WITH TUC young workers’ conference ahead of us, it is important to recognise the significance of the education workforce’s representation in the TUC. 

NASUWT, NEU, GMB, UCU and Unison are all unions that represent education workers in the primary and secondary sectors. Young members of these unions have a difficult task ahead of us. We face problems from the material conditions of our work environment and from within our own unions — both of which I will address.

Precarity of jobs and the transformation of teaching

You may have seen advertisements from the British government asking for citizens to join the teaching workforce — or reports of a teacher shortage. 

The reality is that jobs are not as available as they seem to be — and the jobs that are available for young teachers often come in the form of rolling temporary contracts, which allow for your career to be terminated without justification. 

This forces young teachers to frequently hop from school to school, breaking the consistency that young pupils need. Young teachers are forced into low pay supply with private agencies as well. Starting a family, purchasing a house, caring for vulnerable members of family, are all put on hold with the precarious nature of teaching in 2025. 

Additionally, secondary teachers are frequently forced into a position where they must teach outside of their speciality. In my first job, I taught five subjects — right now I’m still teaching four separate subjects. Ironically, this is happening in schools that need a dedicated specialist the most, schools that are in deprived areas with children that have significant needs. 

The young teacher of 2025 is not seen as someone who went to university for four years and is in the classroom to impress their knowledge and passion of the subject onto children. The teacher of 2025 is a social worker who picks up the slack for a government that has deprived its citizens of dignity through austerity and someone who crowd controls children who are physically in the school but not emotionally or socially prepared for it. 

A specific example of the bastardisation of our education system and teaching profession can be seen in the new “Curriculum for Wales.” Its schema professes a need for every subject to have a connection to all “areas of learning” (subjects) in order to meet the skills determined by bloated, overarching “success criteria.” The rhetoric of the new curriculum reeks of corporate-speak, which reflects the Potemkin, neoliberal knowledge economy of a industrially gutted Wales which wants to prepare our children for a future in call centres and work-from-home office jobs. 

Our unions

These problems — the precarity of our jobs, the poverty of our children and degradation of the quality of education — stem from 40 years of neoliberalism and over a decade of austerity. Many articles have preached this and I won’t repeat them. Our unions know the cause of these problems. But it is not enough for our unions to know that these are the cause of our problems — we need to actively understand them and use that understanding to push for change in our material conditions. 

As trade unions members who are socialists, communists, we want to change the world of work for ourselves and fellow members. 

What we can do is raise our class consciousness. Members deserve a trade union education that answers the key questions — who owns what in our society? Why does our government have so much money for foreign wars but not for our children’s education? How did we get to the crisis that we are in now? The education that would address these questions would come in the form of learning about the nature of our political economy, the history of state education in the last 40 years and how we as trade union members can engage with our communities. 

Education unions have the money and time to use their power as a way of educating young members and use the union as a way to develop them into workers who understand the workings of our economic and political sphere — which is the crucial first step in changing it. 

Casual members who see the union as an insurance policy won’t be galvanised by discounts on brands or holiday packages in their union newsletter email — people want to know what is happening to them.

Currently, the money and resources are being used in ways that feed into a liberal, individualistic education and development of trade union members, which divides union members based on their identity instead of uniting them as education workers. 

If you take a look at the calendar of an education union’s website, you will find many events that discuss, celebrate or labour over a union member’s identity, be it race, gender or disability. Yes, these discussions have their time and place, but they do not help in creating a better member who understands the world of work and identifies themselves as party of a large and powerful unifying force — that of a worker, an educator, someone who cares about children, who shares the same struggle with millions of others.

As a young worker, it would be exciting to be a part of this change — embracing a unified class struggle instead of a fractious, tenuous identity struggle. It’s the difference between a foundation made on shaky ground and one that is solid, held up by the arms of thousands of people who want to fight by your side. 

Matt Flamenco is a member of Cardiff NASUWT branch, Young Communist League of Britain and a member of NASUWT young members’ advisory committee.