National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers
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| National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers | |
| Founded | 1975 |
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| Members | 265,000 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Affiliation | TUC, STUC, EI |
| Key people | Chris Keates, general secretary |
| Office location | London, England |
| Website | www.nasuwt.org.uk |
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) is a trade union representing teachers including headteachers throughout the UK. It is the UK's largest teaching union. The acronym NAS/UWT is also in common use for the organisation.
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[edit] History of the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS)
As the government introduced the Education Act 1870, the National Union of Elementary Teachers (NUET) was formed to unite existing teacher associations across the country. It changed its name to the National Union of Teachers (NUT) at its 1889 conference.
The NUT from the beginning contained a number of sectional organisations formed within to promote their interests, among them; the National Federation of Class Teachers, the National Association of Head Teachers, and the National Federation of Women Teachers. Despite the existence of such sectional interests, the NUT sought to represent the interests of all teachers and secondary school teachers were admitted into membership in 1909.
In 1919, a referendum of its members approving the principle of equal pay, gave rise to the formation, within the NUT, of the National Association of Men Teachers (NAMT). The formation of the NAMT was the beginning of a three-year campaign to represent the interests of male teachers within the NUT. The NAMT changed its name in 1920 to the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS) and in 1922, the NAS broke away when it prohibited its members to remain members of the NUT. The origin of the split was ostensibly that a major change in salary policy had been pushed through, whilst many male teachers were still away serving in the army. It could be argued however, that the issue was simply a rallying point for those who believed in a more sectional craft-style unionism, pursuing narrower trade union and professional interests, and seeking to hold back the inevitable: equal pay for women.
The NAS from its inception was a union with a mission. Its aim was to recruit every schoolmaster into the NAS, to safeguard and promote the interests of male teachers, to ensure recognition of the social and economic responsibilities of male teachers (which would mean that men would always deserve more pay than women) and to ensure the representation of schoolmasters on matters concerned with education. In addition, the NAS maintained that all boys over the age of seven should be taught mainly by men, and that schoolmasters should not serve under women heads.
As the secondary education sector expanded, the NAS built its organisation among male secondary teachers. It adopted the methods of collective bargaining and militant industrial action, in pursuing a narrow range of pay and conditions issues related to the interests of full time male ‘career teachers’, refusing for decades to accept that women could also be 'career teachers'.
Between 1937 and 1950 the number of secondary teachers trebled whilst primary teacher numbers reduced by 40,000. The period saw the total NAS membership move into double figures of just over 13,000.
[edit] History of the Union of Women Teachers (UWT)
The UWT was founded in 1909 by the merger of the Women Teachers' Franchise Union with the London Mistresses Association.
[edit] Merger
In 1976, the NAS merged with the Scottish Schoolmasters' Association and the Union of Women Teachers (UWT) to become the NASUWT. The merger was a consequence of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, under which it became unlawful to exclude from membership on grounds of gender.
Largely because of its successful campaign in the early 1960s for representation on the Burnham Committee (which dealt with national pay bargaining), the NASUWT began to establish itself as a major teacin bothhing trade union. Between 1977 and 2000 it roughly doubled its total membership of approximately 127,000 to 255,000.
A significant part of this growth was through recruitment in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where rival union the NUT does not recruit, and through taking into membership significant numbers of school staff who are not qualified teachers.
Many teacher members of NASUWT in England and Wales were bewildered when, in 2003, their union's leaders signed an agreement - along with other 'social partner' unions - which guaranteed planning and preparation time within the school day for all teachers. The price of this achievement was that cheap cover for this time could be provided by non-teachers. Not only were children now regularly taught by people with almost no qualifications, let alone qualified teacher status, thousands of supply teachers who had previously depended on such cover for their livelihood now found themselves without work. Such was the stranglehold of the NASUWT leadership over its grass-roots members that little open criticism of this approach - the antithesis of trade unionism - has emerged from within the union, although thousands have left it. In an act of desperation, the NASUWT has gone into 'planned deficit', giving away free membership in the hope of stemming the tide of membership loss
[edit] See also
- National Union of Teachers
- Association of Teachers and Lecturers
- Educational Institute of Scotland
- Education in the United Kingdom
