How Marxist activists will flood schools with radical propaganda, even targeting dinner ladies

A rallying cry was heard at the Brighton Center last month. It belonged to Daniel Kebede, general secretary of Britain’s largest teaching union.

‘How will we defend ourselves against the crime of organizing low-wage women workers?’ he shouted. ‘Guilty!’ he shouted to hundreds of activists.

‘Our only crime is wanting to organize,’ he continued. ‘We should be proud to be guilty of this, because the arc of moral justice is on our side.’

Thus, in the hands of the Left National Education Union (NEU), a process began that would be one of the most chaotic periods in recent history in terms of schools.

More than 500,000 members are preparing for a nationwide walkout over pay and conditions after Christmas, disrupting exam classes and leaving parents scrambling to find childcare.

These will include newly hired teaching assistants, librarians and dinner ladies (the ‘low-paid female workers’ that Mr Kebede referred to at his annual conference), but more on that later.

Insiders say concerns about staff pay are valid, but Mr Kebede is using the strike vote, planned for this autumn, as a tool for his own political ends.

‘Daniel has a Marxist agenda,’ says former NEU representative Peter Block. ‘He will be there to cause trouble at every opportunity. I don’t think he cares about the welfare of teachers. ‘This is about maximum disruption to cause chaos to undermine the system.’

This month, exasperated students and parents at Connaught Girls’ School in Leytonstone, east London, staged a counter-protest after a strike lasted 45 days in just four years.

Another former representative of the union, Raphael Kessler, agrees: ‘Daniel is a divider. In fact, most of these are not related to education.

‘He’s taking things in a more militant direction than I’m comfortable with.’

It is enough to look at the recent local attacks carried out by NEU to see the extent of the planned damage.

This month, exasperated students and parents at Connaught Girls’ School in Leytonstone, east London, staged a counter-protest after a strike lasted 45 days in just four years.

Young girls confronted their teachers on the picket line, accusing them of ‘not being understanding or considerate’ of disrupting their GCSE mock exams.

In response, some teachers grinned, clapped their hands and even turned their backs as the girls shouted: ‘Teach or resign!’

A NEU member says: ‘Socialist Workers Party [SWP] It has infiltrated the union and is therefore turning into a militant far left. After trying everything else, being stunning should be the last chance salon. But Connaught is in a region where representatives are obsessed with strike votes.

‘They will suddenly hold a strike vote; ‘This is ridiculous.’

Meanwhile, the president of an academy foundation in another region, who wished to remain anonymous, said that an NEU official he did not know suddenly threatened him with a strike vote by letter.

‘It turned out he was a far away organizer and didn’t know anything about the school,’ he recalls.

Protesters outside the Holborn offices of Tradewind UK in London on April 30, 2026, to demonstrate against Tradewind UK, a recruitment agency providing labor during the educators’ strike at Connaught Girls’ School

‘Threats of a vote were being made without having had any discussions with union representatives or even seeing a list of issues; These all turned out to be very minor problems. It was clearly a predetermined tactic.’

Presidents’ union ASCL also reported an increase in ‘personal and vindictive targeting’ of its members.

None of this is news to Mr Block, from north-west London. ‘Them [the NEU] “They’re very good at whipping up emotions and finding something to hold on to,” he says.

‘They see it as a political obligation to stir up trouble. And above all, they have their own political agenda.

‘If they were concerned about welfare [of pupils]They would campaign much more about failing schools and schools where students are rioting and educational standards are falling.

‘But they no longer concern themselves with the daily affairs of the chalk-face.

‘There are teachers who generally do not want to go on strike, but the screams of ‘breaking the strike’ can scare you a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to swim against the current.’

He believes the union is likely to be ’emboldened’ to call more strikes now that Labor has relaxed voting rules.

‘It seems like such a crazy thing to do,’ he adds. ‘There will be even more chaos.’

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday revealed the tactics used by NEU activists to ensure this chaos escalated into a nationwide strike.

One of the activists on the Connaught picket line was Jess Edwards, an influential London regional representative, who this month unveiled a plan to radicalise members ahead of the vote.

“In order for us to win this vote we need to put the whole union on a war footing this term,” he said in an article co-written for the SWP’s official newspaper, Socialist Worker.

Protesters outside Tradewind UK’s Holborn offices on 30 April 2026

‘This means filling schools with supplies, saying get ready to fight. . . It is time to chart a course for strikes and fight for our class.’

The union is recruiting ‘industrial organisers’ and is advertising a job for a £58,000-a-year (pro rata) role saying the right candidate would help ‘build power’ and encourage ‘targeted industrial campaigns’. Nowhere does it say that teaching experience is required.

In addition, the Near East University wants to maximize the suffering during strikes by hiring non-teachers such as classroom assistants, librarians and dinner ladies.

Earlier this year the NEU withdrew from an agreement with the Trades Union Congress not to actively recruit these support staff, traditionally affiliated with other unions, allowing its membership to grow significantly.

Primary school teachers, who are usually less militant, are also likely to be targeted by activists this summer.

The union also seems to be trying to train newly qualified teachers for Generation Z with the New Professionals and Young Workers conference to be held next month.

And NEU is reviving its ‘School Cuts’ campaign, with plans to distribute banners and leaflets on school gates to tell ‘every parent and educator’ about NEU’s funding dispute.

Combined with the growing membership of Near East University support workers, this could mean the worst disruption for schools in recent memory.

The union says the strikes could be stopped if the Government improves its offer of a 6.5 per cent wage increase over three years, which it says is unlikely to keep pace with inflation.

It’s also ‘not fully funded’, meaning schools will have to take money from other parts of their budgets to pay for it, possibly leading to redundancies.

Former teacher John Blake, who became the union’s class representative a decade ago, said that although it was understandable for teachers to feel ‘genuine anger and frustration’, striking was often ‘counterproductive’.

‘Until NEU presents a coherent proposal that adequately takes into account other needs and pressures on the government, I don’t think strike action will get them anywhere,’ he adds.

‘I think this is a new group of people who like to cause trouble and it’s going to be the frontline teachers, students and their families who are going to pay the price.’

In the face of this impasse, it seems likely that ugly scenes outside Connaught Girls’ School will become a disturbingly regular occurrence across the country in the coming months.

Militant ringleader says Britain is racist…and teachers must work from home

Daniel Kebede, leader of the militant National Education Union, is an avowed Marxist who claims the education system is ‘institutionally racist’.

He was born to a white British mother and father who immigrated to the UK after fleeing the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia.

The 39-year-old spent his early years in West London and recalled how the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 had a profound impact on him.

His family later moved to a ‘majority white area’ in Northampton; Here Mr. Kebede first experienced the racism that would fuel his activism.

He said that when he was in grade 9, a geography teacher scolded him for disturbing him and told him: ‘You’re not in the forest right now.’

“I remember being physically shocked by it,” he told the Talking Race podcast in 2020. This led him to participate in his first protest march against the National Front at the age of 17.

NEU Secretary General Kebede addressed protesters in London on 30 April 2026

Mr Kebede studied law at the University of Wales before working at a primary school in North Tyneside. In 2013, he joined the National Union of Teachers, the forerunner of the NEU, and rose through the ranks.

She won the union’s Blair Peach award for her anti-racism campaigning in 2017 and joined the national executive two years later, becoming NEU president in 2021. He was elected as general secretary in 2023.

He has close ties to the left of the Labor Party. He was in a relationship with Laura Pidcock, the Corbynite MP for North West Durham, for several years. They have a six-year-old son.

In 2019, he told the Socialist Labor Party’s Marxism conference that the British education system was ‘fundamentally and institutionally racist’.

He said the national curriculum had been whitewashed by powerful white men and taught a ‘little England, white savior narrative’.

In 2022, Mr Kebede said the strikes were about ‘taking back control of the education system from a brutally racist state’. Last year he also said full-time teachers should be able to work from home one day a week.

However, it appears that he has been trying to soften his radical language since 2023.