Righting a historic injustice: why special needs teachers at one Bristol school walked out
Illustration: Alex Dimond
On a quiet side street in Montpelier in July, a small group gathers in the early morning sunshine.
I’m outside the entrance to Bristol Hospital Education Service – one of seven units in Bristol providing education to children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) outside of mainstream settings. The council-run statutory service is for young people who are too unwell to attend mainstream schools.
As it’s barely 8.30 am, the atmosphere is calm, and the assembled teachers are initially a little hesitant to speak to me – until I find one who’s willing to explain why they are there.
“Most of the young people that we support have mental health issues,” says a female secondary teacher who wishes to stay anonymous. “Severe anxiety, self-harming, it’s very complex. We have young people with very low self-esteem that we work with, and there’s such a complex set of needs that they have.”
The school provides specialist support to young people aged 11-16, including those on the autism spectrum and with other neurodiversities. Many of the young people are provided with one-to-one classroom support, while others receive lessons in their homes from teachers who travel from the school.
Teachers and support staff are deeply committed to improving the lives of vulnerable young people, and plenty of those gathered outside have been working at the school for many years. But unease has recently been growing around working conditions among many teaching staff, who will be discussing whether to accept a new pay offer now the 2024-25 school year has begun.
‘It takes a certain kind of teacher’
Working with young people who have very complex needs can make for an emotionally draining work environment. “Most days are…. I mean, you get used to it, but you are challenged,” the teacher continues. “It takes, I think, a certain kind of teacher with a certain nature to be able to engage them, and we do successfully do that.”
“One of the things that’s so hard is to engage the young people who are really withdrawn. So for example, if it’s within the home, quite often they’ll be in their bedroom and they’ll refuse to come out. And the day can start with you turning up to tutor a young person, and them not being willing to come down, and you can quite often be teaching them from sitting on the stairs outside their bedroom.”
Some of the teachers gathered outside on the day I turn up have been working at the school for decades. For many, this is the first time they’ve been on a picket line.
We realised we were due an awful lot of back pay – and there are similar settings to ourselves where they have been receiving that money for years
The central demand of the National Education Union (NEU), the union representing them, is around pay. As providers of SEN education, teachers at Bristol Hospital Education Service are entitled to an extra payment, called a ‘SEN allowance’, which is meant to reflect the additional difficulties of working in such a high needs setting.
“In the course of supporting some of our members in some fairly routine things, we ended up uncovering the fact that members here have been systematically underpaid for years and years and years, and nobody seemed to fully have noticed it,” explains William Brown, assistant branch and district secretary for Bristol NEU, who works at a different school but turned up to offer support.
Bristol Hospital Education Service seems to be an outlier in this regard. “There are similar settings to ourselves, where they are receiving that SEN money and have been for years,” adds the teacher.
“We said [the situation is] not acceptable,” Brown continues. “Our members deserve at least a fair day’s pay for the exceptionally difficult and complicated work they do here, and that’s why we’ve ended up having to come to this, because no real progress was forthcoming.”
There had been initial negotiations for a year before the strike took place, with the management initially offering a year’s back pay. The union, having discovered the underpayment has been ongoing for many years, is demanding more.
“All of our young people have special educational needs,” says the teacher. “We’ve been receiving that SEN pay since September, but we realised we were due an awful lot of back pay and there are similar settings to ourselves, where they are receiving that SEN money and have been for years.”
The SEN allowance would represent a significant boost to teachers’ incomes. In negotiations with the union following the strike, the school’s management has offered two years’ back pay, an increase on an initial offer of one year.
The union’s members have been balloted on whether to accept this offer and will be discussing details in the coming days – with further walkouts also a possibility.
An additional complexity is that Bristol City Council has asked the school to make the payments out of its own budget, which union members I speak to say is far from ideal.
Deeper issues in the SEND sector
Tom Bolton, joint branch and district secretary for Bristol NEU, who I speak to over Zoom a few days later, is keen to stress that the issues around pay are about setting “a historic injustice” right.
“Our members all along have stressed they’ve got no issue with the existing management of the school, with the existing head teacher,” he says.
In some ways, the union winning two years backpay seems a relatively straightforward victory. But all the people I speak to mention the deeper issues in the education sector, and the SEN sector particularly, which will take longer to address.
One of these is that support staff, who make up a significant proportion of the school’s workforce are not eligible for the SEN allowance. This makes it even more challenging for these staff, who are on lower salaries, to survive in an expensive city like Bristol.
“Bristol in particular has a disproportionately high cost of living,” says Brown. “Trying to work on a salary that is standardised across the country makes it extra hard to live and get by somewhere like this.”
Bolton agrees. “If I were to reflect and do it over again, I think I would have identified issues impacting support staff alongside teacher members and balloted our support staff as well,” he says. He mentions the fact that support staff are in a range of different unions as one reason why it was more difficult to mobilise them.
He also suggests that part of the reason issues around the withheld SEN allowance were able to fester for so long was a reluctance for teachers to come forward. He describes a prevalent sense of guilt in the SEN sector: “That sort of, ‘Well, we’re there for the kids – we don’t want to cause disruption or kick up a fuss.’”
Having once worked as a learning support assistant myself, I put it to Bolton that part of the reason for systemic low pay in the SEN sector is a cultural issue of SEN being seen as inherently ‘rewarding’, with proper remuneration a secondary consideration. “Yeah I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with that,” he replies.
For the teacher I speak to, the issue is very simple – she wants to feel valued.
“We work really hard, and we have amazing results with our young people,” she says. “But Bristol doesn’t necessarily know about what we’re doing and how far we’re going out of our way, or over and above, what you would do as a normal teacher in order to engage young people”.
The Cable has approached the school’s management, as well as the director of the Children and Education Directorate at Bristol City Council for further comment.
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 a series of articles focusing on workplace organising and creative solutions to the cost of living crisis.
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