The COVID pandemic has been a truly awful time for educators across the UK but they have risen to huge challenges and overcome them. The move to remote learning and online teaching is the biggest public infrastructure project ever successfully undertaken – even if teachers get little recognition for their heroic efforts in using technology in new ways to teach their pupils remotely.

In England, the National Education Union has worked tirelessly, as has, in Scotland, our sister union the EIS, to be the voice of educators who have felt, at times, abandoned and let down by their governments. The NEU has campaigned relentlessly to keep school staff safe and children and young people educated. We have been resolute in our determination to understand and follow the science of COVID – producing a report on the international evidence of the rate to which schools act as vectors for the virus and the rate to which children and young people transmit the virus. We did this because Boris Johnson’s government did not – part of a pattern of inaction, dither and delay which has become the hallmark of his government’s response to COVID.

Lockdown and social isolation means that we cannot meet members in person, so the NEU has made use of the technologies used by its members to teach pupils remotely, to communicate with them. We have, since March, held regular zoom meetings attended by thousands of members. On 3rd January, the day before Gavin Williamson, the English Secretary of State for Education had ordered the majority of primary schools in England to re-open, we held a zoom meeting which was viewed by 400,000 people – many of them NEU members.

At that meeting we advised members that the government’s scientific advisory group, SAGE, in the minutes of its meeting on 22nd December, had advised government ministers that because the new variant of COVID was 50% to 75% more transmissible, it would be highly unlikely that a lockdown like we had in November, where schools remained open, would be sufficient to bring R below 1. Indeed, SAGE was so worried that they said they were not sure a lockdown like that in Spring would be enough in the face of the new variant. Given this advice, the English government’s determination to open primary schools on 4th January made no sense – other than political dogma. Something at which Boris Johnson’s government excels.

As Joint General Secretaries, Kevin Courtney and I advised members that the NEU’s advice was that it was not safe to return tomorrow to in school teaching for all pupils and that they had the right to use section 44 of the 1996 employment act to refuse to enter a workplace which in their opinion directly endangered their health. In the chat line on the zoom call we sent members links to model letters which we advised they should use if they agreed with our advice.

We found out, the next day, that a quarter of primary teachers had signed the NEU model section 44 letter and had refused to return to school for in person teaching to full classes of pupils. During the day 32 English local authorities either ordered their primary schools to close, or told primary heads that they would support them if they made the decision it was not safe to open their school. That evening, in an address to the nation, in the light of warnings by the 4 chief medical officers that the NHS was in severe danger of being overwhelmed. Boris Johnson announced a third lockdown, with all schools open only to vulnerable and key worker children.

Since the start of the pandemic the NEU has recruited over 40,000 new members. The union’s rep density has increased by 14%. Our members are meeting virtually and communicating in whatsapp groups. The union is stronger and more vibrant.

No one would have wished COVID, but the NEU has shown that, in a crisis, members look to their union and the bonds between members in schools and colleges, and with their union, have been strengthened