The joint leaders of Britain’s largest teaching union have been urged to resign from their posts after being “out of touch” and “working against the interest of children” during the Covid pandemic.

The call was made at today’s meeting of the Commons’ Education Committee by former teacher Jonathan Gullis MP (Conservative), who said teachers had “gone missing” in the crisis.

He accused Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, joint general secretaries of the NEU teaching union, of “bringing the reputation of teachers into disrepute” during the Covid pandemic, including by going against the advice of the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) in calling for teachers to be vaccinated ahead of other groups, and through issuing a “200-point checklist” before schools reopened.

He said: “The image [of teachers] was that any time there was an issue, it was the teaching profession that was moaning and groaning while police officers, firefighters, doctors and nurses were getting on tackling this global pandemic.”

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He added: “The NEU has been really out of touch with people throughout the pandemic. I think they’ve got it wrong. They’ve brought the reputation of teachers into disrepute.

“NEU advice was saying that teachers should not be teaching a full-time table or routinely marking at the start, [and there was] this 200-point checklist before schools reopened [as well as] ignoring the JCVI saying teachers must be jabbed first.

“And it’s not me as a Tory who is having a go. Lord Blunkett, former education secretary, [has said] ‘I’m really, really surprised at Mary and her colleagues’ attitude on this - not because I don’t understand the risk and the role they play. I’m deeply critical of the attitude. It’s about how we can work together to make it work as safely as possible. Anyone who works against that, in my view, is working against the interest of children’.”

However Kevin Courtney, also attending this morning’s committee, said he “absolutely disagreed” and that the union’s stance on teacher vaccines had been in line with other education unions. He also said that the union now had 35,000 more members than this time last year because “education staff think that we broadly got it right”.

He said; “If you had taken the steps that we recommended in our education recovery plan of last summer - finding extra staff [and] reducing class sizes - then there would have been far less disruption.

“If you had taken our recommendation in September and October following Sage (Scientific Advice Group for Emergencies) [advice] that there should be a circuit break, and then our recommendation that you should have had a rota operation in secondary schools, there would have been far less disruption. We might not have had the counter-variant.

“Gavin Williamson [the education secretary] said to me in a meeting in October that I sounded like Dominic Cummings going on about the data - well, maybe he should have been listening to both of us,” Mr Courtney said.

However, Mr Gullis said: “Hiring staff isn’t simple because you want to quality assure them and make sure they’re good enough. Just saying ‘reduce class sizes’ would have led to more disruption because you’ve got to find all the classroom spaces in which those kids would go into.”

Mr Gullis, formerly an NASUWT rep when he was a teacher, said the joint leaders “were more interested in playing party politics”, and that it was “absolutely shocking” that the NEU had spent £505,000 in the 2019 general election on [Labour] party campaigns, which was more than the left-wing campaign group, Momentum.

He said to Mr Courtney: “You, yourself, Kevin have been caught at Momentum meetings, you know, saying ‘We’re against Boris’, so the idea is that we’ve got a union here where the leadership is not representing the people it represents.”   

Mr Courtney replied: “Let’s just say that I’ve also been ‘caught’ at meetings of the Conservative Education Society in the House of Lords. We’re not affiliated to any political party. We do invest in general elections. I’m actually proud of the fact that three-quarters-of-a-million people changed their vote in the 2017 election because of our campaign on education funding.”