Nut General Secretary Christine Blower S Speech to Annual Conference on Tuesday 26 April 2011

NUT GENERAL SECRETARY CHRISTINE BLOWER’S SPEECH TO ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON TUESDAY 26 APRIL 2011

President, Delegates, Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers – the largest teachers’ union in Europe and certainly in England and Wales! – and very proud to be so. In fact, taking the lead from Lily Eskelesen on Friday, I’m going to say I’m a good General Secretary of a fantastic Union.

Let me begin, President, by congratulating you on your address to Conference and your chairing of our proceedings. You are already a fantastic President.

I have no wish to embarrass you, but I do want to say that I have immense admiration for the courage and fortitude you have shown in confronting and handling very significant health problems.

You have shown incredible resilience. I am pleased to count you as a friend and wish you the best Presidential year imaginable – although with this Government I know that will be tough!

Last year, as we met in Liverpool, the General Election was ahead of us. There was much to do, both at local and national level. Members of the National Union of Teachers set about the task of ensuring a rout of the British National Party – and I’m proud to say that, in that task, we were exceedingly successful. Our activities in various constituencies across the country enjoyed support from members. None more so than the brilliant day in Barking and Dagenham, when NUT members and staff alongside other trade unionists put an excellent newspaper through the door of every household in Barking and Dagenham and quite a number in the neighbouring Havering. It was a great day. Brilliantly organised and executed.

We were all rewarded with an excellent lunch and entertainment from local boy Billy Bragg. I happen to know that meeting Billy Bragg that day was the highlight of the anti-BNP campaign for at least one of this year’s delegates here in Harrogate.

The paper we distributed had been produced by Daily Mirror journalists working with Hope not Hate.

We are continuing collaboration with Hope not Hate and the Daily Mirror ahead of the local elections on May 5th. We want to have the same presence we managed last year, to ensure the same outcome of seeing off the far right, whether they are wearing the label BNP or EDL or WDL or anything else they can think of.

The weekend before Easter saw activity in Bradford, Boston, Burnley, Charnwood, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NW Leicestershire, Stoke on Trent, Thurrock and Wrexham. Despite intimidation from members of the EDL in Thurrock, all the newspapers were delivered. Colleagues, we are many, the EDL and BNP are few. We need to have a greater peaceful presence wherever they are to challenge their abhorrent polices and views.

We will, of course, also continue to work closely with both Unite Against Fascism and Love Music Hate Racism to bring the anti-racist and anti-fascist message to every part of the country. And may I also take the opportunity to pay my own tribute to Jason Hill for the fantastic anti-fascist work he has done. We are proud to have him as the first recipient of the Blair Peach Award.

So, we all know what the outcome of the General Election was. A coalition of a very different type from that of 1944. No-one voted for the outcome we got. And those who voted for the Liberal Democrats feel, in many cases, unbelievably let down.

We know what the consequences have been for the public sector and, in particular, for education. The age of austerity is upon us. The attacks on the Jewels in the Crown of the welfare state as highlighted by the President in her speech, the NHS and the education service are brutal.

Many of us in this Hall lived through – or more importantly, opposed the waves of cuts under the Thatcher Government. Many of us may have hoped and believed that those days were behind us. But the attacks we face from this Government go to the heart and very existence of the education service in which, and for which, we all work. Our debates on Saturday showed the strength of feeling against the cuts.

The Union has responded vigorously to cuts proposals all over the country. We’ve heard about the action supported enthusiastically by the National Union in East London and Camden. In Rotherham, the campaign at Rawmarsh School, which I was pleased to visit, has resolved the situation for most of the threatened redundancies. Moreover, the words ‘indicative ballot’ uttered by the Division Secretary in Rotherham has made proposed redundancies at other schools and the Sixth Form College simply go away.

Since last Conference, we have seen members taking action up and down the country in defence of jobs and to oppose transfer out of the local authority, to defend members from excessive workload, in Calderdale, in Coventry, in Liverpool, in Nottingham, in Brighton and Hove - too many to mention. Suffice it to say that the Action Committee has been busy.

As Jerry Glazier said in moving the SFC section of the Annual Report, the Union is at its best when we stand together and take action in defence of members and education.

It takes a lot of effort to organise campaigning and action against cuts and policies that threaten our jobs and our education service. I pay tribute to all Division Secretaries and their committees and activists who have carried out these campaigns and members who have taken action in defence of the education service we all value.

So resistance is very far from useless. In fact, it is our duty. We know that this Government is ideologically driven to change the face of public services. We know that the cuts were never inevitable but a choice. The Government clearly believes that, if they get the cuts out of the way in the first two years, the public will forget and be prepared to vote them in again. I think that we know, colleagues, that we face the prospect of a landscape so changed that no-one will be in a position to forget. The role of the National Union of Teachers is to work with all who seek to defend education and arrest as much of that change as we can.

And so it was that we took to the streets exactly a month ago on March 26th. And what a day it was.

The giant inflatable scissors, the balloons and the flags – the big ones and the small ones made a huge visual impact. This picture of the scissors was e-mailed to me from the President of EI, Susan Hopgood, who had seen it in a publication in her home country of Australia.

My colleagues, in the Communications Department, deserve a big round of applause for what they did to give us such a great presence.

I know we don’t like league tables – but sometimes they have their uses. In the league table of banners on the march, the NUT came 2nd with 95 banners. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. We were only outdone by UNISON who did, indeed, have an enormous presence.

Even more than the fantastic pictures in the media and the delight that so many members were there, there is just one more thing that made me proud. This is a postcard of Wortham Manor in Devon. I received it just a few days after March 26th. And on the back it said:

“On the demo I stood for 4 hours on Waterloo Bridge with my ‘No Trident’ banner, watching thousands go past underneath. Beyond question, the NUT lot were the most cheery and best organised and one of the largest. Please accept the Bruce Kent Demo Prize for 2011. As ever, Bruce.”

I count Bruce as a friend and am delighted that a veteran campaigner such as he, took the time to write to me in those terms.

The TUC asked us to bring flags rather than placards but I’m very glad some on the march chose placards. For creativity you can’t beat placards with messages thought up by individuals. They ranged from the slightly surreal, including ‘Eric Pickles ate my youth club’ through just odd, including: ‘I was told there would be biscuits’. To the direct such as ‘Will you lend me your nanny when my Sure Start Centre closes?’

Given that we knew it would be quite a long march, I chose to line up with the party at the front. I was pleased that I did so, as it gave me the opportunity to greet many, many NUT members as they walked down Northumberland Avenue to join the rest of the huge NUT contingent on the Embankment. Thanks in particular to those who came from Newcastle Upon Tyne and from Liverpool who e-mailed me later to thank me for being there to welcome them. I can tell you it was an enormous pleasure. As it was to see colleagues from Oxford and Nottingham and Brighton outside the Albert Hall, as we all made our way home. Alas, I didn’t see those from the South West who arrived by boat! But what originality, colleagues.

Delegates here who have heard me speak in Association meetings will know that I’m not always especially brief but the rally on March 26th was in danger of overrunning so I told Frances O’Grady, DGS of the TUC, I would do a minute and a half. I think we can encapsulate the motivation of those hundreds of thousands who demonstrated that day into about 30 seconds.

To the Government we say: “We don’t want your cuts, we don’t want your privatisations, we do want our public services, our NHS, our free state comprehensive schools and we want a Robin Hood Tax.”

Big Society? We are the big society. We know what social justice and fairness look like and it isn’t closing libraries and Sure Start Centres. It isn’t denying access to education by pricing ordinary people out of it.

And it isn’t schools and hospitals given over to “any willing provider” to turn a profit. So let’s stand together and march together and, yes, if necessary, strike together to support and defend our public services.

There seem now to be increasing numbers of people with whom we can stand and protest. One such is the ‘No Cuts for Kids’ campaign started by a group of women who used Mother’s Day to focus on the loss of Sure Start Centres.

Here’s how one organiser of the protest described the great success of Sure Start:

“Sure Start Children’s Centres are a great leveller in our society. Kids from all walks of life mix and learn together. Parents can further their education and gain vital support. Take them away or force them to make cutbacks and we’ll see the next generation really suffer.”

The Department for Education responded with this assertion:

“We have ensured there is enough money in the system to maintain a network of Sure Start Children’s Centres...”

Well at least one London Council thinks ‘maintaining a network’ can be done by cutting the budgets of Centres from £450k to £19k a year. Hard to for me to see how Hammersmith & Fulham Council thinks a Centre can be maintained on funding which, as one campaigner put it: “Would barely fund a caretaker and a bottle of bleach!”

So, from the devastating cuts in early years to the attacks on post-16 provision. We heard an excellent contribution from Joe Cotton yesterday. He deservedly is all over the press. For him and his contemporaries, the cuts to EMA and the obscene hike in university fees will simply price many of them out of education.

The prospects for our young people are indeed bleak, so campaigning on all of these issues is necessary. The campaigns all have a common theme, as the TUC put it: “Cuts are not the Cure.”

And who do we think the cuts hit the hardest? I think we all know it is the poorest, most vulnerable in our society. The End Child Poverty coalition, with whom we work closely, published a child poverty map of the UK in March. 21.3% of children are growing up in poverty. In some areas of large cities, this rises to over half. Tower Hamlets, with 57% of children in poverty, is the local authority with the highest child poverty rate. This is the most shocking finding from End Child Poverty Campaign was that the settlements handed down by central government to local authorities tend to be less favourable for those authorities with higher rates of child poverty and more favourable for those with lower rates of child poverty. The highest cut - 9% - was in Tower Hamlets. That’s an absolute disgrace!

Nowhere is campaigning more necessary for teachers than in defence of public sector pensions. Since last autumn, the National Union of Teachers has been at the forefront of campaigning to defend the wholly reasonable pension settlement we achieved by negotiation in 2006. We have quite rightly used the slogan that the Government wants us to Work Longer, Pay More, Get Less. Kevin Courtney, our DGS and myself have literally been from Cumbria to Cornwall to take the message to members that our pensions are under attack and we need to defend them.

We were all delighted to welcome Mary Bousted, General Secretary of ATL, to address us on Friday. The anger about pensions is all too obvious when our colleagues in ATL believe a ballot is necessary.

I congratulate delegates here in this hall on following their fine lead.

We will continue to work together with colleagues from ATL and all unions whose members are being short-changed by these attacks on our pensions.

Kevin Courtney, representing not just the NUT but on behalf of the TUC affiliated teacher unions has been at the table in the negotiations with Government so far. He is, as we all know, a brilliant negotiator but even he and the combined efforts of the TUC, have not brought about any movement from Government. So the time has come to ballot for action. The Government can still come to us with proposals to negotiate in good faith but the 2006 settlement was fair and is affordable. So make sure that you are prepared, straight after Conference to get on with campaigning for YES votes from all our eligible members in this ballot.

Alas, this is a time when we need to run more than one big campaign. We all came into teaching because we thought it would be a great job and indeed it is. It would be even better if we weren’t ground down by the stress and unnecessary and counterproductive workload that we all face. We continue to fight against this, against the erosion of national terms and conditions and for our own policy on a proper teachers’ contract everywhere.

We oppose the atomisation by academisation of our education service. We recognise that we now have members, good, loyal and active NUT members in very many academies and they are as valued as any members as in any school or service or Sixth Form College but it doesn’t stop us opposing the wilful break-up of our education system.

We will continue to seek from the Liberal Democrats adherence to their party policy – so eloquently moved at their Party Conference by Councillor Peter Downes who was both here in Harrogate and who we will be very pleased to welcome to our NEC in July. And we will press the case with all politicians for democratically accountable local schools and services.

In the NUT, we aspire to and work for a Good Local School for Every Child. Not a system of individualised markets and provision in which some children are chosen and many are rejected and where profit is deemed appropriate.

I wrote to Michael Gove last week to ask ‘why, at a time when school budgets are being squeezed to the limits has the DfE made £21 million in payments to private consultants?’ ‘Why, at a time when the DfE is cutting staff are almost one hundred DfE staff are employed on free school policy? That’s the equivalent to 4% of all junior posts in the DfE and costing the tax payer almost £4 million’ ‘Why, has he changed the application process to become a free school to make it highly unlikely that small groups working in their free time, without support from experienced project managers, would be able to complete successfully the initial application stage?’. The thing is he sold this policy of free schools to the general public as one of small groups of enthusiastic members of the community running schools, the Government has changed it to one of handing schools over to unaccountable private companies. No more public money should be ploughed into this untried, untested and unwanted experiment.

Despite the high level of campaigning against negative policies that we have had to do, we did find time to put on the most excellent day: our Reading 4 Pleasure Conference. Should anyone ever have the temerity to suggest that the NUT doesn’t take CPD seriously, they just need to look at the inputs and output from that day. The very well-received publication, largely the work of Karen Robinson, was downloaded over 5,500 times in its first week and has many more times since. It’s fantastic.