In March 2024 myself and my colleagues walked out on the first maintained nursery school (MNS) strike in the National Education Union’s (NEU) history. What follows is a reflection on my experience as a workplace rep in the strike. We went out over the managed decline of our school, deep cuts and job losses, and an attack on our ability to teach. This led to us organising all classroom-based workers into the union, before overwhelmingly winning a strike ballot. We took 15 days of strike action over the 6 month period of our strike mandate before there was any resolution.

What is a Maintained Nursery School?

From 1918 onwards, the MNS system in England was developed with a focus on the holistic child where healthy food and medical care was delivered alongside carefully designed learning environments. In their design, and to this day, MNS are legally constituted as schools and need to be led by a headteacher. They are specialised in the education and care of very young children and supported by qualified early years teachers. The extra statutory requirements of MNS mean they cost more to run, and many have to cover costs that schools don’t pay, such as business rates. MNS were nearly always built in areas of deprivation. Over the years they’ve become known for providing inclusive education, meeting the needs of significant proportions of two-year-old children and those with additional needs.
MNS activists’ campaign for a long-term funding solution that fully covers costs. Insufficient investment has been exacerbated in London where MNS have been further negatively impacted by falling numbers of children on roll. This has led to financial instability and MNS closures – 3 are due to close in England this year!

My nursery school opened in 1935 and we operated it in much the same way as when it was first opened. Some of the same facilities that we see in photographs taken shortly after its opening are still in use today. Until recently, staff teams were long serving and proudly held onto the roots of quality early childhood education, whilst also looking at the latest research and adapting to changing needs. Knowledge had been passed from one worker to the next.

MNS do not have the ‘top-down’ pressure of schools which often involves formalising learning for very young children. MNS pedagogy (the way we teach) is child-led, play based, free-flow, nurturing but also enables children to assess and take risks – normally in a big garden with trees to climb. MNS teaching and care is radical, socialist teaching that rejects the standardization that is typical of neoliberal education in most primary schools and private nurseries. For example, in my nursery two, three, and four-year-old children were taught how to use cameras and printers independently to document and reflect on their own learning, a system imbued with meaning and care, valuing each child’s agency and ideas. It was far removed from some experiences I had as a trainee teacher in a primary school. Sitting with a glue stick for meaningless hours, pasting in photographs taken by a Teaching Assistant of a teacher-led learning activity, almost the same photograph for each child.

The Pre-strike Context

The COVID-19 pandemic had been incredibly challenging and, unlike many, our nursery had remained open and taken in children of key workers. During this time the nursery had accumulated a large deficit. Shortly after, in 2021, we went through a restructure, and, like many nursery schools, this included federation. Federation is often sold to workers as a form of protection – a way to save money and save jobs to keep nursery schools open. Speaking with other MNS union members, I often hear them cheerfully speak of federation as if it will solve all their problems. Federation means cuts and should be opposed by all MNS workers.

Federation connects two or more schools and typically involves cuts to senior leadership teams, with remaining senior leaders taking on the running of multiple nurseries. In our nursery the increase in workloads for senior leaders had a devastating impact on them. When concerns were raised about a further restructuring, we received an email from the Executive Headteacher saying the senior leadership team had experienced PTSD from the last one and couldn’t face another.

After the first restructure, we lost staff to the pressures of growing workloads and to the loss of a sense of pedagogy and care we once delivered with pride. Staff weren’t replaced. Even before the restructure of 2024, we were a vastly diminished staff team in both number and expertise. If workers were replaced, they employed the cheapest labour they could, deskilling the workforce over time. By our second restructure and subsequent strike action, all senior leaders had left the school either due to illness and/or burnout. We lost long standing members of staff who had passed carefully crafted, precious expertise from one generation to another.

Rumours of closure started to emerge during the Summer Term of 2023. Staff were stopped in the street by concerned parents asking if they should move their children to other nurseries. We weren’t sure where the rumours were coming from. They weren’t from us, but they increased in frequency. I contacted HR and was told that nothing would happen under our outgoing Executive Headteacher’s tenure. That the situation would be made clear in September 2023, the implication being that something would happen, but not yet.

We were alarmed when we heard that the federation could not afford to advertise for an Executive Headteacher, and that an agency headteacher would take it instead. Schools rely on agency staff – at greater cost – but as they are not written into the school’s budget, they help to balance the books. Workers at our sister nursery told us that when first meeting the new agency Executive Headteacher, she told workers that she had closed the last two schools she had worked for.

Anxiety was growing and we started being in closer contact with our local union secretary, who began to liaise with our local case worker and central union team. This all happened alongside NEU teaching staff in my nursery taking part in national strikes, seeking a fully-funded, above inflation pay rise from the UK government. Although support staff had narrowly missed the threshold to go ahead with strike action, some of our nursery’s support staff could afford to support the strikes and refused to cross the picket. These strikes were key in helping our nursery workers feel connected in struggle; that a future local strike was a possibility.

During May 2023 I stepped down from the Acting Deputy Head role to return to my substantive lead teacher post. I had spent the last year managing a school that for chunks of time didn’t even have a premises officer or an admin team. We had employed an agency admin worker that left after a few months citing workload and stress. For two thirds of the year our Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Coordinator (SENDCo) was on long term sick leave. I was expected to absorb all this extra work into my role; I was firefighting.

Even more difficult for me was seeing much-loved colleagues become seriously unwell and knowing if things got worse, as I had been warned, I would be on a pathway there too. In that year I had also had treatment for skin cancer, the second question I had been asked was, ‘Do you work outside?’ In a nursery that valued outdoor play, I had often been rota’d on whole days or afternoons outside. As budgets tightened, shade sails had not been replaced, and with fewer staff it was hard to swap inside for breaks. My workplace was beginning to feel like a physical risk to us all.

I wrote in my letter stepping down as Acting Deputy Head:
“‘”Ultimately, in light of the new budget and reduced staffing structure, I don’t feel that I can lead the school in a way which aligns with my values and maintain the quality of education that you would expect of a maintained nursery school […] The frustration for me is that my values and expectations of outstanding early years practice has grown out of the very system that is now compromising them“’”.

The Lead up to Strike Action

The initial plan for the proposed restructure looked like a managed decline of the nursery, but not necessarily school closure. It proposed my nursery should lose half the staff team and operate out of one class (previously there had been three classes, including a dedicated two-year-old class) and our sister nursery was to lose eight of nine classroom-based staff. The third nursery school in the federation was to lose a couple of staff, but they had a bigger staff team and more money in the bank. Workers at this nursery chose not to support the strike action we would later take.

We wrote to governors expressing serious concerns. Key amongst them, that support staff were proposed to leave mid-year (May 2024), putting us outside the legal ratio with the remaining staff and the number of children we had on role. The proposed staffing, combined with an instruction to work out of one class, also did not meet statutory obligations on space requirements in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Staff governors were excluded from governing body meetings, meaning their expertise and concerns were not fed in. Several governors told us that they didn’t agree with the restructure and seemed distressed. One said she had not agreed with it, demanding her name to be removed from the restructuring plan.

In response to staff questions and concerns at the first whole-federation consultation meeting, we received an email from the Chair of Governors telling us that staff/the union were virtue signalling and making spurious statements. It seemed this was in response to staff describing the work of an MNS and how this went above and beyond a typical private nursery or nursery class. This set a tone from the federation leadership that felt cruel. During the meeting several falsehoods were presented to us, seemingly so we would think ourselves lucky that the nurseries weren’t being closed. They said all nursery schools would be closed in two other London boroughs. The meeting was recorded to be shared, but we weren’t surprised later on when they wouldn’t.

Balloting and Striking

During the lead up to our indicative strike ballot, all classroom-based staff in my nursery became union members. After a previous restructure and additional staff losses, fear of further cuts and growing workloads were in the forefront of everyone’s minds. As a small school we had a small union membership, but the collective dedication to fight the cuts seemed to be key to the union taking us seriously. One new member had worked at the nursery for over 20 years and had never been in a union before! It was important to us to ensure all our union members could take part in the strike financially. Shockingly, nearly all our support staff had second jobs.

On Feb 20th there was a notification to conduct a formal ballot. My nursery staff were by now all NEU members and set on voting for strike action, but we were less sure about how members at our sister nursery would. During the ballot campaign, nursery budgets were being controlled more tightly than ever before. I saw our Deputy Head buying staff loo roll. Staff even had to buy our own gloves for nappy changing, and at one point we had to put out towels for children to dry their hands. One worker saw our Executive Headteacher shaking her wet hands in the office and asking for paper towels to be ordered, only to be told by the admin team, ‘no, there’s no money’. There were days when the building was very cold, on one occasion, I wrote to the Chair of Governors to say the building was 9 degrees Celsius and we were having to get the children to wear coats indoors. The response I had was one line, ‘these concerns are operational, and the Executive Headteacher would respond’. It was really scary, there seemed to be no limit to what they would cut. We were given just the basics for caring for the children, rather than providing high quality education.

But we won the ballot. Our first strike days were named for March 2024. On picket lines we had a range of different supporters including parents, ex-parents, and ex-leaders of the nurseries. Members of other nurseries also turned up, explaining that: ‘Your fight is our fight’. It was humbling and emotional to feel that solidarity from people we’d never met before. At our sister nursery, I was told that staff in a different union had been advised they had to cross the picket line and go into work. This meant that their staff team was unfortunately split, with most workers having to leave their colleagues on the picket and follow their union’s advice.

In April 2024, I attended my first union conference as a speaker on a panel of women who had been involved in strike action. In the discussion section, I was shocked when speakers, mostly men, did not engage in anything the women had spoken about, but made long political points. At the conference, I was surprised to hear that women workers, the majority of our union’s members, rely on a system that alternates male and female speakers for women to have a voice at conference. Having worked in an all-female staff for the last 17 years, misogyny in the workplace was not something I had thought much about. When I expressed my surprise at how men would take up space in union discussions, a long-time member of the union told me that ‘misogyny did not exist in the union’ as they had the alternating speaker system in place. Taken aback, I said this system was in place because there was misogyny, it did not mean it wasn’t there anymore. I also met with organisers and other early years members and developed plans of action. The general secretary even agreed to attend our picket line. This gave everyone a boost and made us feel like we were doing something important.

Parent Partnership

Parents at the nurseries were informed of restructure at the end of January 2024. Support from the union’s national organising team – a group of women not contracted to support early years campaigns but believe it to be important so do it anyway – included occasional access to photographers and videographers. Several short films were released of parents expressing concerns about the cuts. Posts were shared across social media. In one short film, one parent said with the cuts you would, ‘Destroy the nursery from the inside out’ and that you ‘Cut staff and facilities, you cut away the quality of the nursery’. This was an important point as research shows that quality of nursery provision is key in delivering early education that makes a difference, especially for children experiencing disadvantage.

The proposed cuts to our nursery were happening during the largest expansion of funded childcare that England has ever seen. During a union organised picnic, a parent that we did not know turned up to say that she had applied for a place at the nursery school for her child with needs and had been told that there were no spaces. This was a shock to the staff who had been told that the cuts were necessary due to falling rolls – now it seemed that the local authority was actively turning away children! There were other rumblings, staff overheard that two-year-old parents were being told on the phone the nursery was full for September. A list of families newly eligible for the expansion of funded places was left on my desk. When I asked if these parents would be contacted to try and fill the nursery and potentially save jobs, I was told it was not a priority. Watching our local School’s Forum meeting confirmed what we feared, it was recorded that our Executive Headteacher had said that numbers of children were being kept low in order to remove staff.

Guidance from NEU’s national organising team was key in building parent support too. We ran a letter writing session (with a staff-run creche) at the local library which we planned for the morning but ended up continuing all day as parents kept turning up. Organisers employed by the union proved to be a useful link between parents and staff who could not speak openly with staff at the nursery gates.

Unclear communication from the federation and leadership team impacted on parents. The union informed the local authority of 9 days of further strike action on the 16th of May, but the governors did not inform parents until the 24th of May, and then only told them about the first 3 days. We were never sure if this was ineptitude or deliberately designed to create tension between parents and workers, although if it was, it had the opposite effect. Parents began reaching out to MPs and local councillors to try and secure support. One parent said that they would be hard-pressed to get them to lay the blame at the feet of the staff despite the strikes. They witnessed the dedication of staff to the people they held dearest – their own children. Support like this from parents was heartening and helped us feel valued.

Barriers to Organising

Campaigning is creative work and being creative when you are exhausted (and scared) is very challenging. As interest grew in our situation, it became apparent to us that we were not going to be able to grow a campaign unless we cut back on all the extra hours we were working. One of our most effective strategies was collectively working to rule, including not staying in the building outside of contracted hours and observing lunch breaks. As workers who practice sensitive, emotional connections with very young children, this was very challenging. We regularly held each other to account if we were seen to be breaking our agreement. If I was tempted to stay a little longer after work to do a few emails, two or three people would come up to stop me and say, ‘We agreed…” I knew that by breaking our agreement I was letting them down and vice versa. We’d all been working three or four hours extra most days. Having more time allowed us time together to write letters, develop campaign materials and leaflet the local community.

More broadly, the fractured nature of the early years sector makes it very difficult to organise. Most workers in private nurseries are un-unionised. There can also be tensions between parts of the sector. Most MNS workers proudly ally themselves with the education side of their work and don’t like being called “childcare”. This in turn can upset private nursery workers who feel that teachers can make them feel ‘less than’ whilst, by nature of their roles, experience power privileges of higher pay and better union representation.

Within our union, early years members are a small group and MNS workers a smaller proportion of that. In MNS settings, there are typically one or two teachers, a headteacher and several support staff who all may belong to different unions, or in some cases none. This fragmentation makes it challenging for staff to coordinate effectively and engage in collective action. Labour have increased fracturing with the introduction of the School Based Nursery plan which sees massive investment in early years within academy schools.

Pushed Out

During a conversation with a senior leader I was informed that they had decided to shrink mine and my colleagues’ role into one. I was told that, as I was the more experienced ‘lead’ teacher and more expensive, I would not be kept on. This was news to me as there was meant to be a formal interview process to decide. This never happened, so I pushed to appeal their decision.

During my appeal and that of another member, our regional officer did not attend and my local union officer was referred to as a ‘retired volunteer’. The local authority did not allow them to speak in the meeting. I had spent a long time preparing and the process felt designed to intimidate. I fought my case and was told my appeal would be upheld. This initially felt like a win, as we thought it might stop or slow down the redundancies. However, in one of the most frustrating moments for me personally, I realised that challenging them in this way just gave them a chance to right their wrongs and continue with the process. Their initial decision to make me redundant was highly stressful (I still feel like I am recovering from this!). I had to go through with the redundancy interview, which stirred up high levels of stress again. As my regional officer later told me, “Sometimes it’s better to let them make mistakes”.

Myself and my colleague (who had felt that she was safely in line for the job) now had a late interview, which went ahead, led by members of the local authority. The decision had obviously already been made though, and I was told my employment was set to end. I requested my interview notes and the way my answers had been negatively recorded would have been funny if it all wasn’t so stressful. I had been employed by the nursery for the last 17 years and worked my way up from Teaching Assistant to Higher Level Teaching Assistant, to nursery nurse, teacher, lead teacher and deputy head before a step back to lead teacher again. A job I had been completely in love with had become hell, and even though I knew it was going to be a massive loss, it was also a relief that it was going to be over.

Win or Lose?

After 6 days of strike action the union asked ACAS to intervene, but the nursery federation and HR refused to discuss any other solutions. This was an approach that the local authority and federation stuck to, they just refused to engage. There were no negotiations and a lack of a response from local councillors during the strike. At a hustings, our local MP said she would meet us. This was in the summer of 2024, shortly before the redundancies were to take place on the 31st of August. When we joined the meeting, we were told she had gone on holiday and we would only meet with her team. This felt like the final insult, and we were all left to start to deal with our own endings - redundancy, retirement, new work and, for all of us, a much-needed period of recovery.

On August 31st 2024, 20 posts were deleted across the three nursery schools. Since the strike, duties previously completed by teachers such as parents’ evenings and report writing are now done by support staff. Our sister nursery, in one of the most deprived areas of the borough, does not currently have a single teacher on their staff list and only one member of class-based nursery school staff listed. I have been told that they have merged the day nursery with the nursery school.

As the strike had a profile, at rallies and union events, we were repeatedly asked, ‘Did you win?’ And I found myself repeatedly saying, ‘no, we lost’. But, since our strike, three other nursery strikers are now on our local union committee. Not one of us was politically engaged before, and now we nearly all are. We have all been involved in early years events at the union and regularly keep in touch. So, this doesn’t feel quite like losing.

The more I have become involved in the trade union movement, the more I focus less on the binary of winning and losing. I draw on the holistic, relational practice I learned as a nursery school teacher — one that gives up power to give voice.
Chatting recently with a nursery striker, I asked her what she had learnt during our campaign, she responded:
“I learnt that solidarity is amazing. Who you know helps. And togetherness is key”.

More Reading and Listening:

Childcare Voices Podcast
Grow Your Own Childcare Histories
Education Uncovered/Public Childcare Now
Early Education (on saving MNS)
Post Pandemic Childcare