More than a thousand teachers and parents gathered on the steps.
The crowd began to gather shortly after half past three on Wednesday, as the school day ended across the city. By half past four the steps of City Hall and much of the square below were full of teachers, teaching assistants, parents and children, many of them carrying home-made placards. Police estimated the crowd at around 1,200; organisers put it closer to 2,000. It was the largest protest outside City Hall since the bus fare demonstrations three years ago.
The rally was called by the teachers’ union and a parents’ group, Fair Start Calder, in protest at rising class sizes in the city’s state primary and secondary schools. According to figures released by the council in September, the average primary class in Calder now has 30.4 pupils, up from 27.9 five years ago, and more than one in six primary pupils is taught in a class of 33 or more. Several secondary schools in the east of the city have merged GCSE sets in maths and science because they cannot recruit enough specialist teachers.
Voices from the steps
Speakers stood on an upturned crate at the top of the steps and used a borrowed sound system. A Year 6 teacher from a school in the old town described teaching 34 children in a room designed for 28, with desks pushed so close that pupils could not reach the door in a fire drill without others standing up first. A teaching assistant from Harrow said she now covered three classes in a morning and could no longer give individual reading support to children who needed it.
“We are not here for ourselves,” said Maeve Lindqvist, the union’s regional secretary, to loud applause. “We are here because a child in a class of thirty-four gets half the attention of a child in a class of twenty-five, and our children only get one go at school. Every year this is not fixed, another cohort pays the price.”
Lindqvist called on the council to use reserves to fund an extra 120 teaching posts over the next two years, and on the Assembly to change the funding formula, which campaigners say favours rural districts over the city. Parents spoke too. Owen Batty, whose two children attend a primary school near the canal, said his daughter’s class had had four different supply teachers since September. “She asked me last week whether her teacher would be there tomorrow,” he said. “A seven-year-old should not need to ask that.”
The council’s response
The council’s cabinet member for education, Rhiannon Fairclough, came out to speak to protesters near the end of the rally and was heckled as she began. She said she agreed that class sizes were too high but argued that the council’s hands were tied by its budget, most of which is set by the Assembly. She pointed to a recruitment bonus for maths and science teachers introduced this year, and said the council was building two new primary schools on the edge of the city to relieve pressure on crowded schools in the centre.
“I understand the anger, and I share a lot of it,” Fairclough said. “But I cannot conjure money that we do not have. What I can do is make the case to the Assembly, and I will be doing that, loudly, next month.” She said using reserves for permanent posts would be “irresponsible”, because the money would run out within two years.
The union said that was not good enough, and has given the council until the end of January to come forward with a plan. It has not ruled out industrial action, though officials said a strike ballot was “a last resort”. Any such ballot would need the support of members across the city’s 140 schools.
Calm, crowded, and cold
The rally passed off peacefully. A small number of children performed a song they had written, and a stall from Fair Start Calder handed out leaflets and hot chocolate as the temperature dropped. Traffic on Guildhall Street was briefly held up while marshals moved people back onto the pavement. Police said there were no arrests.
By six o’clock the square had emptied, leaving a few placards propped against the railings. One, written in green crayon and decorated with stars, read: “My class is too big for my teacher to hear me.” A council cleaner paused, read it and set it carefully against the door rather than putting it in his bin.
