Why I am standing for Deputy General Secretary

I’m a fifty something trans woman who transitioned as a forty something in the same Coventry secondary school. Back in 2017 I was accepted and welcomed by my school community. I’ve watched the reality for trans people shift, largely through right wing driven and funded ‘culture wars’. My workplace has changed dramatically because of this.

 My lived experience and understanding of oppression has driven my work as LGBT+ executive member. I speak up and I speak out. Not only for trans and LGBT+ rights but also for Black members and students, Disabled people, and women. I’ve grown LGBT+ members under my leadership. From 14,000 to 20,000 since my last election. They are also overrepresented as reps, officers, and district secretaries.

I’ve consistently supported motions on the executive for industrial action and organising. I always advocate for support staff being fully represented by the NEU even where this hasn’t been popular. 

I’m standing for this position because I feel the time is right. It’s the right time for me personally, my children are largely grown up and more independent. I also have around ten years before retirement and I’d love to dedicate five of those years to the union to improve and change the state of education in this country, for all educators, and every student, for the better.

 Most importantly though, I feel my work on the executive for the LGBT+ sector, and for intersectional organising has reached a point where I would like to take a step up.

I believe that, in these times, a trans woman as part of the leadership of the NEU will be groundbreaking and narrative shifting. I will use the platform for all of our members and workplaces.

Our children, learners and students are the raison d’être for our profession. They are why we go to work. They are why we have continued for so long with relentless under funding, unbearable workloads, life threatening scrutiny and accountability, and massively lower rates of pay. I will fight, under our members instruction, passionately for all of these.

Without significantly increased funding our members cannot truly educate and broaden opportunities for our students. I know viscerally how the blunt end of this is always our most marginalised students whether through poverty, race and ethnicity, disability.

 I want the profession to be oversubscribed with ‘would be’ educators and not desperately recruiting to fill gaps. We need to ensure our pay, our conditions and our pensions keep us in role.

I want education to be central to our society and valued for its breadth and deep personalisation of the curriculum. I want SEND students and those with other disabilities to have choices and options as to which kind of setting they learn in. I want all learners to have meaningful engagement with the arts and to have the choice to pursue arts subjects in the learning. I want assessment to benefit the educators and students to aid learning rather than being a stick to beat schools and staff and a label to undermine and disempower students.

I believe in our profession. I believe, at the grassroots, WE are the experts in education. I believe in trade unionism and collective organising and activism to make change. I believe in the NEU.