Kevin Courtney's talk at the conference

This is text I prepared for my speech – but I varied from it.

NUT and Palestine

NUT is proud of its international work. We are working to support the growth of strength of teacher trades unionism in Sierra Leone. We are working to against our own Government efforts to privatise education in the global south – through DFID support to companies engaged in that – like Pearson. We are engaged in work with other unions in the global north in a similar effort to resist the spread of what we call the Global Education Reform Movement – which sees a hug increase in testing and spread of market methods which we say are failing.

And we are also engaged in a variety of streams of work around Palestine, just as previously this union and its members engaged in a variety of streams of work around apartheid South Africa.

NUT is doing work around

• a boycott of goods from illegal settlements
• a series of solidarity visits by teachers from here to teachers there
• direct support for the GUPT
• and work on educational materials with Edu Kid.

These all around Palestine – but different strands of work  with different purposes that I will come back to – particularly about the work we are encouraging teachers to do in schools.

It isn’t always easy doing work around Palestine – and much of that for the reason the previous (or next) speaker has spoken about. There is a real danger of self-censorship.

But it wasn’t always easy engaging in work around South Africa.

At Mandela’s death David Cameron said Mandela was "a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death – a true global hero". Which would make you think we were all on the same side and it was easy to do work on those issues?

But Margaret Thatcher when Prime Minister described the African National Congress, which Mandela was the leader of as "a typical terrorist organisation" and she fiercely opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime.

Sir Larry Lamb, a personal friend of Thatcher and then Daily Express editor, declared in 1985 that Mandela's unconditional release would be "a crass error".

Thatcherite MP, Teddy Taylor, declared that Mandela "should be shot".

One of Thatcher’s biggest fans in the press, the News of the World's "Voice of Reason", Woodrow Wyatt, accused Mandela and the ANC of trying to establish "a communist-style black dictatorship".

And during Thatcher's time in office, members of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) went as far as wearing stickers declaring: "Hang Nelson Mandela".

So it wasn’t ever consensual and it wasn’t always easy doing work on that issue. But it mattered to teachers – because black kids and other kids in our schools could see what was happening on their TV screens and it mattered that you could talk about it and it mattered that they could see that not everyone agreed with Thatcher and Lamb and Woodrow Wilson.

And it matters now that Palestine is an issue that can and should be spoken about.

Like I said there is a real danger of self-censorship.

And I do think the fantastic work that the Camden Abu Dis friendship group does is a really important way of overcoming the fear of talking about Palestine.

We hope that the work we are doing with Edu Kid can be similarly helpful.

Edu Kid is a charity – runs projects on Cambodia, Uganda and now Palestine. These projects are about children living in conflict zones or in zones that have recently been conflict zones. The projects are about getting children in one country to see the world a little through the eyes of children in another country.

We have been working with Edu Kid on a series of short films and teaching packs about the lives of Palestinian children living in the west Bank and living in Israel.

They aren’t about the Israel Palestine conflict – but about the lives of the Palestinian children.

They are about getting to school, about children’s ambitions about dabka dancing.

On one level they are just a way of saying these Palestinian kids exist.

The teaching materials are graded for age - and they encourage debate and discussion.

Hundreds of teachers have downloaded the materials – and I would encourage you to look at them too.

We have taken one of the films down “My name is Saleh” and I’d like to say something about that. The film is about a little boy Saleh – who lives in Hebron and whose daily journey to school is very difficult because of the illegal settlement there.

We launched this film at Easter – but during the middle of August – when there was not much other news there were suddenly complaints. They were various - that the film referred to Israelis as Jews, or that in the Arabic it referred to them as Jews, that the materials were unbalanced, that Saleh himself was probably the child of terrorists because someone had a picture of him holding an assault weapon. There were complaints to the DFE about the NUT and complaints to the Charity commission about EduKid. Complaints were made to Ofsted about a particular school that might have used the materials.

Tory MP Eric Pickles said that the NUT had really stepped over the line by referring to Israelis as Jews.

And in truth if we had done that would have been a big problem. There are very many Jewish members of the NUT who do not support the illegal settlements or the illegal wall and who wouldn’t not support many of the actions of the Israeli Government.

We tactically decided to take the materials down whilst we looked at the complaints. We may well have taken different decisions if we had been not in the middle of the summer holidays without easy access to one another.

But we made clear we weren’t backing away from the project overall – or from work on the issue.

And know we have looked at all the issues.  There is no reference in the English to jews. There is no reference in the Arabic to jews. The assault weapon is a plastic toy. The materials are balanced.

The DFE has made clear that it isn’t saying the materials are unbalanced. Ofsted has said the same. Just to be clear they aren’t saying they are balanced either – they say balance can be over a series of lessons and the duty to provide balance lies with the school.

We’ve challenged people who say they are unbalanced to point to balanced materials – and we’ve had no answer.

And we’ve been building support for the materials – so that we can considers that in our consideration of if, when and how we put them back up.

It was only the one film we took down the others are still there and still being used. I would encourage you to look at them.