THE Greens have won teachers’ support from Labour because the country “needs change,” leader Daniel Kebede said yesterday as he lambasted a government that was failing education. 

In his closing speech to the National Education Union’s (NEU) annual conference, Mr Kebede said polling showed the Greens were now the favourite party among its members because they were “offering something too rare in politics: a belief that things can be done differently, a belief that the economy exists to serve people rather than discipline them.”

About 60 per cent of NEU members backed Labour in the general election in 2024.

But the NEU this week became the first union to welcome Green leader Zack Polanski to speak at its conference in Brighton this year, where he received a standing ovation for his promises to tackle the “marketisation” of education. 

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson was not invited amid huge anger over her department’s decision not to fund teacher pay rises for the next three years.

Mr Kebede said: “Clinging to a failed economic orthodoxy will not deliver the change people voted for — or the change they desperately need. 

“It will deliver the familiar disappointments instead: pay rises that fall short of dignity, public services stretched to breaking point, and opportunities rationed rather than shared, and people know this… which is why so many who placed their hope in Labour now feel that hope slipping away.”

The same polling found 65 per cent of his membership who voted Labour in 2024 say less than two years later that they wouldn’t do so again.

Delegates cheered as he said the NEU doesn’t affiliate to any political party “because it allows us to speak the truth — even when it is uncomfortable.

“And it is for that reason that we welcomed the contribution this week from Green Party leader Zack Polanski,” he said, despite making it clear they did not “agree on everything.”

“It should surprise no one that the Green Party now commands the greatest support among NEU members. 

“People are not volatile — they are responding to what they see, and to what they do not.”

Mr Kebede urged Labour “to understand where it has gone wrong.”

Schools are “running on empty”, the general secretary said, “not by accident, but by political choice.”

He warned the government’s landmark reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) system would not deliver an inclusive system for children “on exhausted workers and underfunded schools.”

The reforms push responsibility downwards on to schools, support staff and families, he said, and ask “working people to carry a promise that was never properly funded.”

The classroom “has become the front line of every unresolved crisis in our society,” Mr Kebede said.

“Hunger walks in with the children. Anxiety takes a seat at the back of the room. Unmet special educational needs raise their hands every morning and are told to wait and wait again.”

NEU members are currently voting in an indicative strike ballot set to end later in April over teacher pay, workload and school funding.

The union will deliver national strike action to save school funding if needed, Mr Kebede said.

The general secretary also said schools and teachers are being left to repair the damage of online worlds “that reward cruelty, speed and spectacle.”

Mr Kebede criticised the “sleazy degenerates” who own social media platforms designed to “keep children hooked” and who “amplify misogyny because it drives engagement, and who treat humiliation as a business model.”

Reform UK “offer no solutions to the crisis in living standards”, and “would be a disaster for education,” he added.

Under the government’s reforms, schools across England will offer inclusion spaces for Send students. 

They will be backed by £3.8 billion for over three year and  include a statutory duty for schools to draw up a digital individual support plan for every child with Send. 

Those currently with an education, health and care plan (EHCP) will have it reviewed when they reach the end of primary or secondary school.

EHCPs are legal documents setting out support a child with Send is entitled to.

A Labour party spokesperson said: “This Labour government is committed to delivering for our schools, supporting families and ensuring the background of a child doesn’t determine how they get on in life.

“This is the change Labour promised and the change Labour is delivering. No other party is willing and able to do that.”