How kind of the teaching unions to get us all in the mood for Christmas with a nice big pantomime. The latest amusing drama from the NUT and NASUWT is over a meeting that they’re supposed to be having with Michael Gove about their ongoing industrial dispute. This dispute, if you will remember, nearly led to the unions holding nationwide strikes over performance-related pay. But those strikes were called off on the offer of more talks with Gove.
Now the talks themselves are mired in a row over who has been invited: the NASUWT and NUT do not want representatives from other unions coming along because they feel the dispute is specific to their unions (and the other unions tend to be far less militant and in some cases, such as the NAHT, supportive of performance-related pay). So now they are arguing with the government over the guest list for talks that were supposed to resolve the original row.
This has been played out over a series of very terse letters between NUT/NASUWT and Gove, the latest of which hit the postboxes today.
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