The government has been told to provide teachers with a real pay rise, a working time limit and the end of “fire and rehire” in a scathing speech by a union leader today.

Addressing the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham today, the body’s general secretary, Dr Patrick Roach, said ministers had broken coronavirus rules, while teachers “worked around the clock”.

He asked how Conservative MP Michael Fabricant had “dared” to suggest school staff had spent time drinking and socialising during lockdown, and demanded: “Stop attacking our teachers and our nurses who put their lives on the line whilst those in Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street put themselves first.”

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Dr Roach then laid out a list of demands of the government, including: “A government that is on the side of teachers, a contractual working time limit for teachers that will be enforced, and the right for teachers to switch off and disconnect from work at the end of the day and at weekends.”

His list of demands also included “ending the licence to bully, discriminate and abuse teachers and scrapping the link between teacher performance and pay” as well as “a real pay rise for every teacher” and “the ending of fire and rehire”.

In an address directly to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, he said: “Your government is the problem.”

A recent survey by NASUWT found that over six in 10 union members would support a joint day of strike action with other education unions in support of pay increases.

Government wasting money propping up ‘failing trusts’

In his speech, Dr Roach said the Department for Education was “wasting” money by propping up “failing” academy trusts and said that the government needed to “call time” on trust boards and supply agencies that are “on the take and who believe they can get away with it”.

Dr Roach cited a recent Public Accounts Committee report that criticised the use of public funds to “prop up academy trusts in difficulty”.

He continued by mentioning the finding that in 2019-20, the DfE gave away £31 million to 81 academy trusts, and added that the DfE was “writing off millions of pounds of unrecoverable debts arising from incompetent management within these trusts”.

He said: “The problem is getting worse rather than better. As classroom teachers’ salaries have been cut, the number of academy trusts paying at least one individual above £150,000 increased by 71 per cent in just one year.”

Dr Roach added: “Now, ministers say they want a school system based on fewer, stronger trusts. But, the government is still failing to take the action needed to properly regulate these trusts and ensure they act in the public interest rather than their own self-interest.”

The recent Commons Public Accounts Select Committee report said that the DfE “does not yet have a sufficient handle on excessive pay within the sector” and couldn’t assess if public funds were being used well.

The MPs writing the report said that the Education and Skills Funding Agency should set out the criteria used in decisions to support trusts’ financial recovery or write off debts. They added that the DfE did not have a “sufficiently joined-up” approach to dealing with financial misconduct or monitoring the redeployment of leaders of failing academies within the sector.

Independent schools need to deal with ‘gun-to-the-head employment practices’

In his speech, Dr Roach also took aim at the Independent Schools Council (ISC) - the body that represents the private school sector - and called on it to deal with the issue of “gun-to-the-head employment practices”, which he said were used by their members and were “damaging teacher morale and children’s education”.

Dr Roach named several independent schools and said that they were “treating teachers with contempt, intimidation and the threat of fire and rehire”.

And he called on the DfE to “issue guidance to schools advising against the use of dismissal and re-engagement”.

He concluded that if some independent schools continued their “shoddy treatment” of the workforce, then the public needed to question whether these schools “should continue to benefit from public contracts or tax subsidies”.

Earlier this year, teacher-members of the NEU teaching union in 23 independent schools went on strike in response to plans for their schools’ trust to withdraw from the Teacher’ Pension Scheme (TPS), and what they called the threat of “fire and rehire”.

But the action was ended last month after a deal was agreed between the schools and the NEU.

Government spending on ‘dodgy’ procurement criticised

Dr Roach closed his speech by demanding a “programme of pay restoration” for all teachers, saying that this should start with calls for a minimum 12 per cent pay award from this September.

He said “nothing else” would do.

He added that if the government can find the money to “write off £8.7 billion of debt from dodgy PPE procurement”, “bail out failing academies to the tune of millions”, and “give lucrative contracts to companies like Randstad”, then “they can find more money for teachers and for education”.

In March this year, the government called for teacher starting salaries to rise by over 16 per cent over the next two years, to bring them up to £30,000 by September 2023.

The DfE has said in its submission to the School Teacher Review Body (STRB) that it wants statutory starting pay to increase by 8.9 per cent this year and 7.1 per cent next year.

But the proposed increases for more experienced staff are lower, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said that given rising levels of inflation, the proposals for teacher pay would see a real-terms cut of 5 per cent for more experienced staff between 2021 and 2023.