Running Time: 10 mins 11 secs
**UPDATE: After the strength of the strike, GDST finally agreed to go to ACAS and reached an agreement with the NEU ***
Teachers at the Girls Day School Trust (GDST – a group of 23 independent schools) are very reluctantly continuing their strike to stay in the Teachers Pension Scheme (TPS) after management inexplicably refused to go to ACAS with the NEU – despite 78% of teachers voting to call off their strike if they did go to arbitration, in a union meeting of nearly 1,000 members.
This is the latest disgraceful act by GDST during a dispute in which they have threatened to fire and rehire teachers if they don’t do what they say, have refused to negotiate properly, have only started talking at all when the teachers were finally forced to take strike action, and have blatantly lied to parents and the media by saying it’s the NEU who are refusing to negotiate, not them. All these teachers want to do is sort this out and get back in the classroom where they belong – but the GDST are making that impossible.
