‘Collective power is where it’s at’: City Academy workers celebrate strike action successes
Credit: NEU
On an uncharacteristically grey mid-morning in late June, a group of education workers from east Bristol’s City Academy are huddled on the Bristol and Bath Railway Path by the exit to Russell Town Avenue, close to the school.
Teachers, pastoral staff and technicians stand on either side of a low wall making teas and coffees, in what’s become a daily ritual for staff, organised by the academy’s branch of the NEU (National Education Union).
As well as a time to catch up, these coffee mornings are part of a series of coordinated actions by the union as part of an ongoing dispute with the school’s management over staff terms and conditions.
“Every day since we started the action, we have been coming out to have a break together”, explains Norhan Nabeeh, a teacher and workplace rep for the NEU.
“We believe – our position as NEU membership and NEU nationally – that break time, the morning break, should be part of the directed time budget in every school, because although we are not specifically directed to do anything in that time, we consider it to be ‘trap time’,” she adds. “We can’t really leave the building, for example, and we have to do things in that time that are beneficial for the school.”
The union — which has over 100 members at City Academy —argues that students’ safety would be put at risk if all staff were to leave the building during break times. Therefore, including break times in annual salaried hours formed one of 11 asks by the NEU, four relating to teachers and seven relating to support staff.
Since June, NEU members at the school have taken part in a series of rolling strike days, starting with one day a week and escalating to three. Their other asks include back pay for support staff and better handling of bullying and harassment cases.
At the time of writing, this strike action has already been successful – 10 of the union’s 11 asks have been met by management, who returned to the negotiating table after the union announced 23 strike dates across June and July.
‘Many school support staff are working second jobs’
The coffee mornings have continued though – both as a reminder to management what would happen if all staff were to walk out during their break times, and as a way of maintaining solidarity between staff.
“[It] feels like things are historically quite separate between support staff and teachers, in terms of activism,” says Jack Knight, an IT technician. “It varies from school to school, but there seems to have previously been a bit of a divide, so it’s nice to break that down where we can and come together.”
Sandwiched between Easton and Lawrence Hill, City Academy is a large secondary school with around a thousand students. Like others around the country, it has faced significant challenges as a result of funding cuts imposed by the outgoing Conservative government.
“The school has obviously lost funding, as every school has over the last 14 years,” explains Michaela Wilde, NEU branch secretary and a pastoral support worker in the school’s inclusion centre. “But equally, youth services, particularly in central/east Bristol, where our school is, have been decimated, so that is impacting our young people.”
She mentions the recent uptick in youth violence involving knives in Bristol and the effect this has had on students and staff.
“Young people are at risk of child criminal exploitation — that has had some very serious outcomes for young people in many secondary schools across central and east Bristol, and obviously, there’s been cases in south Bristol as well,” she says. “Unfortunately, children have died, or children will be looking at long prison sentences, lots of injuries. We’re dealing with very anxious young people.”
For staff – particularly support staff – the emotional toil of dealing with these issues, coupled with financial struggles, is making working life more challenging.
“Support staff pay awards are not funded, usually, which has an impact,” Wilde says. “So many are working second jobs, third jobs – we know that many of our lower paid staff who are from Easton, Lawrence Hill, Redfield, can’t afford to live in this area anymore.”
This sentiment is echoed by Norhan Nabeeh at the coffee morning: “I don’t think anyone should be doing the job that [support staff] do in the school and have to then go and do another job after school or at the weekends. They do incredible work with our students, and they should be paid appropriately.”
Academy trusts ‘less accountable’
As I speak to staff, one issue that comes up repeatedly is how the school is managed and structured. City Academy Bristol falls under the umbrella of Cabot Learning Federation, a multi-academy trust (MAT) that governs 35 schools in the South West, including Bristol Brunel Academy in Speedwell and John Cabot Academy in Kingswood.
Academy trust CEOs are not accountable to the communities that their schools serve
Michaela Wilde, National Education Union
Over the past two decades, MATs have become one of the dominant models for managing secondary schools in the UK. But many education staff, including Wilde, have reservations about how they work.
“Schools are stressful environments, full stop,” says Wilde. “But the multi-academy trust structure follows business structures, so therefore it becomes a competitive environment and you will see people starting their teaching career and becoming management very, very quickly.
“When you think about the suppression of wages for classroom teachers, then the incentive and the motivation to move into managerial positions becomes quite enticing,” she adds.
Wilde also believes MATs create a less accountable management structure. “CEOs are not accountable to the communities that their schools serve. They’re accountable to their trustees and the Department for Education (DfE), but they’re not accountable to the staff in the buildings, the children that they work with, and the families of those children and their communities.”
Bullying and harassment
One particular area of concern at City Academy has been the way bullying and harassment brought by staff are handled by management.
“A member of staff might feel that they have experienced something, which might be student violence towards them, or another member of staff being discriminatory towards them. And the issue is around how management have handled those complaints and concerns”, says Wilde. “Sometimes the way a case is handled actually becomes more of an issue for the member who’s being affected than the initial issue.”
Wilde says many of the bullying and harassment cases examined by the union show an over-representation of women, and particularly women of colour in these cases. She adds that the school’s management tried to downplay these issues.
“Their press releases and their letters to parents were a denial and a diminishing of that particular demand, which really upset our members,” she says. “Given their negotiating, and them making changes around their policies in relation to bullying and harassment and how management are handling it, they clearly do accept it’s a problem – so it was frustrating for our members that they were telling parents and the press something different.”
Strike action an effective tool
Despite some of the pressures and difficulties faced by educational staff at the school, Wilde underlines that the union’s relationship with management is largely positive, with union members highlighting issues as they arise. Nonetheless, when these issues were repeatedly ignored, strike action remained the union’s most powerful negotiating tool.
The effects of the strike action has been transformative, not only in delivering a series of wins for the union, but also for staff morale and confidence.
For Jack Knight, simply understanding what a union is for has been a big step. “Once I’d actually taken part in my first bit of strike action, I started to realise that the union is a term that people throw around, but really it’s just the people inside the building sitting in a room trying to work out what’s better for us, and what ways we can go about winning that,” he says.
For Nabeeh, the union wins have been the culmination of a hard-fought campaign. “I’m really proud of our membership and our union group, and I think we’ve worked really hard to get to where we are now,” she says.
I think [achieving] 10 of the 11 asks is huge, so it’s a great achievement, and we should be proud of what we’ve done,” she adds. “I think management in any school should take their staff seriously, because this is the power that we have. Collective power is where it’s at”.
We put specific questions about the issues raised in this article to the Cabot Learning Foundation.
A spokesperson for City Academy said: “Some staff at City Academy participated in National Education Union strike action back in the spring as part of a dispute over their employment terms. These typically related to staff pay.
“All issues have since been fully resolved to the satisfaction of all parties,” the spokesperson added. “City Academy remained open throughout the dispute and continues to be a vibrant, diverse and dynamic learning environment for its students.”
This story was funded via a crowdfunding campaign that local trade union branches and workers are contributing to. During 2024, reporter Adam Quarshie will be delivering series of articles focusing on workplace organising and creative solutions to the cost of living crisis.
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