The National Union of Teachers (NUT) annual conference on Monday voted to demand a pay rise of ten per cent or at least £3,000, whichever is greater.
NUT delegates at the Cardiff conference backed the call despite warnings it would be unseemly when people are being made redundant.
In the debate, one teacher said she was so fed up with the workload strains and the strain of repaying her £25,000 student loan that she was going abroad to work.
Becky Williams, a history teacher from Nottingham, told the conference that after four years in the profession she was earning just £26,000 a year.
She added that had had enough and is going to work in a British-run international school in Kenya, earning £100 a month more than in England.
‘I have handed in my notice. I am going to teach abroad,’ she said.
Michael Wrought-Brookes from North Yorkshire opposed the ten per cent pay demand, arguing that it would be wrong when people were being made redundant in their thousands.
But Bradford NUT delegate Ian Murch, said the recession should not be used as an excuse to cut teachers’ pay when the consumer prices index was still more than three per cent.
He told conference: ‘We take no lessons in morality from government ministers, who fit out their homes with stone sinks from Habitat on their expenses, who pay their husbands more than a teacher earns to be their personal assistants and who don’t appear to engage in even a hint of performance management of what they get up to.’
He successfully proposed that NUT members should be balloted for strike action if the 2.3 per cent pay rise agreed for September, as part of a three-year deal, is reduced.
Last year the NUT leadership called off further industrial action over pay, on the excuse that the majority for strike action was not big enough.
This was after a one-day teachers’ strike in April that had been the biggest for 21 years, closing about one in 10 schools in England and Wales.
The NUT conference also threatened ballots on industrial action against moves to privatise the exclusion units for disruptive pupils.
The government has announced a dozen pilot schemes in England where private companies are to run units for pupils who have been excluded or are at risk of being disruptive.
These include a city farm, a football training centre and a scheme based on Army Cadet Force training.
NUT delegates predicted that the numbers of troubled children being sent to such referral units would rise as family problems grow during the recession.
The centres, known as PRUs, are supposed to provide short-term help to get children back into mainstream classes.
NUT national officer Jerry Glazier warned: ‘We do not want, in any shape or form, privatisation which will simply put up barriers to that partnership working, not take them down.’
Bristol delegate Rachel Lynch, a special educational needs teacher, said: ‘These services should not be used as a dumping ground for children who do not fit in to the mainstream.’
At its annual conference in Bournemouth yesterday, sister teaching union, NASUWT voted for a motion on contract compliance, highlighting the continuing breaches of the teacher’s contract taking place in some schools.
Commenting, NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates said: ‘The fact that this motion came in the top five of the motions balloted by members is an indication that there are still too many schools where teachers and headteachers are not receiving their full contractual entitlements.
‘Some schools still don’t grasp the fact that these contractual changes are not perks for teachers.
‘They are designed to enable teachers and headteachers to work more effectively and to focus on teaching and learning.
‘Therefore it is not just the teachers, but the children and young people who are also losing out.
‘However, time is running out for those who continue to flout the law.
‘Legislation is on its way through Parliament that will put an end to the actions of those who consider themselves above the law and compromise raising standards in schools.’
The motion was moved by Mike Wilson and seconded by Josh Wright.
It stated: ‘Conference fully supports the “Compliance Campaign” and the changes to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document.
‘Conference notes that the Government is taking steps to legally enforce these changes.
‘Conference condemns school managements which, in some cases in collusion with local authorities, have not implemented the changes fully and which still expect teachers to:
(i) undertake cover;
(ii) supervise examinations;
(iii) do the specified clerical tasks;
(iv) attend more than one meeting per week;
(v) supervise children at lunchtime;
(vi) put up classroom displays and
(vii) not benefit from preparation, planning and assessment time.
‘Conference believes that failure to implement the changes brought about by the National Agreement has led to an erosion of working conditions resulting in an increase in class sizes, contact time and the number of teaching periods in the day.
‘Conference calls upon the National Executive to take appropriate action against non-compliant schools by all available means, up to and including strike action, thus enabling all teachers to enjoy their contractual entitlements without fear or detriment.
(from Newark & Sherwood, Devon, Sheffield, Hampshire West, Sandwell branches)
The ‘Is your school breaking the law?’ campaign was launched as a result of a survey of teachers and head-teachers in England and Wales which demonstrated that they were not receiving their contractual and other statutory entitlements.
The NASUWT National Conference also voted to call for an end to the ‘debilitating and unacceptable burdens of lesson planning, assessment, recording and reporting faced by teachers’.
Ahead of the debate, NASUWT General Secretary Keates said: ‘Teachers are buckling under the weight of the burdens of excessively bureaucratic workload, intensive systems of assessment, lesson planning, recording and reporting.
‘These serve no useful educational purpose. They are paper trails designed only to satisfy inspection.
‘These debilitating systems drive out the fun and enjoyment that should be an integral part of teaching and learning.
‘A national protocol against which schools can benchmark their systems of assessment and lesson planning to ensure they are fit for purpose is long overdue.’
