Some Context

What follows is a brief overview of the education system (mainly secondary) and some of the struggles within it, as we see them. We are two teachers, one primary and one secondary who have been working in education for 8 and 10 years respectively. We’re interested in workers inquiry because we believe in generating knowledge for political practice from the ground up and want to use our experiences of education generated from day-to-day practice to think carefully and critically about the work of teaching, then share our perspectives. We want our experiences to have the potential to guide others and contribute to a mass of experience and knowledge about the work school staff do and the struggles we face. For us this is part of a process of reimagining and rebuilding education, for ourselves and for the children we teach.

We take seriously the idea that ‘our working conditions are their learning conditions’. A worker inquiry into the labour of being a teacher is also an indirect enquiry into the labour of being a student. We don’t speak for our students and their voices urgently need to be heard in all political work within education. In a separate piece written at the same time as this one, we analyse a specific school that we both have experience of. We want inquiries and writing like this to respond to the experience of teaching, but also the experience of learning, under the conditions we describe. As teachers with interests in radical politics, we want to work in ways that are very different from today’s mainstream schools, just as we want something very different for students, in response to what we see and hear from them about their needs, desires and aspirations. We write more about this in the separate inquiry.

History of Schools

Comprehensive education is a relatively new thing. There were a number of Education Acts at the end of the 19th Century which brought about compulsory, free education for all young people up to the age of 10. After the First World War this was raised to 14. After the Second World War the Butler Act introduced the tripartite system of Grammar, Secondary Modern or Secondary Technical Schools. In 1965 the Labour Government moved most (but significantly, not all) local authorities towards Comprehensive schools with the intention of giving all young people a standardised level of education. In 1973 the leaving age was raised to 16, and in 1988 the Thatcher government introduced Ofsted, league tables and the National Curriculum. The Blair government introduced City Academies which were essentially state schools operating with reduced state control and were subsidised by charities, individuals or businesses. The Coalition government under Micahel Gove expanded the academies program significantly, so that now around 80% of secondary schools (c.2075) and 40% of primary schools (c.2440) are academies. Importantly from a workers perspective, these schools do not have to comply with the Burgundy Book, which is the national agreement around pay and working conditions for state school teachers in England and Wales. That government also encouraged private investment through its ‘free schools’ initiative, which allowed schools to draw public funds, as well as private, and exist with an even greater degree of autonomy from the state. Due to changes in government approach, far fewer free schools are now being established.

Parallel to state funded schools are Independent schools. These consist of two types: Public and Private. Public schools in the UK were originally fee paying schools open to anyone who could afford the fees whereas Private schools were available to those of certain religious or cultural backgrounds. The vast majority still charge fees for the education they provide, and most follow fairly traditional approaches to pedagogy and curricula. A small number broke with tradition and developed forms of what has become known as ‘democratic’, ‘progressive’ or ‘alternative’ education, the most famous being Summerhill in Suffolk. There are also various other educational settings which sit outside of the ‘mainstream’ - specialist Special Education Needs (SEN) schools; Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and Alternative Provisions both of which are where young people who’ve been permanently excluded go; and schools within other institutions like hospitals.

Workforce

The education of young people is an enormously labour intensive process. As of 2024 there were 468,258 teachers, 288,812 teaching assistants and 228,684 other support staff working in schools in England and Wales. This doesn’t include the 11,520 working in independent (private or public) schools, the 203,000 working in Further Education Colleges, the 368,100 working in nurseries and the countless other formal and informal tutors and others who help provide education in the community to those under the age of 18. Add to that the 246,930 involved in university education and that puts the total sector at nearly 2 million people and that means that almost one in every 20 people of working age (37.5 million in 2021) works in education in one way or another.

We saw the enormous bargaining power which the education sector held in January 2021 when school staff refused en masse to go back to schools. The executive of the National Education Union (NEU) had no choice but to follow suit having failed to ballot members for industrial action in the Autumn term. The NEU is the largest education trade union in Europe with 487,420 members, but has been unable in recent years to organise its members into a coherent, militant force. Teachers are often very resistant to strike action, partly because of the knock on impact it has on young people and families, partly because of their middle class economic position and - from our cynical perspective - because of their capitulation to hierarchical power structures.

Unions

There are two main unions for teachers, the NEU and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) (which has 228,437 members). However, teaching assistants (TAs) are not able to negotiate as a group as part of these unions. In a total stitchup TAs and support staff can only be bargained for by Unison, Unite and GMB on the National Joint Council. This is despite the fact that these three unions do not have the same number of members in schools and as such regularly fail to meet strike ballot thresholds set by the anti-trade union laws. Last year Unison, Unite and GMB complained to the TUC who ultimately fined the NEU £150,000 for recruiting and representing TAs. All this means that it is very difficult to have one trade union to represent all staff within a school. If you have an NEU branch in the school, TAs can join, but they are powerless to bargain about their pay and working conditions on a national level - which hardly gives them an incentive to join and pay their monthly union fees.

Both of us have been active in our schools as trade union members, and as reps. We’ve had different levels of involvement in wider union organising, and both have a degree of scepticism around the direction and strategy of the NEU over recent years - in terms of leadership and the tendencies of its membership.

Overview of Work in Schools

Technical

There are two key roles which most teaching staff do: teaching and pastoral. Within both of these roles you have the practical side and the administrative side. One of the huge shifts which has taken place in schools over the past 40 years has been the escalation of the administrative tasks which teaching staff are required to do. Planning, marking, working with data and writing reports are all forms of work expected on top of the primary role of teaching, and large numbers of teachers are leaving the profession due to workload-related stress.¹ The task of switching between these areas of work is also taxing in itself - a day of teaching can involve a wide range of quickly changing and largely administrative, tasks.

Teaching

In most primary and secondary educational institutions in the UK, teaching looks relatively similar. There will be one adult, stood next to some sort of display (a whiteboard, projected screen, touchscreen etc) with a pre written lesson (often on some sort of slide show) in front of a group of young people who they will guide through the learning material, occasionally asking them to talk to one another, or answer questions, write in exercise books or laptops, or take part in some other activity like a science experiment. It’s pretty standard stuff. This work involves being able to know about the topic at hand and the skills required to grasp it, an ability to guide young people and keep their attention, and to monitor how well the young people are understanding the information as well as how able they are to participate either actively or passively with the lesson. This format differs according to subject (drama, art, PE and music are notable examples). Class sizes in mainstream schools are generally about 30.²

Teaching staff have to know their subject well, which often requires reading around the subject, researching current pedagogy, participating in discussions, going to conferences and so on. We would wager that the vast majority of teaching staff in the UK do not do any of these - at least not regularly enough to make a material difference to their practice. These things are often seen as an additional luxury and the time demands of other parts of the job often take precedence. For a full time member of teaching staff with no additional responsibilities, you can expect to teach 18 hours a week, with an hour and a half of Personal Planning Allowance where you are expected to do nothing other than plan. That’s 5 minutes per lesson (or per hour if you’re on 45 minute lessons). The rest of the work week is expected to be dedicated to meetings, pastoral work or other responsibilities.

Outside of the classroom a huge amount of labour is taken up marking students’ work (although this does also happen within lessons, the efficacy of which can range wildly). Depending on the subject which you are teaching will change the impact of marking. Secondary English teachers may have fewer class groups as they often teach the same group four or five times a week but will have to mark longer, denser pieces of work; Language teachers may have more classes, but have shorter pieces to mark; Maths teachers may have fewer classes but have consistent and high levels of marking to do. More and more, teachers are trying to find technological ways to reduce the amount of marking like using apps or setting work online. Some of these are effective (in subjects like Maths and Science), some less so (like English and other Humanities subjects).

The other huge part of teachers’ workload is taken up with planning lessons, writing schemes of work, medium term plans and so forth. Planning lessons can be a very short activity for experienced teachers, or take hours for newer members of staff. Once you have come up with a starter, some main activities and a plenary (a final activity where you round off the lesson and check the learning of the class) you usually have to design a slide show to keep the focus or attention of the class, and some paper or physical resources. These might be card sorts, gap fills, information packs, questions sheets etc. Once this is done you often have to differentiate (make adjustments for young people with additional learning needs, varying the level of difficulty if you are teaching a ‘mixed ability’ class etc) your resources to make sure that everyone is able to participate in the lesson. You have to do this for all 20 of the lessons you are teaching that week.

Fortunately, curriculums don’t change quickly, so often you can reuse and recycle material. You can find lessons and resources of varying quality online, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee. If you are part of a Multi-Academy Trust or a large network of schools you may not have to do any planning but be compelled to use resources predesigned for you (a relatively recent move, designed to reduce workload but which brings about its own set of problems). This was not the case at the school we discuss elsewhere.. Almost every lesson was new, bespoke and following the needs of the young people.

If you are part of a department you will likely have regular meetings to discuss planning, marking, or the exciting new idea the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) has from the conference they went to but can’t quite quote the research about (or worse, the twitter thread they skim read). You will also have to do regular parents evenings. Depending on how many students you teach and how long the meetings are, these can be used as productive conversations between the young person, their guardians and you. However, at one school one of us had over 400 separate students. There is no way to have productive, meaningful conversations about young people who you have taught a handful of times and whose name you are still trying to learn. You end up repeating a few stock phrases (‘use this app to help learning vocab at home’) whilst hoping that you are able to remember which class they are in.

Pastoral

Pastoral responsibilities fluctuate massively between schools. We will not go into all the variations, but give a flavour of the workload required. If you are a form tutor you might be required to spend 15-30 minutes a day in tutor time, sometimes chatting with the young people, sometimes delivering Personal Social Health Education (PSHE) sessions, sometimes talking through announcements from the wider school. You may have to take your class to assemblies, run team building activities with them and so on.

The big pastoral issue many teachers talk about is behaviour. We do not have enough space to critique this term, or the ideas around it but when teachers talk about behaviour they mean bad behaviour, or ‘the young people under my control are not doing what I want them to do’. The rise in zero tolerance schools and strict responses to bad behaviour has also come hand in hand with a rise in school dissatisfaction amongst young people, a drop in teaching retention and a stagnation in academic outcomes. Of course, approaches to punishment are not the only factor, it is the whole neoliberal ecosystem where students are treated as objects with basic inputs and outputs rather than complex human beings.

Anyway, having to manage behaviour is a lot. One of the ideas around zero tolerance schools is to reduce workload, you ‘nip bad behaviour in the bud’ before it escalates. Sometimes this works, and lessons run according to plan, and you have no extra work. But often enough, giving out warnings and detentions escalates conflict, which brings about paperwork for you as the teacher, the tiring and emotional work of taking to young people, attempting to maintain control of the atmosphere in the class, deescalation, running detentions or ‘restorative’ meetings (spoiler, they are rarely restorative, though, like all neoliberal institutions, they use a radical name to mean a punitive thing). It is not just that we think punitive measures are mean to young people, we also recognise the waste of labour, emotional and administrative that they cause. They are bad from a workers perspective. They are a feature of a workplace which is trying to squeeze so much out of its employees and subjects (the students) that there is no time left for humanity.

Everything else

All of this is before we get to running trips, extra-curricular clubs, sports, activities weeks and union activity. There isn’t time to go into all this, but this shit takes up so much time in the school day, not to mention evenings, weekends and sometimes summer holidays.

Time

Time, as always, is the constant restricting factor. There is never enough time to plan, mark, email, write up incidents, plan trips, call parents, go to meetings and carry out pastoral duties. Why? Because there are too few staff being asked to do too many things. We have a huge number of trained teachers in the UK, but many quit before they make it 5 years in the job (33%). They leave because of workload stress, difficult relationships with students (always lumped under the bland title ‘behaviour’), shit management, low pay, lack of in-classroom support and so on. We write this to show that it is entirely possible to shift the sector in a matter of years and decades, but the financial and physical infrastructure needs to be invested in. Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) were widely despised and criticised, however a local model for understanding school needs, given proper funding and where shit managers are actually held to account could provide a viable alternative to the bizarro patchwork of multi academy trusts, alternative provisions, grammar schools, faith schools, free schools, PRUs and local authority schools which we currently have.

There are guidelines about how many hours teaching staff have to work, 1275 hours a year. As a result there is a maximum amount of hours which you can teach, though many teachers are compelled to teach more than these hours. However, ask any teacher and they will tell you they work more than these allotted hours. They work in their evenings, on weekends, in the holidays or all three. This is not the norm. Go to Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and the teaching staff will end their day at the school door, and go home. As it should be for all workers! We have settled for less because we have accepted that school staff can and should be martyrs sacrificed on the altar of ‘good grades’ and ‘social mobility’. We know it’s bollocks, we know that education plays very little role in social mobility because the conditions which allow for education to happen are largely determined by the young person’s economic background! It’s a vicious cycle. But successive neoliberal governments and a media class wedded to capitalism have and constantly recycle the idea of meritocracy.

We hope that this piece has provided some kind of introduction to a field of labour in dire need of worker-led overhaul - not only for the workers themselves but because schools are where almost all young people spend the majority of their pre-work lives. If we’re to build worker power for the future, they need forms of education that are drastically different too.