Anti-academy strike

Submitted by SJW on 18 July, 2018 - 11:39 Author: a John Roan teacher
John Roan anti academy posters

National Union of Education (NEU) members have struck for six days and last week we were joined by the GMB.

There was an amazing sense of unity and we were very proud to have teaching assistants, cleaners and other workers on the picket line with us teachers.

Our pickets are regularly about 50 strong — with lots of parent and community support — they’ve really become community pickets or community protests.

The order for academisation was issued on 12 June. It’s like an eviction notice — they want us to give up and people to leave. But we’re not leaving or giving up. We’re not going to be bullied. We have an NEU meeting tonight [17 July] and are going to discuss more strikes next term. It’s our action that has driven and energised the much broader campaign, which has many facets, and will continue to do that.

In terms of where things stand: thanks to our action and our campaign, John Roan will reopen in September as a local authority-run community school. No funding agreement has been signed, no TUPE meetings have taken place, no land has been handed over. The whole thing keeps getting pushed back.

We have a legal challenge coming in December, based on the nature of the Ofsted procedure and report which opened the door to academisation. When a school is judged to have serious weaknesses or require special measures, Ofsted does not allow the conclusion to be appealed!

Our legal team at the NEI have told us we have a strong legal challenge based on Judge McKenna's ruling (Durand, July 2017). We are now pushing our Governers and the Local Authority to support the school and make the legal challenge on behalf of staff parents and their families.

The legal challenge is being backed by the NEU nationally. Last night [16 July] we lobbied the school’s board of governors to demand they sponsor the legal action. We don’t know the outcome yet.

Dominic Herrington, the regional schools commissioner bureaucrat for the South East and South London, has the power to quash the academisation order so there is still everything to play for.

Obviously there won’t be strikes over the summer but we will continue the campaign in various ways and still very much need your support.

In terms of the wider issues, the problems posed by academisation, by our whole education system, could not be more stark. It’s been revealed that the highest suicide rate for young women is among primary school teachers. Meanwhile thousands of children are literally being disappeared from education system – “offrolled” in an attempt to boost results for the league tables.

For John Roan specifically, we are the oldest school in the country run for the wider community and not just the well off. This academisation violates a very long tradition.

University Schools Trust (UST), the proposed academy sponsor, is an organisation with a £700,000 deficit, with a £1.3 million hole in its pension fund, which brags in its Company House report about its use of agency staff to bring down costs. It’s made clear that it will have complete control over the school — the board of governors will become window dressing.

We have always argued that our school needs time to turn things around, and we now have an experience Head that we can work with to lead our school forward.

Does not allow for the judgement to be challrnged it complaints to be lodged.

This month I’ve been involved in organising a speaker tour from with teachers from the strike in West Virginia and have been incredibly inspired by their struggle and story. They’ve taken anger and turned it into collective action, not let it collapse into pessimism or defeatism. On a smaller scale that’s what we’re doing at John Roan too and it’s what we need to do much more widely in our schools system.

Faced by this situation, we really need to go for it.

How you can help

• Write to Dominic Herrington calling for him to quash the John Roan academisation order and meet with parents’ and teachers’ representatives to discuss rsc.sesl@education.gov.uk
• Donate to and circulate the crowdfunder for the legal challenge bit.ly/2KE2AYG
• Send messages of support to johnroannut@gmail.com and parentsforjohnroan@gmail.com

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