Teachers (Industrial Action) (Hansard, 14 February 1985)

§ Mr. Dunn

No. A local authority's response to industrial action by its employees will depend on a variety of factors including the nature of the action and the employees' terms and conditions of service. The National Union of Teachers contends that school teachers are not contractually bound to stand in for absent colleagues. What a teacher is contractually bound to do as part of his job depends upon the express and implied terms of the contract of employment between him and his employer. It is for those parties to interpret the contract in the first instance: in the event of dispute it must be for the courts ultimately to decide. The question cannot be resolved, as the National Union of Teachers contend, by reference to a quotation from a letter written by my noble Friend, Baroness Young in 1979. In this letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Onslow) dated 1 November 1979 and dealing with the effects on a particular school of a dispute between Surrey county council and the local teachers' associations, my noble Friend concluded that this was not a matter in which the Secretary of State could intervene under the provisions of the Education Act 1944 and wrote thatthe teachers are not contractually bound to stand in for absent colleagues and they are not in breach of any statutory duty in refusing to do so. 223W However, my noble Friend wrote again on this matter on 2 April 1980. This letter concluded as follows: I said in my letter of 1 November that teachers were not contractually bound to stand in for absent teachers. I based this view on the fact that as I understood it there is no written requirement in the contract of teachers in Surrey nor I understand in most local authorities, which specifically requires them to provide cover. I understand that a copy of my letter has subsequently been used by teachers in the Midlands who are seeking to demonstrate that teachers generally are not contractually bound in this way. Surrey County Council have asked me to make it quite clear that in their view, in certain circumstances, failure on the part of a teacher to provide cover could be regarded as a breach of the teacher's contract despite the fact that there is no specific reference to cover in the written contract. The teacher's liability would apparantly depend on whether the instruction to provide the cover was itself reasonable, given the circumstances in the school at the time and the past practice in the particular school.

We offer this account for the record to avoid risk of misunderstanding based on the limited version apparently circulated by the National Union of Teachers.