“I’m certainly not coming in to man the barricades for strike action,” Geoff Barton told me almost exactly seven years ago when I visited his school in Bury St Edmunds.
Ironically, in his final year as general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, he almost did exactly that.
Had it not been halted for a 6.5 per cent pay deal, the school leaders’ union’s historic ballot would almost certainly have passed tough thresholds for industrial action.
That pay dispute, conducted with what he says was an “extraordinary sense of discipline” by the four unions, is a proud achievement for Barton. It is also something that “probably strengthened the profession. It’s certainly strengthened ASCL”.
