A rallying cry rang out across the Brighton Centre last month. It belonged to Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of Britain’s largest teaching union.

‘For the crime of organising low-paid women workers – how do we plead?’ he shouted. ‘Guilty!’ yelled back hundreds of activists.

‘Our only crime is wanting to organise,’ he continued. ‘For that we should be proud to be guilty, for the arc of moral justice is on our side.’

And so began what is set to be one of the most chaotic periods in recent history for schools – at the hands of the Left-wing National Education Union (NEU).

More than 500,000 members are set to walk out nationwide after Christmas over pay and conditions, disrupting exam classes and forcing parents to scramble to find childcare.

These will include newly recruited teaching assistants, librarians and dinner ladies – the ‘low-paid women workers’ referred to by Mr Kebede at his annual conference – but more on that later.

Insiders say that, while concerns about staff pay are valid, Mr Kebede is using the strike ballot, planned for this autumn, as a vehicle for his own political ends. 

‘Daniel has a Marxist agenda,’ says former NEU rep Peter Block. ‘At every opportunity he will be there to stir up trouble. I don’t think he’s interested in teachers’ welfare. It’s about maximum disruption – to cause chaos to the system to undermine it.’

Raphael Kessler, another former rep for the union, agrees: ‘Daniel is a disrupter. Much of it is not actually anything about education.

‘He’s been steering things in a more militant direction than I have been comfortable with.’

To see the scale of the damage planned, one only has to look at recent local strikes called by the NEU. 

This month, exasperated pupils and parents at Connaught School for Girls in Leytonstone, east London, held a counter-protest after 45 days of strikes in just four years.

Teenage girls confronted their teachers at the picket line, accusing them of having ‘no sympathy or consideration’ for disrupting GCSE mock exams.

In response, some teachers smirked, clapped their hands and even turned their backs while the girls shouted: ‘Teach or quit!’

One NEU member says: ‘The Socialist Workers Party [SWP] has infiltrated the union and that’s why it is becoming militant far-Left. Striking should be the last-chance saloon, when you’ve tried everything else. But Connaught is in an area where reps are obsessed with strike ballots.

‘They’ll have a strike ballot at the drop of a hat – it’s ridiculous.’

Meanwhile, an academy trust chief executive in another area, who wants to stay anonymous, says an NEU official he didn’t know threatened him with a strike ballot out of the blue by letter.

‘He turned out to be an organiser a significant distance away and knew nothing about the school,’ he recalls. 

‘The ballot was being threatened before I’d had any discussions with union reps or even seen a list of issues – all of which turned out to be very minor issues. It was clearly a tactic that was predetermined.’

Heads’ union ASCL has also reported an increase in members being ‘targeted in a way that is personal and vindictive’.

None of this is news to Mr Block, from north-west London. ‘They [the NEU] are very good at whipping up sentiment and finding something they can latch on to,’ he says.

‘They see it as a political necessity to stir things up. And they have their own political agenda which overrides everything else.

‘If they were concerned about welfare [of pupils], they’d be campaigning far more about the failing schools, and the schools where the pupils run riot, and the educational standards have slipped.

‘But they’re not interested in the day-to-day issues of the chalk-face any more.

‘There are teachers who don’t want to strike in general, but you can be very intimidated by cries of “scab” and all that. It is difficult to swim against the tide sometimes.’

He believes the union is likely to be ‘emboldened’ in calling more strikes owing to Labour’s softening of ballot rules. 

‘It seems like such an insane thing to do,’ he adds. ‘There will be even more chaos.’

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has unveiled the tactics NEU activists are using to ensure this chaos will be rolled out into a nationwide strike. 

One activist on the Connaught picket line was Jess Edwards, an influential London district rep, who this month revealed a blueprint to radicalise members ahead of the ballot.

‘We need to put the whole union on a war footing this term to ensure we can then win that ballot,’ she said in an article co-authored for the Socialist Worker, the official SWP newspaper.

‘It means flooding schools with material now, saying get ready to fight . . . It is time to set a course for strikes – and fight for our class.’

The union is recruiting ‘industrial organisers’, with one job advert for a £58,000-a-year (pro-rata) role saying the right candidate will help ‘build power’ and encourage ‘targeted industrial campaigns’. Nowhere does it say teaching experience is necessary.

In addition, the NEU wants to maximise the pain during strikes by recruiting non-teachers such as classroom assistants, librarians and dinner ladies. 

Earlier this year, the NEU withdrew from an agreement with the Trades Union Congress not to actively recruit these support staff, who have traditionally belonged to other unions, allowing it to grow its membership considerably.

Primary school teachers, who are generally less militant, are also likely to be targets for activists this summer.

The union also appears to be grooming Gen Z newly qualified teachers, with a New Professionals and Young Workers conference next month. 

And the NEU is resurrecting its ‘School Cuts’ campaign, with plans to deliver banners and leaflets to school gates to tell ‘every parent and educator’ about the NEU’s funding dispute.

Coupled with the NEU’s boosted membership of support workers, it could mean the worst disruption for schools in recent memory.

The union says the strikes can be stopped if the Government improves its offer of a 6.5 per cent pay rise over three years, which it says is unlikely to keep up with inflation. 

It is also not ‘fully funded’, meaning schools will have to take money from other parts of their budgets to pay for it – likely leading to job cuts.

Former teacher John Blake, a classroom rep for the union a decade ago, says that, while it is understandable teachers feel ‘genuine anger and frustration’, striking is often ‘counterproductive’.

‘Until the NEU presents a coherent proposal that adequately takes account of the other needs and pressures on government, I don’t think strike action is going to get them anywhere,’ he adds.

‘I think this is another round of people who enjoy creating trouble, and those who will pay the price will be front-line teachers, pupils and their families.’

In the face of this stalemate, it seems ugly scenes such as those outside Connaught School for Girls are likely to become a disturbingly regular feature across the country in months to come.

Militant ringleader says Britain is racist...and teachers should work from home

Daniel Kebede, the leader of the militant National Education Union, is an avowed Marxist who has claimed the education system is ‘institutionally racist’.

He was born to a white British mother and a father who came to the UK as a migrant fleeing the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia.

The 39-year-old’s early years were spent in West London and he has recalled how the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 had a profound effect on him.

His family later moved to a ‘predominantly white area’ in Northampton, where Mr Kebede experienced for the first time the racism that would fuel his activism.

When in Year 9, he said, a geography teacher scolded him for being disruptive, telling him: ‘You’re not in the jungle now.’

‘I can remember being physically shocked by that,’ he told the Talking Race podcast in 2020. It led him to join his first protest march, aged 17, against the National Front.

Mr Kebede studied law at the University of Wales before working at a primary school in North Tyneside. He joined the National Union of Teachers – the precursor to the NEU – in 2013, rising through the ranks.

He won the union’s Blair Peach award for his anti-racism campaigning in 2017 and two years later joined the national executive, becoming NEU president in 2021. He was elected as general secretary in 2023.

He has firm links to the Left of the Labour Party. For several years he was in a relationship with Laura Pidcock, the Corbynite MP for North West Durham. They have a six-year-old son.

In 2019, at a Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism conference, he said the British education system was ‘fundamentally and institutionally racist’.

The national curriculum, he said, had been whitewashed by powerful white men and taught a ‘little-Englander, white-saviour narrative’.

In 2022, Mr Kebede said strikes were about ‘taking back control of an education system from a brutally racist state’. And last year he said full-time teachers should be able to work one day a week from home.

However, it is understood that he has tried to tone down his radical language since 2023.

READ MORE: Unions plot worst ever school strikes as Labour law change makes national walkout easier