The meeting opened with various appointments to delegations;

2009 TUC delegation was agreed as Jeff Bevan and Joyce Walters,

2009 Women’s Conference as Kim Knappet and Joyce Walters, with Shelagh Hirst as delegate leader,

Head and safety leader would be Hank Roberts,

Niamh Sweeney would be ATL rep on the Institute for Learning Council,

Jeff Bevan would represent the union at the 2009 Black Workers conference.

Julia Neale was reelected to the TUC Executive as our second member.

 

Membership:

We have the greatest membership this year than at any time over the last five years and thanks are given to all those who work so hard to raise the profile of the union to achieve such recruitment. We need to keep recruiting however as our membership age profile is aging and more will retire over the next ten years than previously.

 

Martin Freedman then spoke about the Government’s paper headed “New opportunities – fair chances for the future” which ATL had responded to but had been ignored. He then spoke about social mobility and said the UK had a large degree of inequality between rich and poor, causing many social problems. Child Poverty was identified as a major cause of inequality and we must work towards eradicating this.

 

Pay:

Martin Johnson explained that we had submitted an in depth report to STPRB which had been favourably received and we had to reply to a number of questions raised. This would be done within the next few weeks, but the SoS was minded to implement the next phase of the pay award, so we shouldn’t rock the boat too much as the indicators were showing to be unfavourable to the unions for a greater increase, in fact showing a good reason for a smaller increase.

 

Conference:

Two further conference motions were debated and agreed to allow them to go forward.

One was about the partnership between ATL and ACM to form AMiE and the other was on assessment in secondary schools.

There was a further motion about the earlier start times of conference but this was held back as previous conference attendees had asked for an earlier start, but now some people had argued against due to transport, child care etc.. It was decided to see how this year’s conference worked and look at this subject again after taking account of experiences in Liverpool

 

Political Fund:

Executive then received information about the establishment of the Political fund; not to be linked to any political party but as a result of legislation saying we cannot meet, talk, socialise or even go to party conferences and lobby on members’ normal subscriptions. There must be a separate way to fund this. This will be brought to member’s notice as it will require a postal ballot of everyone before it can be implemented, and have to be repeated every ten years. It was thought that a better title would be the Non-Political fund. Executive approved the general idea and we are now moving towards the fine detail of how this would work in practise.

 

General Secretary:

Mary then gave a talk on how the union is managing in these cost cutting days and what we have achieved over the past five years. She also unveiled the union’s next Three Year plan to rationalise professional staff and the working of the three offices. She also said that all training events were full and oversubscribed and that there had been very positive feedback over our involvement with Edge Hill and our CPD offer.