The Marxist teaching union leader planning to use strikes to ‘reorganise Britain'

Telegraph

15-04-2025

'The British education system is fundamentally and institutionally racist,' announces the speaker, on stage at the Socialist Workers Party's Marxism 2019 conference in east London. The national curriculum has been whitewashed by powerful white men, he explains, and simply teaches a 'little-Englander, white-saviour narrative'.
It's certainly a radical position to take, though perhaps one not entirely surprising given the company to whom it is directed. Yet what indeed might shock is the identity to whom it belongs – Daniel Kebede, now chief of Britain's biggest education union and in charge of representing the views of nearly half a million teachers and school leaders.
As general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), he is currently readying his troops for strike action in the coming months after branding Labour's offer of a 2.8 per cent pay bump for public sector workers 'insulting'. This week, delegates at the NEU's annual conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, are due to vote on whether union districts and branches should 'immediately prepare' for a formal industrial action ballot. Kebede's members, it is claimed, are burnt out, working up to 60-hour weeks as they deal with ever increasing class sizes and shrinking budgets.
Their reward? Salaries that in real terms are worth a fifth of what they were over a decade ago. Government ministers will have watched with concern that the results of an indicative ballot, announced on Friday, showed 93.7 per cent of voting members rejecting the pay offer and 83.4 per cent would be willing to strike.
Yet for Kebede, 38, an avowed Marxist and hardened protester, joining the picket line is about more than just compensation. Instead, it would appear to serve a greater purpose – to 'take back control of an education system from a brutally racist state'.
'It's much more [than] about the issue of pay,' he told another Socialist Workers Party conference in 2022, while president of the NEU and standing for election as general secretary. 'It's about reorganising society where we are free from racism, and free from oppression.'
A grand ambition indeed, though colleagues close to Kebede suggest that this is unlikely to be among the demands at any negotiation table currently. With schools struggling to recruit and retain teachers, more money remains the number one priority. To some extent, Kebede is limited by his membership, a broader church than their leader's narrow politics suggest who must agree to any strikes first. But with just over 47 per cent of members taking part in the indicative poll, parents, who may remember the chaos caused by the last school strikes in 2023, will be concerned about any repeat. More than 100,000 teachers across 23,000 schools took part, with one in 10 schools closed and around 40 per cent of pupils missing classes.
What Kebede's words do provide, however, is a snapshot of the militant zeal fuelling the man that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is now facing. The outspoken primary school teacher, a Corbyn loyalist, has spent much of the past decade pounding the streets on countless anti-fascism and racism marches. The two issues, he says, run through him 'like a stick of rock' and remain central to his trade union work. So where did it all start?
Kebede was born in 1987 to a white British mother and a father who came to the UK seeking sanctuary from the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, which had sought to turn the east African country into a socialist state after overthrowing Emperor Haile Selassie. Ever since he was a child, he has told how the issue of racism never strayed far, recalling how Stephen Lawrence's murder had a profound effect on him aged six.
While his early years were spent in west London, his family later moved to a 'predominantly white area' in Northampton. It was here that he experienced for the first time the racism that would go on to define his activism. At school, where he acted the 'class clown' to fit in, he told how in a Year 9 geography lesson the teacher scolded him for being disruptive, telling him: 'You're not in the jungle now.' 'I can remember being physically shocked by that,' he told the Talking Race podcast in 2020. It led him to join his first protest march, aged 17, against the National Front.
After studying law at the University of Wales, Kebede chose to pursue a career in teaching after volunteering to help a child with special needs at a primary school in his early 20s. 'I fell in love with it,' he says, and moved to Newcastle to begin his teacher training. But it was witnessing the 'sorry' conditions faced by pupils at a school in Wallsend, North Tyneside, and delving into the works of Karl Marx, that then turned him into a true socialist. Further motivated by the police shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011, and the rise of the far-Right in the North East, he soon took his anger onto the streets as a coordinator for Unite Against Fascism.
His move into the teaching unions came during one far-Right counter-protest when he spotted a banner for the NUT – precursor to the NEU – and decided to join as a rep in 2013. Since then, his rise through the ranks has been swift. Winning the union's prestigious Blair Peach award for his anti-racism campaigning in 2017, he joined the national executive two years later and became NEU president in 2021.
Kebede had established firm links to the Left of the Labour Party. For several years he was in a relationship with Laura Pidcock, the Corbynite MP for North West Durham. In 2017, the couple – who have a six-year-old son – bought a £230,000 three-bedroom home together in County Durham. The move courted controversy as it came just months after Pidcock had said raising a deposit for her first home was 'out of reach' – even on her then £76,000 salary – and claimed she would 'love a council house' but 'there aren't enough'.
Kebede's leadership bid in 2023 was also backed by his friends in the NEU Left, a powerful faction within the union pushing for more work to address social injustice within education. Kebede defeated his more moderate rival Niamh Sweeney by three to one to become general secretary, taking over at the start of the last school year.
In the near 18 months since, his robust stance on underfunding in schools, teacher workload and calls to reform Ofsted have proved popular. Yet questions have continued to be raised amongst union members whether his political sentiments have distracted from the NEU's ultimate aims. The union after all is not supposed to be affiliated with any political party. For all his dedication to teaching reform, Kebede has continued to wade into various political debates, no matter their relevance to education.
Most recently, his strident views on Palestine have been met with unease from some NEU members. A clip from 2021 shows him speaking at an anti-Israel rally in Newcastle calling to 'oppose apartheid… and fight for Palestinian liberation'. In the background are chants of 'Khaybar, oh Jews', a phrase historically associated with inciting violence against Jewish communities. After the footage emerged, Conservative Friends of Education called for an investigation and warned of the impact it could have on Jewish teachers and students within the union.
That same year, Kebede also had to apologise after posting an anti-Semitic trope on Facebook claiming those close to the downfall of Corbyn were being paid '30 pieces of silver' for book deals – the price for which Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ in the Bible. Deleting the post, he said he did not realise the phrase had been used by the Nazis to suggest that the Jews were traitors and responsible for Christ's death.
Last year, Kebede used the NEU's annual conference in Bournemouth to reaffirm his anti-Israel stance, condemning its 'relentless' bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas atrocities of October 7. A few months later, he was taken to task on Teachers Talk Radio as to whether this stance was in danger of losing members. 'Let me be really clear: I do not care what your opinion is on the situation in Gaza or Israel,' he replied, stating that all were welcome regardless of their view. 'That is the point of being in a union, that there is a diversity of opinion.'
One key area Kebede is particularly keen to influence is the national curriculum. He has welcomed the Government's review led by education expert Prof Becky Francis, a Left-winger whose life mission is to even the playing field for disadvantaged children. For Kebede, the aim should be 'decolonising education and embedding anti-racism throughout the curriculum', he told the Talking Race podcast in 2020. Children are taught a 'nationalistic, simplistic' version of history that is 'alienating' for pupils. 'I think we should be teaching children about the brutality of the British past,' he said, citing the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and the Amritsar massacre in India.
But for now, the focus remains on improving the proposed pay deal. Last academic year, teachers received a fully funded 5.5 per cent pay rise, but the amount put forward this year is less than half – an unfunded increase of 2.8 per cent. 'It's an issue that every teaching union leader would fight for, no one could agree to more cuts,' says Kevin Courtney, who, with Mary Bousted, was Kebede's joint predecessor as general secretary of the NEU.
Having known Kebede since they first marched together on the streets of Newcastle a decade ago, Courtney suggests Kebede has toned down his language since becoming leader, becoming more 'thoughtful'. He continues: 'I think his fundamental drives are the same, but when you're speaking on behalf of an organisation of half a million people, you have to use words they would be happy to hear.'
Kebede agrees. Speaking to this newspaper earlier this year, he said: 'I certainly do feel a great sense of responsibility in my role. I no longer can just speak as an individual, anything that comes out of my mouth is a representation of the union, and that's something I take really seriously.' He stands by his comments that teachers need to 'take back control'. Education is now broadly led by bureaucrats in Whitehall, he says, with 'teacher autonomy greatly removed, and their professional control eroded'.
Any industrial action is 'by no means an empty threat', but 'the reality is we absolutely want to avoid it'. 'I prefer to deal with these things through dialogue,' he adds. The earliest time frame would be autumn, he says, 'so it gives loads of opportunity for me to talk with the Secretary of State to try and avoid this action.' So what should Bridget Phillipson expect around the negotiating table? Kebede himself said shortly after the election that the pair enjoyed 'a very good relationship' and he has backed the Government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
'He gets on very well with people, it's a real gift,' says Courtney, though he adds that Kebede's steely determination should not be underestimated.
One former Tory minister, who has dealt closely with Kebede, agrees. 'The most interesting thing about Daniel is how nice he is,' the former minister says before adding: 'But he's proper Left-wing.
'While he can be disarming, one should never be disarmed.'