The NEU teaching union is facing calls to reconsider its July strike dates amid concerns that they clash with “critical” summer term events and will hit student attendance.
Over the weekend, England’s largest teaching union announced two more days of national strike action - on Wednesday 5 July and Friday 7 July - after the education secretary declined to restart negotiations on pay.
The decision to hold these further days of strike action, taken by the union’s executive team, has sparked a backlash from some leaders and teachers, who highlight that the dates coincide with events such as Year 6 transition and sports days
Some also warn that the timing of the action will undermine efforts to tackle the pupil attendance crisis.
However, others argue that the teacher recruitment problems, which they link to teachers’ salaries, are more disruptive in the longer term than a couple of strike days.
Sufian Sadiq, director of teaching school at Chiltern Learning Trust, said that, while he was a “supporter” of the strikes in general, and that the NEU had done a “great job in the last year to defend and protect the sector”, he wanted the union to reconsider its choice of dates.
Teacher strikes over pay
He tweeted: “These dates genuinely rob children of special memories: enrichment days, transition days, sports day, trips & performances. Kids shouldn’t suffer. Please reconsider!”
In some areas, the strike dates will clash with secondary school transition days for Year 6 pupils.
Glyn Potts, headteacher at Blessed John Henry Newman RC College in Oldham, told Tes that these transition days were “critical”.
“For those parents with children who are anxious about coming to secondary school, not having those transition days actually builds that anxiety, and probably gives greater risk of those young people being disaffected before they’ve even stepped foot in the building,” he said.
“So I think at this time, particularly with Covid and the hangover of Covid, to not have transition is a real risk.”
His school takes pupils from around 42 primaries and uses transition days to ensure that “all those parents get the same messages”.
Rob McDonough, chief executive officer of East Midlands Education Trust, highlighted the “quite significant” logistical challenge of organising transition days.
“It’s not as easy as just cancelling it and deferring and pushing it back,” he said. “There may not be the means to be able to put it anywhere else in busy school schedules.”
He added that there was “no good time to be engaged in strike action” and “the whole thing remains regrettable”.
“Potentially having to cancel a sports day or a school trip is just as devastating as having to cancel important revision work for examinations, which was where we were last time,” Mr McDonough said.
Fears about pupil attendance
Amy Forrester, English teacher and director of behaviour and futures at Cockermouth School in Cumbria, expressed concern on Twitter that splitting up the strike days would “compound the already astronomical issues every school is facing with regards to attendance”.
And Matt Taylor, an assistant principal, tweeted that the split day strikes were “so unfair on attendance teams”.
On attendance, Mr Potts told Tes that splitting the days meant the school had “a pattern now of attendance being poor because of the timing of the strikes”.
He added that the “disruption lags into those families and parents...that’s actually not helping us dealing with those those children, despite wanting to support colleagues in bringing about positive change due to industrial action”.
However, others said they supported the NEU’s decision.
Simon Smith, principal of East Whitby Academy in North Yorkshire, tweeted that he would support his NEU colleagues “whatever they choose to do on the strike days of the 5th and the 7th July”.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s Sports Day (the 5th is ours) or transition day or any of the other things that happen at the end of school year,” he added.
And Vic Goddard, co-principal of Passmores Academy in Harlow, Essex, said: “I do think that SLT [members of senior leadership teams] (the highest paid members of staff) should be mindful of moaning about having to move sports day, etc, whilst their staff are striking over not being able to pay their bills and the funding crisis hurting every child.”
Lack of funding ‘far more disruptive’
Caroline Derbyshire, executive headteacher and chief executive of Saffron Academy Trust, said that the planned strike dates will “spoil work plans and ruin events I have worked hard on”.
However, she added that the “lack of funding and the teacher recruitment crisis is spoiling every school day and will be far more disruptive in the longer term than two lost days this July”.
“I try to take a longer term, philosophical view of the matter,” she added.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, declined to comment “on the decisions of another union over strike dates as they will have their own reasons and decision-making processes”.
The situation was “of the government’s making through its neglect of the education workforce and its refusal even to resume formal negotiations let alone reach a meaningful settlement”, he added, reiterating calls for a “decent and fully funded pay award”.
While union members voted for three days of strike action in the summer term at the NEU conference in Harrogate earlier this year, the union’s executive has opted for just two strike dates.
Asked for the rationale behind this, a spokesperson said: ”The executive decided two days was the right amount to take to continue the pressure on [education secretary] Gillian Keegan to publish the [teacher pay review body] report and come to the table to negotiate.”
Addressing the concerns over the July strike dates, Kevin Courtney, NEU joint general secretary, said: ”No teacher wants to be taking strike action. The education secretary has it within her grasp to have the strikes halted.”
Education in England was ”in a state of crisis”, with teacher recruitment and retention “at debilitating levels, with headteachers struggling to fill posts across all subjects”, he added.
A Department for Education spokesperson responded: “Further strike action will cause real damage to pupil learning and even more disruption for parents right across the country. Thousands of schools are receiving significant additional funding as part of the extra £2 billion of investment we are providing for both 2023-24 and 2024-25 which will take school funding its highest level in history next year, as measured by the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies].
“As part of the normal process, the independent School Teachers’ Review Body has submitted its recommendations to government on teacher pay for 2023-24. We will be considering the recommendations and will publish our response in the usual way.”
