Christina McAnea is the first woman to lead the UK’s biggest union, Unison, which represents school support staff, including teaching assistants, cleaners, caterers and caretakers.

The mother-of-two, from Drumchapel, Glasgow, left school at 16 and worked in the civil service, the NHS and retail before going to university at the age of 22. She has worked at Unison since its formation in 1993, becoming its most senior negotiator, as well as holding a number of other senior positions, before her eventual promotion to general secretary.

So, how did she get on when faced with Tes’ 10 questions?

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

My history teacher, Mr Reid. He made history come alive for me. He made it leap off the page, he made it about individuals and people and not just about royalty and all the rest of it.

But also, he gave me an understanding of reaching conclusions with evidence. If you wrote an essay, he would say, “Where’s your evidence for this?” It was something that stayed with me all my working life - that you come to a conclusion based on evidence and don’t just think, “this is a good idea”.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

I hated the [start] times at school. I think school started too early. I’m not an early bird, and I think it’s got even worse. My kids had to start school at 8am and I don’t think that suits young people.

The best thing: I always liked the learning and I liked the challenge. I also liked being with my friends.

3. Why do you work in education?

I was head of education at Unison [between 2002 and 2010] and I loved it. I have to say that our members in education are inspirational. They just blow people away with their knowledge and expertise and passion about what they do and their commitment to the kids they look after.

The knowledge that teaching assistants have about how children learn is just fascinating, and when you want to go into detail on things like delivering medications in schools or family problems affecting [pupils’] concentration, their knowledge of that is incredible, too.

When my mother died, my daughter was 5 and she was in Reception and at home she’d be relatively calm about it, and then [one day] I went into school to collect her and it was the teaching assistant that took me aside to tell me how upset she was getting at school. That made me realise, as a parent, the impact that my mother’s death had on her.

I was probably still struggling with grief myself, and the way she described what my daughter was going through and the suggestions about how I should deal with it was just fantastic. For weeks after that, I’d talk to [the teaching assistant] about it. And it was always the teaching assistant who talked to me, not the teacher.

4. What are you most proud of in your career and what’s your biggest regret?

It’s the work that I was involved in [through helping to set up the National Workforce Agreement in 2003] for getting recognition for school support staff in terms of them not being one big homogeneous group, and actually getting people to recognise that you had [for example] different levels of teaching assistant doing different levels of work.

And [people started to recognise] that nursery nurses - as they were called then; now they’re early years professionals - had a fantastic skill set and a better understanding of the needs of early years children than most teachers, even most early years teachers. Back then, you could be an early years teacher without actually having studied early years, but you couldn’t be a nursery nurse unless you’d done your two-year training course.

So I’m proud of that. I think we helped to put support staff on the map, as it were.

My biggest regret is that we never saw it through to get a separate negotiating body for school support staff, which we were almost set to get when Labour lost the election in 2010. We were pushing really hard for that and we’d finally got the Labour government to agree and they’d said if they won the election that would have been on the table.

5. Who would be in your dream staffroom?

Having somebody like Martin Luther King as your head of ethics and religious studies would be fantastic. I’d pick some really great authors like David Walliams, who would be brilliant, and I could just imagine the kids learning how to write inventive stories with somebody like him. And I have to say, when I was growing up I was a fan of people like Louisa May Alcott, and I still think Little Women is one of the best kids’ and young adult books ever written. Gloria Steinem [the US journalist and feminist activist] could come in to teach the girls about standing up for themselves. And Grayson Perry should be an art teacher - he’s fantastic.

6. What are the best and worst aspects of our schools system today?

It’s [too] exam-driven and results-driven rather than letting pupils develop and understand a sort of critical understanding of the world.

The best aspect is that schools now are much more diverse and we need to continue to encourage diversity and let kids discuss things like gender and sexuality.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

Somebody who was the vice-chair of our schools committee for many years. She’s called Carol Ball. She was an early years worker at Glasgow City Council, and she was one of those people who would go to meetings and blow people away with her knowledge of early years. She sat on the Scottish government’s review of early years and led the big nursery nurse strike we had in Scotland 15 years ago, so she has always been inspirational - not just in terms of her trade union work but actually her knowledge of what you do in education.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?

I would give a pay rise to school support staff and teachers. I’d give then the right rate for the job. We’re an incredibly rich country and I would reform the tax system so that we tax not just income but wealth. I’d also bring back Sure Start [a Labour government scheme aimed at giving children the best possible start in life through the improvement of childcare, early education, health and family support].

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years’ time?

There will be a lot more online learning. I’d like to think there will be smaller classes. You may not have big schools any more. They may be smaller, more local, with children and young people only going in at certain times. [School designers] might be more aware of climate issues, so maybe you wouldn’t build huge schools any more that you have to heat and have pupils in all the time, where you’re giving them lots of materials. You could do things differently. You could have much more integration of pupils with learning disabilities or other kinds of additional needs - their needs being much more catered for, so instead of having to fight to get a statement and get support and get this and get that, these things are just taken for granted. I’d like to see children treated more as individuals rather than as part of a big group.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to our schools this year?

Marcus Rashford [the Manchester United footballer and child poverty campaigner]. I think he’s an amazing example of a young man who is very talented at what he does, and obviously he’d got loads of money because of the job he does, and yet he’s still committed to fighting for people who are worse off than him and probably come from the same background as him. He’s absolutely an inspiration and I wish more young footballers would do that.

Christina McAnea was speaking to Dave Speck, a reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 13 August 2021 issue