NEU Special Conference

In 2003, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) opened its membership to support staff, joining Unison, GMB and Unite in having support staff members. An agreement was brokered by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) governing relations between the four unions.

Upon the ATL’s merger with the National Union of Teachers (NUT) to create the National Education Union (NEU) in 2017, this agreement was renewed and is still in effect.

The NEU is a union based on vibrant school and college groups led by active reps, that fight on the workplace issues that members care about. As a result, we have grown to be the third biggest union in the TUC and the largest education union in Europe, with an ever-increasing number of members taking an active role in their union.

Our support staff membership has increased threefold since merger and currently stands at 64,000. We are probably the second biggest union for support staff behind Unison. Almost nine in ten of the support staff who have joined the NEU in recent years were not in any union before.

A special conference has been called to decide how best to go forward in organising support staff. Our overwhelming desire is to work collaboratively with NJC unions in a joint drive to organise the majority of support workers who are not in any union.

The conference will decide between two options:

1. To withdraw from the 2017 TUC agreement that prevents us from ‘actively recruiting’; or
2. To accept the TUC interpretation of our ability to organise in the sector.