NORMALLY I spend my time documenting and recording other people’s pickets for the website I co-founded a couple of years ago, www.strikemap.org. 

We list every strike and picket that we can and then encourage people to send messages of solidarity or make a trip to visit a picket.

But on Wednesday last week the tables were turned and I found myself standing outside the school in which I have worked for eight years setting up my own picket line in the dark and drizzly rain.

Not one person on the picket line wanted to be there — “We’d rather be teaching!” was oft repeated. This is not something we take lightly though, this is the reaction of a workforce at the end of its tether.

Battered and bruised by austerity, undervalued and overworked most feel as though we have no other option. 

Although the official reason for the strike is pay, for most it is about so much more than that.

The strike is the symptom of a diseased education system. A system in which teachers regularly report working 55-hour weeks, a system where stress and overwork force a third of teachers to leave the profession in the first five years.

The government’s answer to this is to constantly throw more and more money at new teachers through “golden hellos,” but this is money wasted if we cannot convince these teachers to stay. 

We have one of the worst-funded education systems of any high-income country in the world and all that is holding education together is the goodwill of teachers and support staff in our schools.

Last week we saw that this goodwill is coming to an end. What is often forgotten is that there is a direct link between teachers’ pay and conditions and pupils’ learning conditions.

I do not want my own children taught by stressed-out teachers who work two other jobs on the side just to make ends meet. 

We left the picket line just after nine and, after a hearty strikers brunch, we headed into Manchester for a rally.

We met at St Peter’s Square. A red plaque on the wall pointed out that this was the site of the Peterloo Massacre. This felt ominous but kind of fitting.

I am not, of course, comparing our protest to the brave men and women who died opposing a different Tory government but what it does show is a continuation of the struggle of the labour movement. We are still fighting the same battles today as they were fighting that day. 

The rally in Manchester saw perhaps 5,000 striking workers take to the streets, a scene echoed up and down the land.

As the day went on more messages kept coming through, “2,000 in Liverpool!” “1,000 in Durham!” “Some say 40,000 in London, perhaps 100,000!” 

The rally was great fun, despite the wind turning our new banner into a sail and causing a slight panic as I thought I might take off.

Rallies help the PR battle, they show the weight of support behind the strikers and they give confidence to the workers to continue the fight. The more important part, though, is the picket line. 

On the picket line we can discuss with those thinking of crossing why they are crossing and try to win them to our side. We can then talk to them about why solidarity is important.

The picket line is a place where for once we are not bogged down in day-to-day work and can speak and  get to know each other — but most importantly we can build a stronger union group.

A picket is a visible display of support for the strike in the local community too plus it’s our chance — for once –—of giving our side of the story.

The last time I went on strike was 2012 in the strike over public-sector pensions. We won serious concessions then.

It is depressing to think that if the government gets its way, this may be the last time I am legally allowed to strike.

The forced labour Bill that is rocketing through Parliament at the moment threatens to put minimum service levels onto schools.

This would mean that the brave teachers who stood with me on the picket line on Wednesday next time could be ordered into work despite voting democratically to withdraw their labour that day. 

For most teachers who joined the picket it was their first time taking strike action.

For the rest of us it was our first time in over a decade. The questions should surely be, why has it taken this long?

We’ve seen a decade of falling wages; years of increased surveillance from Ofsted and an increase in workload.

The union membership in my school has nearly doubled in the past couple of years, with a massive surge in the last couple of weeks, and everyone is up for a fight. 

This isn’t a battle we will win in one day. It may not even be a battle we win in the seven planned days of strikes.

We must now keep up the momentum — we have had 40,000 new members join our union and these new members are all fighters.

They joined because they wanted to take industrial action and they perhaps felt they had been denied this. We must mobilise these members now and get them active in the union. 

The strike action is not just about pay. It is about dignity. That is why it was so heartening to see hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets on last Wednesday, finally realising that for once they had power and agency.

I am proud of what the members of my union have achieved. We beat the anti-trade union thresholds and we have finally found our collective voice.

The chant on the marches up and down the country was “Save our schools!” which shows that what is at stake here is more than just wages — it is the very future of education itself.