And now, yet another historic moment (they’re coming thick and fast): this time in education. This weekend, the NUT teaching union holds its 145th and final annual conference before it joins with the ATL teaching union to form the National Education Union, which will come into being in September.

Inevitably, while looking forward eagerly to the launch of the “superunion”, I can’t escape looking back with (generally) fond memories of the NUT conferences that I’ve attended every Easter for 62 years (at 92, I’ll probably be the oldest member of the conference).

Through the decades, I’ve seen significant changes. Throughout, the NUT conference has remained the principal forum for the expression of the aims, hopes and concerns of teachers, and the needs and achievements of their pupils and students.

Open to change

Having come from five years’ involvement in the hurly burly and often bitter debates within the NUS students’ union, my first impression of the NUT conference in 1955 was of a staid, almost old-fashioned body somewhat in contrast with the union’s reputation as the crusading organisation battling for education reform and leading the struggle for equal pay for female teachers.

The style and procedures of the conference had been unchanged for years. There was no strict time limit for speeches and the conference’s “big guns” were allowed to speak at great length; the choice of floor speakers was left to the president; the press were not admitted for most sessions; union documents and the NUT logo were antiquated; and on the platform, the wives of officers and executive members sat, invariably wearing hats of all kinds.

After my first conference, Ronnie Gould, the union’s formidable general secretary, asked me if I had any suggestions to make about the conference. With as much tact as I could muster, I said that the press should be allowed to report all the conference proceedings except financially confidential ones, and that it would make the conference seem more workmanlike if the wives and their hats were seated elsewhere and the executive occupied their places. I was even allowed to commission a designer to create a new logo.

Conference participants now run the gauntlet of good-humoured, slogan-shouting leaflet distributors telling them who and what they should vote for

Other changes were to come. The official church service, an almost compulsory occasion, was dropped and replaced with various events for worthy causes. The conference ball was also stopped and, even before that, a “royal personage” no longer came to receive the purse for the Benevolent and Orphan Fund.

Outside the conference hall, where in days of yore one encountered the solitary peddler of pamphlets or the Daily Worker, conference participants now run the gauntlet of good-humoured, slogan-shouting leaflet distributors telling them who and what they should vote for, fringe meetings they are invited to attend and bulletins offering partisan comments on what has been happening in the conference.

If they can find the time, a considerable number of participants go to the fringe meetings or receptions and discos held by some of the divisions and associations.

On the other hand, the continued and substantial presence of fraternal delegates from the British Isles, the Commonwealth, Europe and the Americas demonstrates the strong ties and fruitful co-operation that they have enjoyed with the union over many years. What will need to be done in the wake of Brexit remains to be seen.

What, for me, has been even more striking is the range of issues, problems and challenges that now shape the conference agenda - an agenda determined in its compilation by the votes of the associations.

Issues are being discussed today that never appeared at all on the agenda in earlier years. This Easter, the various topics tabled include: teacher and student mental health and wellbeing; a national contract; primary assessment; the “asbestos time bomb”; supply teachers; bullying; racism and migration; early years funding; supporting transgender teachers and students; better security for disabled teachers; the Prevent strategy; and “leading schools the NUT way”.

In touch with members

Hardly any of these would have figured even a decade ago, but they all reflect the extent to which the work of schools and colleges, and the concerns of teachers and their colleagues, have increased. This is a measure of the extent to which the NUT is in touch with the interests of its members and those they teach.

While some of those developments have, over time, brought significant changes in the atmosphere and character of the conference, and transformed the sedate gathering of earlier decades, the most important changes have come in the composition of the conference itself.

The growth of NUT membership obviously brought a substantial increase in its size but, more significantly, in its make-up. The number of female delegates greatly increased, the number of female speakers even more so and the age profile has changed most of all.

In my early years with the union, I came to know - and occasionally met at conference - two NUT members who later became speaker of the House of Commons, one who became deputy speaker, two home secretaries (one of them having been joint architect of the 1944 Education Act), one foreign secretary, three education secretaries, an education minister and one Welsh secretary. All were in Labour governments and I even met a handful of NUT members who became Conservative MPs.

The breadth of the debates has widened greatly

So in recent years it has been fascinating to observe the changing allegiances of the “rank and file” and other groups that seek to influence the conference - moving usually from soft to a hard or harder shade of left; in my view, they remain as remote from the political allegiances (if any) of the large majority of NUT members as they are insignificant in the country’s politics.

It is of concern that in recent years the voice of the moderates and centrists who make up a large proportion of the membership has been nearly silenced. But that’s another story.

The earlier decades were the days of the “big guns” who often had an electrifying effect on debates - and voting. They included names such as John Gray, Max Morris, Muriel Stewart, Walter Roy, June Fisher and, of course, the general secretary, Ronald Gould.

Most of them, of course, will mean nothing to this current batch of delegates. But while their oratory and debating skills were outstanding, the quality and level of debate has, in my view, risen substantially since their days. And the breadth of the debates has widened greatly.

It is unfortunate that press commentators seize on the calls for industrial action on a range of issues to depict the NUT as “strike happy”, but they fail to recognise or respect the whole range of educational and professional issues that most of the conference time is devoted to.

Will that change? It will be for the new teaching union, built as it is on the combined wisdom and experience of two unions, to do its utmost to ensure that its conference commands the attention - and embodies the expertise and dynamism - of what will be the new national forum for teachers and education. It’s a big challenge, true, but one that I fully expect the new organisation to rise to.

Fred Jarvis was general secretary of the NUT between 1975 and 1989