The National Education Union (NEU) wants “fully funded schools and to restore teachers’ pay after 17 years of austerity”, but Keir Starmer’s Labour government has left teachers feeling “really let down”, according to NEU executive member Louise Lewis. With Labour simply continuing Conservative austerity policies, she stressed, there’s significant interest in the trade-union movement for a new mass party on the left.
“The government isn’t working with us”, says the NEU
Speaking to the Canary, Lewis said:
Like a lot of unions, we feel let down by Labour. Labour made a lot of promises to improve recruitment and retention, to address workload for teachers, to fund schools properly. And that hasn’t happened. So we feel really let down. And we’re really pushing for a new left party because there isn’t a party there that is for workers’ rights. And we would certainly welcome and get behind a new left party.
Regarding such a party, she insisted:
For myself personally, as an executive member, I would be working with other left executive members to try and push for us to affiliate. I think the best place to do that is at annual conference, because that’s our supreme governing body, and allowing the members to make that decision in a democratic way.
In order to affiliate, she explained:
We’d want a government that’s gonna work with us, that’s gonna listen to unions and work with trade unions… We know what works best for our schools. At the moment, the government isn’t working with us… We know what underfunding is gonna be like, so we would certainly want a party that is gonna work hand in hand with trade unions, is gonna work democratically, are a part of the workers’ struggle.
Labour continues to let children and teachers down
The NEU has called on the government to “invest to urgently restore the real value of teacher pay in line with inflation”, but Labour has just accepted a review body’s recommendation of a 4% pay increase, controversially telling schools to “fund around a quarter of the rise themselves” via cuts. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said:
In many schools this will mean cuts in service provision to children and young people, job losses, and additional workloads for an already overstretched profession.
As Lewis told us:
These cuts are only gonna come in the form of support staff in schools that would be there to support children that are deregulated. Schools can’t afford stuff like glue sticks and basic equipment. I don’t know where they expect schools to make further savings in order to fund this pay rise. So it is gonna have a massive impact on the most vulnerable students. So never mind having provisions, we’re not even gonna have the staff in there to support them.
She added that:
Schools are under so much pressure in terms of what teachers [and] what head teachers have to face in order to meet unrealistic targets because of funding.
In this situation, some children get written off or left behind, sometimes via “part-time timetables”:
They’re vulnerable children often, and that’s why they’re deregulated in school, and they haven’t got that consistency at home. And that, coupled with the fact that we don’t have youth services, we don’t have affordable sporting and [other] opportunities out there for our children in the local community, has a massive impact. And there’s only so much the few of us that are active in that field can do without proper funding and them bids that are available in order to run proper clubs and youth centres for kids.
Sport can be a good way of keeping young people away from potential involvement in gangs and crime in their free time, she said, but her local Labour-led council has been cutting back on community centre provisions. She herself participated in efforts to keep her local leisure centre open in recent years, with only partial success.
Realising and harnessing our collective power to fight back
Lewis is in favour of more “cross-union work” to bring campaigns together. And she called for:
getting more people aware and more activists, and getting teachers to wake up and become more actively involved
But she admitted that:
teachers are worn out… and that’s part of the problem as well… when you’re so burned out and you’re already working 50-odd hours a week.
At the same time, though, she stressed that:
a lot of people don’t know how much impact their voice can have.
This is where local mobilisation can have a really empowering effect. And Lewis played a part in bringing together the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality (PACE) in Kirklees, West Yorkshire. This has been connecting campaigners, trade unionists, and politicians locally in opposition to war, cuts, and racism. And it has received the support of both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana as it prepares for the 2026 local election, hopefully alongside the new national party of the left.
Collective efforts like PACE, Lewis argued:
can help pool our resources to help get that message across and make people more aware of what needs to be done, how their voices do have an impact, and just give them that space… for people to turn up to so they can start getting involved and listen and start getting an understanding of where to be, how to be more actively involved, take on more roles.
Local organising to send people down to London to oppose the genocide in Gaza, for example, has shown how:
when you have got them active members and people can pull together and pool resources together… you can pull something off massive
Featured image via the Canary
