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Matt Wrack Acting General Secretary at Durham Miners Gala 2025 BANNER.jpg

Teachers in schools across the UK are going “above and beyond” every day as they support children who are being failed by a funding crisis in schools.

NASUWT Acting General Secretary Matt Wrack said it was teachers who spotted children going hungry, who bought school resources form their own pockets and who picked up the pieces where services had been stripped away.

And in the poorest communities schools were being asked to make non-existent “efficiencies” from budgets stripped to the bone to fund teacher pay rises.

Mr Wrack delivered a powerful message to tens of thousands of people at the Durham Miners’ Gala telling them: “You cannot run a world-class education system on real-terms pay cuts and on slashing funding.

He said: “Across the North East, more than 170,000 children live in poverty.

“In one of the richest countries in the world; that shames the politics of this country; it shames this system.

“And yet it is in these very communities that the Government asks schools to make cuts; it asks teachers to make do and to find non-existent ‘efficiencies.
 
“But teachers do more than “make do.” Every day they go above and beyond. They buy resources from their own wages.

“They stay late to help the kids who’ve got nowhere else to go. They spot those children who are going hungry. They step in where other services have been stripped away or scrapped.

“As other forms of social support for young people fall away or fall apart, schools and teachers pick up the pieces. They carry communities consistently and relentlessly.”
 


Mr Wrack said the pay rises awarded to teachers, including the 5.5% given to teachers last year by the incoming Labour Government had “certainly improved things”

But he said that to insist schools paid for around a quarter of the 2025/26 pay rise of 4% out of existing budgets was a “political trick that asks headteachers to choose between staff and support—between teacher’s pay and children.” Either way children would lose, he warned.

He warned the recruitment and retention crisis in teaching was continuing and said public sector workers couldn’t be expected to “plug every hole”.

And he suggested more money could be found from “individuals, corporations and sections of society” who had “done very well out of the years since the financial crisis”,

He told the Gala: “Make them pay – not us.”

Mr Wrack spoke of the billions of pounds being siphoned away from schools to private providers as highlighted by NASUWT in its Where Has All the Money Gone? Report.

He said: “While they plead poverty, even with the limited resources allocated to education, there are still people making a profit.

“Chief Executives of Multi-Academy Trusts on half a million pounds a year and they tell us there is no money.
 
“Teacher supply agencies making £300 million in profit and they tell us there is no money.

Private providers for Special Needs charging £60,000 for individual children and they tell us there is no money for education. That is profiteering with our children’s futures.

“These individuals and organisations are ripping off schools, ripping off communities and ripping off the taxpayer. We say enough is enough.”
 
He said at the last General Election the public voted for a change of direction from the austerity policies of the previous government, telling the Gala:

“Well, attacking pensioners, attacking the disabled, attacking those on benefits is not ending austerity it is continuing the attacks on working people.

“I say to Labour ministers; you’ve seen the anger provoked by the attacks on disabled people. That is not what people voted for a year ago.

“So don’t be surprised when people react angrily, when they vote frankly in a different way.

“You have no God-given right to the votes and support of working people. You need to start listening and you need a change of direction.”

Mr Wrack said the NASUWT would never apologise for “wanting decent wages and good quality pensions.”

He said: “We reject the race to the bottom. We don’t apologise for demanding safe staffing levels to enable us to do our jobs effectively and professionally.

“We’ve demanded. We’ve organised. We’ve fought—and we’ can and we will win. From the picket line to the front line, from pit villages to primary schools, our strength has always been in each other and in solidarity.
 
“So I say this: to every worker, every trade unionist, to parents to teachers:

“Stand with us. Speak with us. Organise with us. March with us. Because a better future is possible—but only if we organise for it.

"We have the power in our hands - if we stand together we can indeed change the world and lets do it."

 

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