Cheshire West and Chester Young Teachers
Welcome to the New Professionals and Young Workers (formerly Young Teachers) section of the CWaC NEU!
What is a ‘Young Professional’?
The TUC recognises that unions vary in their definition of ‘young’, with cut-off ages ranging from 25 to 35. Given the time spent in university by many teachers, the NEU recognise professionals as ‘young’ until they turn 36.
We are a community of NEU professionals, including both teachers and support staff, who work in Cheshire West and Chester schools and are under the age of 36. We work together to challenge the austerity agenda – both in schools and on a national level, and to stand up for the children that we teach and the staff who teach them. As well as being a representative voice within the union, we also aim to stand in solidarity with other important causes, both locally and nationally, representing the New Professionals and Young Workers (NPYW) of the NEU on broader issues as well.
Why bother?
The aim of the CWaC NPYW community is to bring together the voices, enthusiasm and ideas of what is beginning to make up a very large percentage of education workers, especially teachers, in the UK.
According to the data presented in OECD’s report, Education at a Glance (2024), the the average age of the UK teacher workforce is lower than the OECD average.
NPYWs can be appealing to schools for a whole range of reasons. Firstly, we are generally cheaper than our more-experienced counterparts, and we can sometimes be seen by employers as fresh and keen, willing to shift the work-life balance more towards the ‘work’ side. However, with the rise in fast-track entryways into teaching, such as Schools Direct and Teach First, poorly-paid young teachers are increasingly arriving in schools ill-prepared for the challenges they face.
Beginning a job in a school with limited pedagogy, behaviour-management skills, and inevitably without the breadth of knowledge that can come from a richer teacher training programme that allows trainees proper time to reflect and discuss their experiences in a range of different school settings, for example, can only increase the levels of anxiety and stress so often discussed among new teachers.
Teachers’ working conditions are our children’s learning conditions
To compound the fact that young teachers are finding themselves in full-time jobs with less and less preparation, the profession that we are entering has become one of obligatory overtime and expectation. In 2024, a TUC study found that teachers in the UK work more unpaid overtime than any other profession. We must oppose this.
It is no surprise that we have a teacher recruitment and retention crisis on our hands, where exiting teachers are citing stress, workload, bureaucracy and behaviour issues as the main reasons for their respective decisions (The Guardian, ‘Why Are Teachers Leaving Education?’). The majority of teachers leaving the profession, alongside pre-retirement-age over-50s, are New Professionals and Young Workers, who are leaving within the first 5 years of their career.
What can we do?
We must oppose the culture of guilt-powered overworking and the reams of unnecessary paperwork and form-filling that is for the benefit of those wishing to turn each of the creative, inquisitive and inspiring members of our diverse classrooms into pieces of data in order to measure them against each other and monetise the ‘value-adding’ schemes and programmes bundling into our school inboxes each week.
Children are not commodities. We do not ‘add value’ to them. We should be helping them to realise what they are already worth. And we do.
In spite of these disheartening, market-driven reforms of education around much of the Western world, the teachers of the NEU are fighting to protect our children. From our widely-resonating national campaigns such as More Than a Score (www.morethanascore.co.uk) and Stop School Cuts (www.schoolcuts.org.uk) to our international campaigns such as those in support of Rohingya people in Burma and against the enslavement of Black Africans in Libya, the NEU is making a difference.
Can a union make a difference?
In 2014, the NUT, one of the two unions that merged to form the NEU, forced the government to finally acknowledge the untenable workload of school teachers. Nicky Morgan and Nick Clegg issued the Workload Challenge, a national survey of school teachers, aiming to identify key drivers of our unmanageable workloads. Three independent workload review groups were set up to produce detailed reports offering teachers, heads and OFSTED respective advice on combatting the workload crisis. This marked the beginning of action on teacher workloads and the NEU continues its campaign to return teacher workload to manageable levels.
In 2016, the government announced that all schools were to become academies. Our determined campaign to oppose this, working alongside others, such as the Anti-Academies Alliance, saw these proposals dropped, keeping our remaining community schools democratically accountable and keeping the education budget out of the pockets of Academy CEOs.
In 2017, Theresa May called a snap election, with which she planned to bank her strong lead in the polls and, where education was concerned, achieve her party a mandate for the rampant privatisation and high-stakes testing of an ever-narrowing curriculum that is already well underway. The NUT helped to change that. Through determined campaigning and nationwide co-ordination, we helped to put education at the top of the agenda for voters.
As Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the NEU, highlighted in his speech at the end of the 2018 NUT Conference in Brighton, Survation calculated that around 750,000 people had changed their respective voting intentions in the 2017 General Election, based on the school funding issues that the NEU had campaigned on.
We made education a priority. People were concerned about education as much as crime and immigration for the first time in decades.
In 2023, NEU members’ action led to the government issuing a long overdue 6.5% payrise to teachers after losing on average around 10% in real terms since 2010. No doubt, the scale of the strikes and the passion with which they were held also led to the new Labour Government taking steps they’ve recently taken towards restoring teacher pay to pre-austerity levels.
We are having an impact. The NEU has made a difference to teachers’ lives and children’s schools and it continues working to make a difference every day.
Play your part
The NEU needs us, as New Professionals and Young Workers, to Stand Up For Education. We need to make our voices heard and play our part in fixing our broken education system.
Like and Follow the Facebook page, Follow us on Twitter – find out about and keep track of what’s going on. Most importantly, come along to a NPYW event. It nearly always involves a free drink and a meal, along with the chance to meet other NPYWs from Cheshire West and Chester. Come and hear inspiring talks from local campaigners and take advantage of some free CPD. Network.
Support the children in your class. Support the staff in your school. Support education.
As a New Worker or a Young Professional, support the NEU.
NEU | Cheshire West and Chester 