DANIEL KEBEDE admits his first weeks as National Education Union (NEU) general secretary have been a “baptism of fire.”

A sudden alarm over unsafe school buildings, announced just days before the start of the autumn term, has forced him to hit the ground running as ministers sow confusion over the number of schools affected.

It’s “a metaphor for this government’s lack of commitment to education,” Kebede tells me. 

“This should be the final nail in the coffin of austerity.

“Raac [reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, for anyone who hasn’t been following the news] was installed to rebuild post-war Britain in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s.

“It was soon discovered it only had a 30-year shelf life and the cautious approach would be to rebuild every school that used it… if the Tories hadn’t scrapped Labour’s Building Schools for the Future, there wouldn’t be a single secondary school with Raac today.”

Does Kebede want a return to a Building Schools for the Future type project to repair the damage of years of Tory cuts?

“What we need to see first of all from government is a timescale of repairs. You can’t have children sat in portacabins and temporary classrooms for an unspecified period of time. 

“If the government stick to their current plan of refurbishing just 50 schools a year, the Raac problem risks remaining unresolved into the 2030s.

“Building Schools for the Future aimed at rebuilding 3,500 secondary schools over a 15-year period: that ambition is what we need again, but that project was dependent on private finance initiatives, which saddled schools and councils to repayment contracts at RPI-indexed inflation. 

“We need school restoration work at the scale needed that doesn’t leave schools with a mountain of debt — a new approach to investment. Something like the £250 billion National Investment Bank backed up by regional development banks Labour were putting forward in their 2019 manifesto.”

No such ambition seems to be on the table from either party at the moment.

But he’s not discouraged: rather, confident that the NEU has proven its strength this year and will enter 2024 in fighting mood.

“What have we learned from the strike wave? A lot.

“We’re the largest industry-specific trade union. We have half a million members and we beat this government’s anti-strike ballot thresholds, not just once, but twice.

“We are capable of delivering sustained strike action over significant periods of time. Eight days of strike action is no mean feat. It’s the most days of mass-participation strike action by teachers in 35 years.

“That’s down to the reps who delivered this action. The union is not some abstract thing — it is our members and our reps. 

“It’s no small achievement to have moved an ideologically cemented government from 3.5 per cent to 6.5 per cent” (the government’s initial pay offer for teachers compared with that eventually accepted by NEU members).

“Gillian Keegan herself even recognises that our action was central to moving government on the issue of pay. But we know that, given inflation, it’s still a pay cut.

“We don’t want to have to engage in further rounds of strike action if the government continues to abuse our profession and make funding recommendations below the rate of inflation. We’ve already seen an indication on July 17 when [schools minister] Nick Gibb made a statement to the Commons that the funding increase would be 2.7 per cent next year. In that case we’d have no choice but to further engage industrially.

“We deserve better. The children deserve better.” Teacher pay, he points out, has fallen 23 per cent in real terms since 2010.

“I think our members understand that restoring teacher pay 23 per cent up in one round wasn’t going to happen. That we have to keep engaging and keep making gains incrementally, year on year, looking to restore teacher pay over the next five years, say — that’s something we can really rally people behind.”

Education unions have been warning about the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention for some time. Last year, the NEU published findings that 44 per cent of teachers intended to leave the profession within five years.

Is pay the main reason? “It can’t be avoided. When real-terms pay has fallen by nearly a quarter in a decade, what does that say about how much we value teaching as a profession? How much we value our children?

“But it’s not the only one. Workloads are incredibly high among teachers and school staff.

“It spirals. There’s not enough staff in schools, that creates a high workload intensity and adds great stress.

“And that leads to more retention problems which worsen the staffing shortage further — a vicious cycle.

“The question of workloads isn’t detached from the question of funding — there isn’t enough money, so there aren’t enough support staff, delivery staff.

“And there’s the removal of teachers’ autonomy, they’re not treated as professionals. 

“Teaching has always been a high-workload profession, but it’s one thing doing pointless bureaucratic tasks you have no control over, and another working hard to create exciting lessons for your pupils — teachers very much want to do the latter.”

Education theorists have criticised the “exam factory” model of British education where pupils are subjected to far more examination than in many other countries so schools can be ranked against each other in league tables.

The appalling stress imposed on teachers by punitive Ofsted inspections hit the headlines following the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry in the summer.

“Ofsted as an organisation is not fit for purpose,” Kebede says. “Even the National Audit Office has said that Ofsted has not produced any evidence to prove it has had an impact on improving education.

“The one thing Ofsted is very good at is measuring poverty — so if you’re in a school in a deprived area, you’re far more likely to be given a poor rating.

“They’ve rightly come under lots of scrutiny in recent months following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, and we want to see an end to that sort of regime that drives high levels of stress in which the careers of school leaders in particular depend on a one-word judgement that doesn’t tell parents very much at all.

“We want to see that replaced with a supportive inspectorate. Teachers and schools aren’t afraid of accountability. As a teacher I used to love showing off the work my pupils had done.

“We want to see a profession-led inspectorate that brings expertise for improvement rather than judgement, an inspectorate where schools work to help each other. There’s a problem with the marketisation of education, it has atomised schools turning them into competing organisations, and that is not in the interests of children.”

Kebede is in no doubt that Britain’s children have been let down by recent governments. He comes from north-east England, an area with higher than average deprivation. Has he seen poverty affect children’s learning?

“Poverty leads to an entire wastage of human creativity. I’ve taught in London, and in the north-east, and whether you are a child of immigrants in Stockwell whose parents work cleaning hotels, or a white working-class kid in the north-east, you face the same struggle.

“A child living in poverty does not learn as effectively as a child who doesn’t and that’s been really depicted in the recent A-level and GCSE results.

“The north-east has seen the greatest increase in poverty over the last five years of any English region, and it also came bottom of the GCSE and A-level outcomes table. You cannot have rising child poverty and rising educational outcomes for young people — it just can’t happen.

“The problem often gets individualised — as one of work-shy parents — but the majority of children who live in poverty have parents in work, the real issue is low pay.”

Kebede makes it clear the driver of inequality in Britain is class, but as the first black general secretary of his union, has he seen racism affect education?

“It’s important that our trade unions reflect the societies they operate in. No-one can deny there are problems with racism.

“In Britain we see a government that is targeting refugees, scapegoating them to cover their own failings.

“And education remains a battleground. It wasn’t that long ago I was outside Stoke Newington police station, protesting at what had happened to Child Q” (a black teenage girl strip-searched by Met officers on the baseless suspicion she was carrying drugs).

“We can’t deny as well that black teachers are more likely to be held back at pay progression, more likely to find yourself on capability, less likely to be promoted. That’s an issue for black educators, and also for black children, it’s an incredibly alienating environment when you don’t see yourself reflected in the education system.”