Meeting ahead of All Saints and St George's School strike

About 100 people crammed into Friargate Meeting House in the city on Wednesday night (April 23) following plans by more than 100 teaching and support staff at All Saints RC School and St George's RC primary in Fishergate to walk out next week.

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Staff at both schools who are National Education Union (NEU) union members will go out on strike Wednesday next week (April 30) over what it claims are issues with financial management at the Middlesbrough academy chain to which the schools now belong - Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust (NPCAT).

There are further strikes planned on Tuesday and Wednesday June 24 and 25.

Michael Kearney speaking at the meeting (Image: Haydn Lewis)The move follows planned strike action at All Saints RC in October last year being called off.

The trust say a restructured board, new directors and a new chair, Karen Siedle, has been appointed and they have asked to meet with the union to discuss concerns.

Michael Kearney, NEU secretary for city of York, said that there was overwhelming support at the meeting for All Saints and St George's staff over their planned action.

Mr Kearney said: “We are here to talk to the community about the reasoning behind the dispute with Nicholas Postgate, to let them know the issues and talk about how we can work together to successfully change some of the issues we have for the benefit of schools in York.

“We have been trying to resolve these issues within the academy for about 10 months now and ultimately none of us want to take industrial action, but this is a last resort and we have made sure that it’s not going to impact on any exams.”

The NEU has submitted several demands to NPCAT which start with the formation of a York-based MAT.

They also include an end to GAG (general annual grant) pooling which allows schools within a multi-academy trust to group funding from each school into one central budget and a maximum top-slice of four per cent. A top slice is where the MAT takes a percentage of a schools' budgets to pay for central services.

In addition they want to see the jurisdiction of the school budget to be returned to head teachers and CEO pay to be re-benchmarked.