LAST WEEK I experienced something of a dissociative moment. As a working-class girl from Newcastle who grew up poor under the Tories, deprivation shaped my life. What right did I have to address our members as president of the NEU?

Yet, being active in my trade union has profoundly shaped my life.

We’ve all worked with children who carry a heavier burden than we’d wish, impacting on their learning and success. Many of us were those children, and those shared experiences have driven us to work in education. A long-time campaigner against child poverty, I entered teaching determined to make a difference.

In 2006, my PGCE leader predicted the education sector would change massively if there were a new government. She turned out to be right. We were too slow to resist the Tory-led coalition’s assault after 2010. The damage was absolute.

I was working in a community school in a deprived part of Gateshead, a school with children at its heart. A vibrant place that championed working-class children’s creativity. A place of challenges, yes, but a place of sanctuary, a place where children could belong and believe.

I witnessed this all be stripped away by a government intent on limiting the education of the working class. I experienced the destruction of a school prioritising its community’s needs.

But it wasn’t just education. It’s not just the accountability structures, stringent curriculum, weaponisation of Ofsted and rampant privatisation. Austerity hit everything.

The closure of SureStart provision and public libraries decimated our most impoverished communities, all while the NHS was stretched to breaking point and mental health services stripped back.

When the coalition government was elected in 2010, I had already been my father’s carer for years. After having recently been elected the NUT rep in my school, I represented my father against the DWP’s decision to remove his disability benefits.

I felt confident representing my members, and we had secured some wins at work. But I still attended that tribunal with a fear I hadn’t felt before. I didn’t know that all it took was for someone who could advocate for themselves to challenge the decision, or for them to have someone who could advocate for them.

Because of the NUT, because of the skills and the confidence my trade union had afforded me, my dad had an advocate who felt like they could take on the DWP’s cruelty.

Between 2010 and 2017, an estimated 120,000 people died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme. In 2013, my dad contributed to this statistic. He was 56.

When the new Labour government tell you that they need to balance the books, when Wes Streeting brags to the Tories that Labour has done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean.

Nearly two decades of economic perma-crisis has not been caused by disabled people, the elderly heating their homes, immigrants, refugees, the trans community or children. But it is these communities, our communities, who will continue to pay the price for the repeated failures of politicians and bankers.

And yet, Labour are perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching down and finger-pointing. They’re balancing the books on the backs of the poor and people who have no-one to fight for them. On the backs of children whose education has been purposefully limited to such a degree that they don’t know that they even can fight back, let alone how.

But this is our fight, and we can’t shy away from it.

Over the next few days, we will set out our vision for what education should be. How we want to shape the world. We have seen the rise of the far-right and suffered violence on our streets. Many of us spent last summer resisting those who want to divide our communities. When refugees and asylum-seekers are demonised, there are direct consequences.

I’m not sure we’ve really begun to process what we saw last summer. How can we challenge rhetoric so hateful that it leads to attempts to trap asylum-seekers and burn down the building with them inside?

When children attacked 80-year-old Bhim Kohli as he walked his dog in the park, leading to his death, how do you begin to process that?

When violence against women and girls is on the rise, and misogyny is so prevalent that the prime minister relies on Netflix to address it, how do we challenge that? The answer is in this room. It’s education. We are the experts. We are the people who care enough to challenge it.

We have made life-changing differences in people’s lives. On an individual basis through our defence of our colleagues facing problems at work, to the unprecedented, life-saving actions taken by our colleagues during the pandemic.

I want you all to know your power. I want you to understand what we can achieve. In this room, we are going to discuss what education is, what it’s for. The life-changing power of it. There is a disconnect between our vision for education and that of this government. But as always, the power for change lies in this room.

So we need to reclaim education. We need to reclaim our classrooms, our schools, our nurseries, our colleges.

When they tell us there’s no funding, but our buildings are crumbling and they’re laying off support staff, we fight back.

When they tell us they can’t fund a pay rise, but they’ll fund arms used to murder children in Palestine and Yemen while simultaneously cutting overseas aid. We take a stand.

When primary schools are faced with closure. Our schools belong to our communities, and if we don’t stand together to fight, then we stand to lose everything.

Fifty thousand of us took to the streets of London during our last national strike action, and we can do it again.

We need to tackle the recruitment and retention crisis head-on. We need a long-term strategy for pay restoration and funding. We need to restore professional autonomy and creativity.

This job might be exhausting, emotionally overwhelming and at times, all-consuming, but we do it because we love it. There is no job more important than educating children.

What I hope for during the next few days, is that we can present our vision for education to the world.

We are always told that the power lies somewhere at the top. Nothing is further from the truth. It lies in this hall, in our schools and our colleges. It lies with you. With us.

And so our union needs to help members to realise their power. We are the biggest education trade union in Europe, and it’s time we fulfilled our potential.

I want us to fight for an education system that is inclusive, creative, and joyful. Schools that are properly funded, with a curriculum that allows children the time and space to think, question, and create.

I want children with SEND to have the same opportunity to thrive as every other child. Staff working in education to be treated with the respect they deserve for doing this incredibly important job, and to be paid accordingly. I know you all want those things, too. We must stand together to fight for them.

We have so much work to do, we face so many challenges. Let’s work together to fight them, because if we stand together, we can defeat them all.