Slowly but surely striking public sector workers have agreed to sit down at the negotiating table with the government and hammer out pay deals for themselves. But there is one sector that might prove more of a headache than others for Rishi Sunak to deal with: teachers.
In September, the National Education Union (NEU) will have a new leader. New term, new start and all that. But it seems that this general secretary-to-be, Daniel Kebede, has some pretty strong thoughts on the state of British schools.
So far this year, the NEU has shut down schools with four days of teacher strikes, and has announced five more to come before the summer is out. As with most of the other unions organising strikes the union has insisted its main reason for striking has been over pay. Just yesterday, the union rejected a pay offer of 4.5 per cent from Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and threatened to keep striking until they received a satisfactory offer. However, Mr Steerpike wonders if Mr Kebede may have other ideas.
Footage has emerged of Mr Kebede giving a speech at the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism conference last July while still a primary school teacher. In it, he says that the true purpose of striking is about ‘much more [than] about the issue of pay’. In fact, teachers’ strikes, he said, were about ‘taking back control of an education system from a brutally racist state that sends refugees to Rwanda’.
He went on to say strikes were ‘about reorganising society, where we are free from racism and free from oppression’. The school curriculum, he said, was ‘alienating’ for students of all races while ‘the British education system is fundamentally and institutionally racist’.
Mr Kebede, who clearly feels he needs to teach the government a lesson, made the speech while standing for leadership of the NEU last summer. With the union leaving the door open to further strikes in September, Mr S wonders just what they could morph into under his leadership.
Rishi Sunak and Gillian Keegan might be hoping to get a new deal with the NEU over the line in time for the summer holidays to avoid just this. Might Mr S suggest they get a move on?
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