The leader of the UK’s biggest education union has torn into the government’s record on schools, accusing Labour of letting down the nation’s children and failing to deliver on its promises for education.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, was unsparing in his criticism of education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s policies in a speech to delegates at the NEU’s annual conference in Brighton on Thursday.
It comes days after the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, received a standing ovation on the conference stage after he promised radical change, including the abolition of Ofsted, a “serious cash injection” into schools and an end to academisation.
“It’s not because we agree with him on everything,” Kebede told delegates in a stirring 35-minute speech before going on to praise the Greens’ vision of an education system “built on possibility rather than scarcity”.
In a direct challenge to Labour, Kebede said: “It should surprise no one that the Green party now commands the greatest support among NEU members. People are not volatile – they are responding to what they see, and to what they do not.
Polanski received at the NEU conference on Monday. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
“Sixty-five per cent of NEU members who voted Labour in 2024 now tell us they will not do so again. That is not a statistic to be dismissed or explained away. It is a warning. And history teaches us that warnings ignored become consequences.”
Kebede said he did not want the Labour government to fail. “I want this government to listen. To understand where it has gone wrong. And to recognise what it must do if it is to honour the hopes of those who voted for change.”
Referring to the new Ofsted framework, the curriculum and assessment review, the children’s wellbeing bill, and the school’s white paper, he said while much of the headline rhetoric was welcome, “the policy detail just does not deliver”. Changes to Ofsted were just a “rebranding” exercise, children were still trapped in a culture of high-stakes testing, and the government’s desperately needed overhaul of the special educational needs system was destined to fail without greater investment.
A key element of the government’s special needs proposals is to improve and extend inclusion in England’s mainstream schools, which will be expected to assess pupils and draw up individual support plans.
The Department for Education (DfE) has said it will provide schools and colleges with £1.6bn over three years to improve inclusion. A further £1.8bn will fund local authorities to hire specialists for schools to call on and £200m will pay for additional teacher training, but education unions say it is not enough.
“You cannot promise inclusion whilst you starve the services that make inclusion real,” Kebede said, warning that schools were “running on empty” and saying classrooms had become “the frontline of every unresolved crisis in our society. “Hunger walks in with the children. Anxiety takes a seat at the back of the room. Unmet special educational needs raise their hands every morning and are told to wait and wait again.”
Kebede warned the government that the union would – if necessary – take national industrial action. NEU members are voting in an indicative strike ballot due to end later this month, over teacher pay, workload and school funding, but any strike action is a long way off.
The NEU general secretary, who backs a ban on social media for under-16s, also described how schools were being left to repair the damage caused by social media owned by “sleazy degenerates”, whose platforms were designed to keep children hooked, amplify misogyny and “treat humiliation as a business model”.
Another key issue explored by delegates during the week has been the influence of the far right, including allegations of book censorship in school libraries, following reports that a Salford school ordered dozens of books deemed inappropriate to be removed from library shelves.
On Wednesday, delegates voted for a motion calling on the union executive to oppose such censorship and promote the NEU as a union for librarians. Kebede said: “Any move to censor books in school libraries, based on misinformation and fearmongering, should ring alarm bells for all of us.
“The USA and Hungary are examples of countries which have implemented book bans in schools, primarily targeting books by women, Black and LGBT+ authors, and the NEU is clear that this is not a path we are prepared to follow in the UK.”
