Teachers at a Penzance school are due to walk out on strike this Thursday over workload issues

Teachers who are members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) at Heamoor Primary School in Penzance will strike this on January 31.

All the classroom teaching staff at the school are members of the NUT and are following joint industrial action agreed with another teachers’ union.

An NUT spoksman said: "This action aims to ensure that the teachers’ contractual conditions of service are adhered to and that in operating performance management, reporting to parents and other duties which they perform as part of their jobs they are not subject to excessive workload.

"One aim of this action is to free teachers from bureaucratic tasks so they can concentrate on teaching and it is intended to have only a positive impact on students.

NUT South West regional secretary Andy Woolley claimned that the "headteacher and governors at Heamoor are not prepared to limit the workload of their teachers in the way that other schools have done".

Adding: "The school is a good school and there is no question about the ability of the teaching staff but they are being subjected to more stringent and onerous conditions of work than most other teachers.

“We have been negotiating with the school for several months now to try and resolve this issue without recourse to an escalation of the action but we believe that assurances we were given at a meeting with governors earlier in January have not been followed through and we are at an impasse as a result”.

“Heamoor Primary is the only school in the whole of the South West Region, stretching as far as Gloucestershire, Swindon and Bournemouth, where this sort of strike action has proved necessary”.

He said that efforts to come to an agreement have come to "no avail", with a suggestion that ACAS (the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service) becoming involved to use their expertise in dispute resolution has "not been taken up by the Local Authority who are advising the school".

Adding: “It is with great reluctance and after many attempts to reach a solution that members now feel that they have no alternative but to take strike action. We hope that this will help to move discussions forward so we can reach a resolution satisfactory to all concerned but, if no agreement is forthcoming, we will if necessary take further strike action in the following two weeks leading up to half term”.

Are you one of the teachers, or a parent who will be affected, get in touch with jonathan.millar@packetseries.co.uk.