By Matt Wrack, General Secretary of NASUWT – The Teachers’ Union
At the last general election, voters demanded real, tangible and immediate change, After years of managed decline they delivered a mandate to end austerity once and for all.
They voted for an end to austerity. They did not elect a Labour Government to merely manage the further decline of our social fabric. They expected a government that would rebuild our public services and confront the cost‑of‑living crisis felt by millions.
When Andy Burnham becomes the next Prime Minister, he will inherit that demand for urgency. And he will not have long to prove that Labour is capable of breaking with the failures of the past. He must deliver real change and show that a Labour Government can take on obscene inequality, create secure jobs, and restore hope. The harsh reality he faces is that if he is not seen to deliver, any honeymoon will be short lived.
And his commitment to real change will be judged in education as elsewhere.
For more than a decade, teachers, support staff, pupils and families have endured an ideological assault on public education - austerity, outsourcing and privatisation. In too many cases school buildings are literally crumbling, and the workforce holding the system together has been driven to exhaustion.
The NASUWT’s Where Has All the Money Gone? report laid bare one part of this crisis. It showed how billions of pounds have been siphoned away from classrooms and into the pockets of private contractors, supply agencies, consultants, and academy trust executives.
Meanwhile, where education is actually delivered - in classrooms - children are too often left without the basic resources they need. Teachers and parents routinely fill the gaps with their own money.
I believe the public wants an end to this marketised hollowing‑out of the state. If the new Prime Minister is serious about improving the life chances of children and young people, they must accept that you cannot build a world class education system on the cheap.
But funding alone will not repair the structural failures. There are transformative changes that cost almost nothing, yet would dramatically improve the working lives of teachers and the learning conditions of pupils.
The first is restoring national pay and conditions. The fragmentation caused by mass academisation has produced a deeply unfair two‑tier workforce. Teachers doing identical jobs, under identical pressures, can be employed on very different terms depending on their employer.
A coherent, publicly accountable education service requires a single national entitlement for every teacher in every state‑funded school. It is fair, it is efficient, and it is the foundation of democratic accountability.
Next, the broken pay‑progression system must be simplified and rebuilt. Linking pay to performance management has created an oppressive bureaucracy, widespread resentment, and a culture of fear; it should be completely removed.
Reinstating automatic progression would immediately improve retention, reduce early‑career attrition, and restore professional dignity.
Workload must also be addressed urgently. Teachers consistently identify it as one of the main reasons they leave the profession. They are drowning in data entry, administrative tasks and surveillance mechanisms that add nothing to children’s learning. Fixing this does not require a major spending package but it does require political will and meaningful negotiation with trade unions, including a national workload agreement as the NASUWT has long demanded.
We must also confront the escalating crisis in Special Educational Needs (SEND) provision. Vulnerable children are waiting months or years for specialist assessments, while teachers are left without support or resources. Every school must have immediate access to external specialists and emergency funding.
Ultimately the Prime Minister must face the reality that the marketisation of education has failed. The drive to push every school into a multi‑academy trust has consumed vast public resources while delivering little for pupils.
Reversing this policy would send a powerful signal of his intent and the type of Labour Government he wishes to lead.
We need to rebuild an education service that is democratically accountable to local communities, parents and families - not shaped by the interests of academy chains, their executives or consultants.
Teachers and school staff have shown extraordinary patience, shielding children from the worst consequences of political neglect. But that goodwill is exhausted.
For Andy Burnham, this is a moment to stand with working people, with communities, and with every child who deserves better than managed decline. The teaching profession has carried this system for too long.
If Labour truly believes in change, now is the moment to prove it through action and not rhetoric.
Our schools cannot wait. Our children cannot wait. And the trade union movement should not wait.
