Teachers Strike

Angela Rayner Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend is right. These strikes not only damage children’s education, with every extra day of school missed damaging the outcomes for those children, but hugely inconvenience working parents, who have to make childcare arrangements or take a day off work in order to look after their children. So I share my hon. Friend’s comments, and I pay tribute to the vast majority of teachers and head teachers who are working today, resulting in seven out of eight schools refusing to close.

[Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

As in the case of the junior doctors dispute, I am sure that the general public watching this debate will see through this Government’s mirage and their fascination with what they seem to think is the picture out there. Taking strike action is one of the most difficult decisions any teacher makes. No one takes that decision lightly, but teachers have said enough is enough. They are fed up with the cuts, which 70% of heads say are directly affecting educational standards. Will the Minister now accept that class sizes are increasing, pupils are getting less choice about the subjects they learn, jobs are going and children are getting less individual time with staff?

I find the Minister’s faith in the free market’s ability to decide teachers’ salaries touchingly naive, on a day when the pound has fallen to a 31-year low. Can he tell us whether there is any limit to how far he is prepared to see teachers’ salaries fall? Meanwhile, the Secretary of State has refused to say anything about what will happen to teachers’ pay and conditions in September, and we have still not heard anything about that from the Minister. We are less than a month from the end of term, so will he finally end the uncertainty and update the House on what teachers can expect?

Unfortunately, the Secretary of State seems to be spending more time on the Justice Secretary’s campaign for the Tory leadership than on her day job. Will the Minister now agree to get around the table and thrash out a better deal for the next generation, which is what every parent across the country wants? The working conditions of our teachers are the learning conditions of our children, and our children deserve the very best.

[Mr Gibb]

What the public are seeing is a Labour party that is equivocal about whether it agrees with strike action that is disrupting children’s education. The hon. Lady is not prepared to condemn strike action that is not only damaging children’s education but hugely inconveniencing working parents, who have to make alternative arrangements for looking after their children.

The hon. Lady talks about class sizes, but the average infant class size has remained at 27.4—unchanged from 2015. Indeed, of the 3,066 infant classes with 31 or more pupils, 80% have just 31 pupils, and that is because of the flexibility we have built in to allow one or two extra children—for example, twins—to have access to those schools. Will the hon. Lady condemn that policy?

I have said that we will publish the STRB report when consideration of it is complete. We will consult teachers and stakeholders about the future of the STRB and about the arrangements when all schools are academies. However, let me give the hon. Lady one final chance to say, on behalf of the Labour party, that it condemns this unnecessary and futile strike by the National Union of Teachers.