‘We fought and we won on every single thing’

WHEN a new head teacher joined her last school, Emma Rose introduced herself as the union rep. “His first words were ‘unions are anathema to me,’” recalls Emma, who will become the NEU national president in September. “He said ‘the thought of you all sitting in a room, moaning about things, I find really distasteful. I hate it.’”

She soon put him straight.

“I said you’ve got it completely wrong. If people are coming in and complaining, it is because the problems already exist. If your staff are unhappy, surely you want to know about that, and you want to put it right?”

Apparently, he didn’t, and a series of disputes followed.

The first involved an observations policy, where what had been informal, ten-minute learning walks became observations, with some staff finding notes on their teaching feeding into performance management meetings. Next was an attempt to force GCSE teachers to use their gained time to cover. Then came the announcement of a mock Ofsted. Lastly, there was a new performance management target for 75 per cent of pupils to achieve grade C or above.

“We fought and we won on every single thing,” says Emma. Inevitably, of course, each dispute eroded a little more the trust between the leader and staff.

Now at a different school, Emma, a modern foreign languages teacher who is also a district secretary in Warwickshire, sometimes finds herself repeating the advice given to her previous head – which he ignored to his cost – to other heads.

Some see that unions improve employee relations, others don’t, she shrugs. Although the growing recruitment and retention crisis means leaders can ill afford to overlook the needs and wishes of staff.

“I don’t know a head who isn’t worried about recruitment,” says Emma. “That is why our pay and funding campaign is so vital. Yes, members need and deserve more pay, and as professionals we shouldn’t be shy to say we deserve it, but members also see the real injustice in school funding.”

She adds that the Government’s unfunded pay offer has left leaders “tearing their hair out”. The tone-deaf response of the Government to the dire state of underfunded schools, and the struggles of increasingly poorly paid staff, makes the political campaigning, alongside strike action, so important, she argues. “Parents probably aren’t aware of all the things happening in schools – that leaders can’t recruit teachers; that so many school buildings are dangerous; that schools just don’t have the money for repairs; that children with special educational needs and disabilities aren’t able to access the support they need.”

Leaders are having to “pick up the pieces of a really dysfunctional society,” she adds. “It’s not just about educating children, gluesticks, textbooks and repairs in schools. It is also about school leaders carrying the load of crumbling public services.”

Emma, who has been on the picket line on every strike day – apart from one, when she had Covid – notes proudly the growing momentum of the dispute, with more schools in her county now prepared to have picket lines.

As president she intends to spread the message far and wide about the state of schools, with the same passion as she pursues other issues close to her heart: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

The fear of Ofsted is, unfortunately, encouraging some schools to become overly prescriptive in lesson planning and delivery, stripping teachers of their professional autonomy and damaging trust between leaders and staff, she believes.

She is a member of the Beyond Ofsted commission, brought together by the union to look into alternatives to the current inspection system, and she is also part of a secondary assessment working party.

“I’m really interested in looking at a system that isn’t just about the academic achievement you can put on a spreadsheet,” she says. “Our assessment system at the moment has failure built into it.”