TEACHERS voted today (Saturday) to take co-ordinated strike action before the end of the summer term.

Delegates at the National Union of Teachers conference in Cardiff vented their fury at the government for claiming to have maintained school funding while budget cuts have hit hard on the ground.

And a prominent parent campaigner told the conference that kids were sitting in classrooms in their hats and coats because the heating had been turned off - and backed teachers’ strikes.

The conference called for the union’s existing national strike mandate from June last year to be invoked in regions particularly affected by school funding cuts.

Delegates voted for an amendment calling for a “one day strike before the end of the 2016/17 academic year” in those regions.

Lewisham delegate James Kerr said: “If we’ve got the ballot, lets use it before we lose it.” But he warned: “We can’t rely on an isolated one day strike and then go back to business as usual.”

Fellow Lewisham teacher Cleo Lewis said: “We’ve been passive for too long. I’ve had enough. Nothing gets changed by sitting and discussing. The government are not accepting our nice words. We need to show them we’re serious.”

The conference gave a rapturous reception to Jo Yurkey, the co-founder of parents’ campaign Fair Funding for All Schools. She hit out at the government’s “fair funding formula” as “an insult to our intelligence” because “they haven’t provided any new funds” for schools.

“In one secondary school near me, the children were taught for the first two weeks of January with their coats and hats on because they’ve had to become a bit more careful about when they’ll turn the heating on - to save money,” she said.

“That school can’t afford to buy the text books the pupils need, but they also can’t afford to photocopy them because that budget’s been cut too.”

She said schools were begging parents for cash to plug budget shortfalls but that this was “completely unsustainable” in the long run. “It will never be enough because the the scale of the cuts is so large,” she said.

“Are we saying we will accept a different quality of education in areas where parents can pay than in areas parents can’t? That can’t be right.

“We would support action teachers take in order that this issue gets taken seriously.”

After the vote for strike action, NUT general secretary Kevin Courtney said the union would be consulting with members in regions on whether strike action would be supported.

Education secretary Justine Greening is set to respond to a consultation on school funding in the next few months - and the NUT expects some areas to end up with even less money. These were likely to be urban, inner-city areas that previously were the best funded.

Mr Courtney said such areas were the most likely to go on strike. “We [can] look for regions where teachers are particularly angry and funding cuts have been particularly bad, and then we could co-ordinate strike action in the summer term,” he said.