In the aftermath of the Tories election win, the National Union of Teachers' general accretarya right-winger Doug McAvoy, immediately warned the press of the danger of industrial action by teachers.
In fact McAvoy will as usual be doing everything possible at next weekend's NUT conference to head off militant action, at a time when thousands of teachers tace lobs losses, and when Tory education reforms threaten to throw education back to the 19th century.
Fixed agenda
The first conference battle will be over the agenda; the conference arrangements com mittee has engineered a fix so that all policy questions will be dealt with first, but action decisions will be relegated to a couple of hours at the end.
In the last couple of years McAvoy has succeeded in sabotaging effective action. In 1990 conference passed positions for industrial action against redundancies and local management of schools, but none was called.
Last year's ballot on industrial action against Standard Assessment Tests (SATS) was undermined by the extraordinary wording of the ballot paper, which warned teachers or dire consequences i they took strike action. Now SATS have been extended to include 14 year olds as well as 7 year olds.
The reactionary changes in education are going to be tollowed by thousands of redundancies among teachers. The background to redundancies is the opting-out of schools to put them in charge of their own budgets, and the impact of poll tax capping in the coming financial year. dancies have been largely avoided by voluntary re dundancy and redeployment. But the scale of the cutbacks next year makes this impossible: thousands will just lose their The NUT faces a further challenge from the impact of the Tory victory. As more and more schools opt-out and become employers, the service will be frag ented. Maintaining trade Graham Day unionism in this situation will be a hard struggle.
Now that Labour has lost the election, the Tories will push on with then restructuring or education.
Doug McAvoy's leadership disastrous for NUT The effects of that are clear. Testing and the national curmining post-war education rerorm, reasserting class divisions among pupils and impovershing the content of education around. At the same time, teachers' pay and conditions are being drastically attacked.
Performance-related pay. and regular appraisal of teachers work will reinstate 'pay. ment by results', a literal throw-back to the 19th censauty Flexibilty Graham Day, the chief executive of British Aerospace, who heads the Teachers Re view Body, has made it clear that next on the agenda is a move away from substantial national pay increases towards Local 'flexibility' The Doug McAvoy leadership has shown itself prostrate before the Tories' attack on education and teachers; now it is about to show itself incapable of defending the organi.