Woodfield School workers on the picket line
Bosses at a west London school are pushing through a vicious attack on support workers’ pay. But education workers are striking back.
NEU union members at Woodfield School in Brent, which teaches children with special education needs and disabilities (Send), struck on Tuesday and Wednesday. They were also set to strike on Thursday and Friday as part of an ongoing series of walkouts.
The school has been shut during the strike days so far, with teachers joining the support workers on the picket lines in solidarity.
Management are reducing the weekly hours of teaching assistants from 36 to 32.5, the equivalent of £250 pay cut a month or up to £4,000 a year.
“It is really significant,” Lucy Cox, joint branch secretary for Brent NEU, told Socialist Worker. “They are already on low pay. To take £4,000 away leaves people with very little.”
These support workers are at the heart of the school’s workforce. Yet they are facing cuts while executives at Compass Learning Partnership, the academy trust that runs the school, are pocketing bloated salaries.
The CEO of Compass Learning Partnership, Hermann Farrington, takes home over £130,000 a year.
And bosses are turning to dirty tactics to try and break the strike, threatening to fire and rehire strikers as a way to intimidate them.
Lucy said that management “are trying to frighten people” in response to “how united and determined the workers are”.
“Management are desperate but also intransigent. The talks haven’t been meaningful,” she said.
Bosses offered to cut 2.5 hours instead of 3.5 hours, but this would still leave support workers thousands of pounds off.
Union members unanimously voted to reject this rotten offer and instead up the numbers of strike days.
Lucy explained, “People are worried about their income, but a lot of the talk is about how it will affect the job and the children.”
The cuts to hours would be before the start and after the end of lessons in a day. “It affects the quality of education,” she said.
“This is the time when you can prepare resources, meet the kids, plan lessons.”
The children at the school have complex needs. It takes time, planning and getting to know the children to know how to best support them.
Yet management recently fired the psychotherapist contracted at the school, meaning that there are no more in-house mental health services.
Instead, more and more the school is using remote therapists.
“There has been a general degrading of services and lack of individualization that you need with children with complex needs,” Lucy argued.
Management aren’t even based in the school workplace. “They spend thousands of pounds renting an office miles away so they don’t have to be where the workers and children are. It is demonstrative of a detached attitude towards education,” Lucy said.
“I’m a parent of a disabled child. I find it insulting that they don’t want to be in the same physical proximity of those they are making a living off.”
Many of the tasks that support workers do are not easy.
“You need high levels of training and significant numbers of workers to meet the children’s needs. You won’t be able to get a remote teacher on screen to replace what these people are doing,” Lucy said.
Strikers have already won demands to remove performance related pay. They are also demanding an improved cover policy. Currently the trust has a policy of not putting cover in when people are off sick.
It means support workers are expected to cover teachers, taking on responsibilities well beyond what they are currently paid.
Strikers are planning on holding a protest in January outside the Department of Education to put pressure on it to hold the trust accountable.
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