Report back from NEU Special Conference

rs21 educators report back from the NEU Special Conference on organising school support staff.

On Saturday, 28 February 2026, 1,200 NEU activists attended the NEU’s Special Conference: they were there to discuss how best to organise support staff in our schools. In recent years, this issue has become the subject of inter-union tension and even disciplinary sanctions from the Trades Union Congress (TUC). The Special Conference is the latest attempt to move forward on the issue.

Historical context of the support staff issue

The conference heard a comprehensive introduction from General Secretary Daniel Kebede about the history of this issue. Support staff in schools are usually paid in line with the Local Government pay scales. These are set each year in pay negotiations between the Local Government Association and National Joint Council for Local Government Services, commonly known as the NJC. This council includes the trade unions Unison, GMB and Unite, which cover all local government workers. The NEU is not recognised in these pay negotiations, and the mechanisms are a hangover from the 1970s and 1980s, when schools and school staff were under local authority control.

The NEU came out of a merger of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), a craft union that allowed only teachers to join, and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), a union that included  Support Staff. During the merger discussions, a TUC framework was agreed that barred the NEU from actively recruiting support staff. Individual members were allowed to join, and the NEU was allowed to represent them at a local level, while acknowledging that the NJC unions were those recognised for national pay negotiations. When the NEU was formed, it had around 25,000 support staff members.

Covid and the 2023 strike wave

The issue has come to a head in the last five years after the NEU adopted a more organised and confrontational approach to employers and government. This started during Covid. After the first lockdown, local Reps were instrumental in getting schools made as safe as possible and then during the refusal to work under Section 44 action in January 2021, the NEU took extraordinary action to shut down the largest site of community transmission, schools, forcing the government to introduce the second lockdown.

During the 2023 strike wave, the NEU was able to beat the ballot turnout thresholds in the anti-union legislation and join the British Medical Association (BMA), University and College Union (UCU), Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and railworkers in the RMT out on strike. That strike halted the cuts in teacher pay, and the effect of it was to win a 23% increase over four years, as well as some new money for schools. 

Both of those moments saw an explosion of organising in our schools, with new Reps elected and many members joining. A lot of those members were support staff – encouraged to join a union because there was someone active in their workplace and because the NEU were seen as defending pay, children and the idea of public education.

The vast majority of these school support staff had never been in a union. Most educators (the term that covers both teachers and support staff) work in schools with no Rep, and there almost certainly isn’t a Rep from the NJC unions. This meant that their main experience of unions was the NEU. This is not to say that there aren’t good branches and pockets of excellent organisation within NJC unions, but the truth rarely acknowledged by their bureaucracy is that until recently they mostly left schools to fend for themselves. Indeed, in one of the biggest Local Education Authorities in England, the Unison Branch Secretary openly boasted that he was the only school Rep covering an area of 3000 sq km and over 600 different schools.

It is also true that the majority of educators now work in Academies, schools that are run as private companies and that are outside local authority control. This further removes the workers in schools from the already distant process of bargaining through the NJC. 

Support Staff Ballot

In 2022-2023, as part of its organising efforts around the pay offer for teachers, the NEU initiated a ballot of support staff members. This was for two reasons:

(i) Local employers and the government frequently argue for cutting support staff jobs to fund teacher pay, and

(ii) The funding for schools comes from the Department for Education (DfE), so any pay award won by the NJC unions would need additional funding from the DfE.

This ballot failed to pass the turnout threshold the first time round, partly because there are still pockets of craft unionism (an exclusive focus on teachers) within the NEU’s bureaucracy. It did pass the threshold on the second attempt.

Unfortunately, the NJC unions tried to shut this ballot down and convinced the TUC to fine the NEU £153,952, even though it was then leading a national strike against the government. The local authority unions successfully argued that any ballot constituted organising activity that would likely lead to recruitment and was therefore a breach of the agreement. Over the same period, the NJC unions failed to pass the ballot threshold or mount an effective national campaign to lift support staff pay significantly. Local authority union leaders saw NEU organising as a significant threat, characterising it as ‘poaching.’ UNISON claimed over a quarter of a million school-based members, including around 140,000 Teaching Assistants; GMB claimed 144,810 support staff members and Unite 7,953. The NEU had 64,000.

The current predicament

The effect of the TUC fine in 2023 was to sharpen minds about the contradictions inherent in the current set-up. It looked like the NJC union bureaucracies were seeking to quash any organising activity in a seriously unorganised sector because they were happy collecting dues and promoting passivity. Despite the fact that there were very few cases of poaching members, the mere existence of NEU support staff members and Reps highlighted the shallowness of the NJC’s presence in schools.

The NEU, following our conferences in 2024 and 2025, has made attempts to try and square this circle, looking at mechanisms such as dual membership, a union coordinating committee or our entry into the NJC process. These have been knocked back by both the employer side and the union side. Daniel Kebede has mainly blamed the GMB for this.

Unfortunately, this hostility has now bled into areas not covered by the 2017 agreement, such as local and sectional action. There have been reports of employers gleefully excluding the NEU from negotiations or consultations and, most shockingly, doing so with the collusion of NJC union representatives. 

In this latest pay round, which looks set to galvanise another school strike wave, the DfE have explicitly said that support staff should be cut. This is why the NEU has included support staff in its current indicative ballot: to protect jobs and frontline services. To do anything else would be a betrayal of members and the education system. However, this will almost certainly result in another TUC fine.

School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSSNB)

A solution was nearly within reach when the Labour government revived the SSSNB, a negotiating body that previously covered support staff pay and conditions nationally. Sidestepping the controversy, the Government left it up to the union side to decide who would sit on the SSSNB – the NJC unions made the decision to exclude the NEU. This was a chance to give the NEU a seat at the table in education while protecting the NJC unions’ stronghold: local councils. Instead, NJC union leaders were more interested in excluding the NEU than in strengthening collective bargaining in schools – and once again, support staff lost out.

The Special Conference – its decisions and outcomes

These are the pressure points that have led to the NEU’s Special Conference. At that conference, delegates voted  almost unanimously to inform the TUC that the NEU would be exiting the 2017 Agreement on 28th March. There remains some room for manoeuvre, and the NJC unions have a chance to come back with a sensible response. Should that not happen, the TUC will likely issue sanctions on the NEU – this could be fines, which the NEU will not pay, and it could lead to the NEU’s expulsion from the TUC.

This would be a blow to the TUC as the NEU is the country’s third biggest union and NEU activists play prominent roles in Regional and local TUCs around the country. rs21 Educators hope that it does not come to this and that a solution is found before then. The overwhelming feeling of the conference was that it would be better if we could find a solution that kept the NEU in the TUC.

However, any solution must recognise the reality of the educational landscape. Support staff are mostly working in academies, and their conditions of work are overwhelmingly set by the framework laid down by the DfE, with significant variety across different Academy Trusts. The NJC pay negotiations are a relic of an old era. While we should defend national bargaining, we need to move away from a model that treats school support staff as part-time mums working for pin money and treats them as the crucial professional workers that they are.

Unity on the ground

Whatever the outcome of the argument between bureaucracies, rs21 Educators and the majority of NEU activists will work constructively with other union activists on the ground. The TUC is a formal mechanism of co-operation, but solidarity doesn’t need a bureaucracy. Many trade unionists have joined BMA and RCN pickets in recent years, despite them not being affiliated to the TUC. While it would be a little painful to have the NEU kicked out of the TUC, it would not be the end of the world.

The principle at stake is much more important, however. What we have on show in this dispute is two different approaches to trade unionism. The NEU’s growth in support staff membership has come in spite of our inability to raise support staff pay and in spite of our being forbidden from actively recruiting support staff. Support staff have joined because the NEU has been an active, confrontational, industrial union. The NJC union bureaucracies have, instead, sought to see off the perceived threat to their subs base – one that they have largely neglected over the last three decades. School staff make up a large part of membership in UNISON’s Local Government service group, so it is understandable that many activists won’t want to give that up. Do we want the NEU excluded from bargaining and competing with NJC unions, or cooperation and solidarity? Do we want unions that manage decline or those that challenge neoliberalism? That is the choice on offer and that is what drove the decision of NEU delegates to withdraw from the TUC Agreement.

rs21 Educators look forward to joining you on joint pickets in the future as we defend an education system that can serve our class.