public services, is a science for which a battering ram is rarely an appropriate weapon. 

It is still too soon to know whether the teacher-led school cuts campaign will be successful in winning an increase, or at least a smaller decrease, in school funding. But it is clear already that the campaign made an impact on the election result, persuading some voters to put their cross in the box of parties that had a less austere message on cuts in the education budget.

Winning allies among the public and other education and child-related organisations builds a powerful alliance that governments cannot safely ignore and gives the profession its best chance of changing public policy. 

John Dunford is chair of Whole Education, a former secondary head, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and national pupil premium champion. He tweets as @johndunford

For more Tes columns by John, visit his back catalogue

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