National Education Union rep
Members in five schools from the University of Brighton Academy Trust (UBAT) – four in Hastings and one in West Sussex – took two days of strike action on 1-2 July.
We walked out due to threats of redundancy and excessive workload caused by a lack of funding from the trust. The average contribution that individual schools make to an academy trust is around 6% of the budget. Our trust takes an average of 13%, and has taken well in excess of 20% from some schools in the past. They have a huge central spend, whilst frontline services and jobs are being cut to the bone.
There are 13 schools in the trust and we serve some of the most deprived areas of the country. The fact that support staff are being made redundant, whilst at the same time the executive team take over a million pounds in combined wages and spend over half a million a year on corporate marketing, is nothing short of scandalous.
Over the course of the dispute our membership has grown enormously. A lot of the people walking out are doing so for the first time, including a huge number of support staff that have joined the NEU.
A cross-trust strike like this is unprecedented, but sadly necessary. Academy chains give control over public funds, not to mention the education of children, to CEOs who treat schools like businesses. There is often little transparency and no local accountability. Schools need to be brought back under local authority control and run democratically with all key ‘stakeholders’ having input on important decisions – including staff, parents and students.
School funding
The acute funding crisis in UBAT schools should be understood in the context of a wider funding crisis. 14 years of Tory government has left education on its knees – pay is up to 25% lower in real terms, recruitment and retention of staff is almost impossible, school budgets are stretched beyond breaking point, and buildings are crumbling.
However, Labour currently offers no solutions. Beyond recruiting 6,500 teachers (with no real plan for how they will do this) Labour does not seem to have any policies that could address the crisis in education. They have not backed the NEU’s manifesto for education (which includes spending 5% of GDP on education) and does not support calls to bring schools back under local authority control.
NEU members in Sussex will continue our dispute until we get assurances that the trust will properly fund frontline services. We have three more days of strike action planned next week if an agreement cannot be reached.
I hope our campaign will encourage members in other trusts to organise collectively and fight back against the worst excesses of academisation, and build the pressure behind demands on Starmer’s Labour to fund education and end academisation.
