2012 preview: part I

Now my broken finger is mostly fixed, I'm starting again with a look ahead to what is thundering towards us down the educational tracks in 2012. For my money, there are three main bodies to watch with some big issues next year. I'm going to work through them in a series of posts.

In at number three, it's the teaching unions.

The two main battlegrounds are fairly obvious: pensions and academies. Reading about the pensions "deal" announced to parliament by Danny Alexander, you could be forgiven for thinking that the negotiations were finished and that everyone is happy. For most of the teaching unions, this could not be further from the truth. ATL are the only major teaching union who appear to have signed the "heads of agreement" proposed by the government, whilst the big two, the NUT and NASUWT, have most definitely not. Interestingly, the union for headteachers, the NAHT, has given little away on whether they have signed the agreement or not, but are consulting members on the government's current offer in the new year (click the links to see each union's statement on their current position).

This seems to have been given very little coverage in the media, possibly because it's not much of a story until the union executives announce what they are going to do next. It would seem that the government has still not provided any evidence to show that the current teacher pension scheme is unsustainable since it was revised in 2006 to make it affordable for the nation. I predict that this will be a key sticking point, as it would seem that the government don't really have an argument against this, and I don't think either party is going to budge. I think that teachers are unlikely to support further strikes leading up to the GCSE/SATS season, but action short of a strike could well be on the cards in early 2012.

More trouble is likely to come along in September 2012 when more schools convert over to academy status, plus a new crop of free schools will open up. The teaching profession as a whole is still very suspicious of academies, and even more so of free schools. Many union members will find themselves teaching at a newly converted academy in September and could well make quite a lot of noise about it. Free schools so far seem to be almost union-free zones (odd that), but I'm guessing they will work their way up the unions' hit lists, especially once the pensions dispute is finally settled.


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