MASSIVE SALARY CUTS AS NEWCASTLE TEACHERS LOSE OUT IN SWITCH TO TLRS

‘Those who signed up to this robbery should hang their heads in shame’ says City NUT Secretary

Mary Bousted of ATL said the NUT was ‘scaremongering’ over the potential damage of the move from Management Allowances to Teaching and Learning Responsibility payments. Chris Keates of NASUWT accused us of ‘posturing’ and ‘carping’ while her association ‘ensures teachers are protected’. But figures now released by the local authority show that in Newcastle the worst fears of the NUT have been realised.

In September 2005, 898 Newcastle teachers held Management Allowances. In September 2006, 721 Newcastle teachers Held TLRs. That’s a cut in salary for 147 teachers. IT’S A 20% CUT IN THE NUMBER OF TEACHERS HOLDING ABOVE SCALE PAYMENTS.

This is one more step in the betrayal of teachers started by the signatories to the so-called workload agreement of 2003 and which has continued ever since. The switch from Management Allowances to TLRs had nothing to do with teaching and learning. It was to reduce the overall salary bill for teachers in order to fund non-teaching jobs in schools, and it’s clearly succeeding.

Newcastle NUT Secretary Ian Grayson said: ‘It’s no use members of ATL, NASUWT and the others protesting against this robbery to the likes of Mary Bousted and Chris Keates. In one of the most hideous betrayals of rank and file members in the history of trade unionism, their leaders signed up to it, and enthusiastically agreed to promote it. They ought to hang their heads in shame.’

But it was those same leaders who had earlier, in return for promised PPA time, signed up to giving teachers’ jobs away to unqualified staff, putting thousands of their own members onto jobseekers’ allowance.

It was they who agreed to lop two points from the planned upper pay scale, and do away with recruitment and retention allowances.

It was they who went along with the wholesale replacement of teachers in pastoral posts with staff who have no teaching qualification.

It was they who agreed to link pay ever more closely to performance management, and who now enthuse about the new system of department heads being responsible for determining colleagues’ pay-rises, with failure the assumed norm unless endless hours of monitoring and observation show otherwise.

It was they who, as ‘social partners’, submit to the pay review body a claim agreed beforehand between themselves, the government and the employers – a way of operating which would find no parallel outside North Korea.

‘The NUT refused to agree to any of this, and it’s no wonder the NUT is experiencing constant growth’, said Ian Grayson. ‘Every day I meet disillusioned teachers from other unions who now realise that the 2003 “agreement” was a sellout for our profession, and that only the NUT is standing up for qualified teachers’.

It is almost impossible to overstate the folly of the sellout, and its failure in the only terms that might possibly justify it: reducing teachers’ workload and improving children’s education. The Office of Manpower Economics showed beyond doubt that teachers’ workload has increased since 2003. It is becoming clearer to parents day by day that putting their offspring in the hands of non-teachers for large periods of time is not improving children’s learning one iota.

To some, however, the difference between a qualified teacher and an unqualified assistant no longer matters. A recently advertised vacancy for a state secondary school in County Durham sought a teacher OR teaching assistant to develop literacy skills. We wonder which they’ll appoint, and on what grounds. We can be fairly certain that expertise in teaching literacy won’t be the main criterion!