Nine in ten teachers could back walkout action before Christmas forcing schools to close across England over pay disputes.
The figures from the largest education union, the National Education Union (NEU), reveal that hundreds of thousands of educators could join rail and postal workers causing disruption across the country as they fight back.
Up to 30,000 members have said that they would become strike volunteers as they endeavour to get their message heard.
In fact, the NEU survey, which was sent out to 450,000 members, led to the website crashing as unhappy teachers expressed their concerns.
The online ballot, which so far has 7,000 responses, still has a fortnight to run and an insider has disclosed the union will open up to a formal vote for striking.
NEU General Secretary Mary Bousted told a newspaper outlet that teachers don’t want to strike but they’re desperate and fleeing the profession in droves. Striking is their last resort, and it’s a message that things can’t go on like this.
It will pour more misery on both parents whose children were consistently forced to miss long periods of school during the COVID pandemic.
Teachers are demanding an above inflation rise in their earnings after the Department of Education told them that most would receive a five per cent rise, rising to 8.9 per cent for newly qualified staff.
But more strike action dooms on the country as the current retail price index rate (RPI), which measures inflation, was at 12.3 per cent in August.
Schools are facing a teacher retention crisis due to more than a decade of pay issues where real pay has dropped by a fifth since 2010.
Just last week NAHT union’s General Secretary Paul Whiteman said that the spiralling energy bills, inflationary prices, and lack of funding for teachers’ pay this year meant school leaders were forced to make cuts that ultimately couldn’t help but negatively affected the education and wellbeing of children.
He said that they encourage all political groups to listen to the profession to really comprehend the connection between funding, pay, and children’s life chances, and to commit to making the investment into education that’s so urgently needed.
It comes also after a summer of widespread union protesting among rail staff, postal workers and NHS staff.
In fact, just yesterday passengers were met with travel chaos as unions kickstarted the biggest rail walkout in decades during one of the busiest sporting weekends of the year.
Most teachers work from 7 am and seldom leave work or stop working till about 6 pm, and weekends are frequently worked as well. They’re not only just teachers, but social workers, counsellors, and the police and they also suffer abuse from parents.
But let’s face it, they’re no longer educators of children, but drones of the state, along with our children, and now, of course, our children will have more disruption to their schooling, so welcome to the gloomy, cold, dark and hungry winter of our discontent.
However, most teachers don’t want to strike, I mean who wants to strike? But the way newspapers demonise teachers to get readers is shocking, but then again, if you look at the basic blunders made in most articles it’s evident that these substandard journalists didn’t have a fantastic experience at school.
But it seems that the newspaper outlets are demonising everything, and then once everything loses support, the Tories can privatise it. It’s that good old saying ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’, and people are falling for all this garbage.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 