After sitting on its own survey for 14 months, NASUWT highlights far right incidents and ignores Israel-related hate. Jews are, as ever, fodder for the hard left
July 23, 2025 11:35
There is something rather bittersweet in learning that earlier this month the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) wrote to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, demanding that she “acts on antisemitism” in schools.
Not so much bittersweet, really, as just bitter. Because when it comes to promoting antisemitism, the teaching profession stands responsible for some of the most appalling examples and behaviour. And when it comes to the NASUWT, there is something decidedly odd going on with its sudden apparent concern over antisemitism in schools.
On Monday, the Daily Mail reported a survey of over 300,000 members of the NASUWT. It found that 51 per cent of Jewish teachers have experienced some form of antisemitism in the past two years. 78 per cent of those teachers experienced abuse personally, 37 per cent witnessed it happening to someone else, and 38 per cent were told about it happening by someone else. 44 per cent said they had witnessed swastika graffiti at their school, while 39 per cent have been subjected to Nazi-related comments. 52 per cent of respondents felt that when they reported issues around antisemitism, appropriate action was not taken to deal with the problem.
For anyone who has been following the rise in antisemitism, none of these findings are surprising, shocking as they nonetheless remain. One Jewish teacher said pupils have chanted “Free Palestine” at them “on multiple occasions”, while another reported a shout of “F*** the Jews”. This is all of a piece with news reports that the JC has carried about Jew hate in schools.
But the union’s survey was actually conducted last May. It has taken well over a year for the NASUWT to decide to release its findings. So much for its urgent concern over antisemitism. As is suggested in this JC news story, it seems the survey is in reality being used as part of a campaign to boost the profile of NASUWT’s Acting General Secretary, Matt Wrack, to help ensure he wins election to the post and loses the “acting” label.
So there is a rich irony in the NASUWT’s call to Bridget Phillipson to show “visible leadership” and act on the survey’s results, given it sat on them for over a year. And given that it is led by Matt Wrack, the former head of the Fire Brigades Union (until he lost his attempt to win a fifth term as its leader) and an ally of Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader. This is the same Matt Wrack who, speaking at the FBU’s conference in 2016, attacked “the so-called furore about so-called antisemitism in the Labour Party”, which was “in reality about an attack on the Left and it is about an attempt to undermine Jeremy Corbyn”. By their works shall ye be judged.
(Hilariously – if anything to do with antisemitism can be described thus - Wrack has defended himself from accusations that he downplayed antisemitism with the immortal line, “I’m not a Zionist but I believe in a two-state solution.” Who is going to tell him?)
But there is a more serious issue with the NASUWT’s attempts to portray itself as a valiant fighter in the battle against Jew hate. The survey is a sham. Commenting on its results, Wrack said that “dangerous rhetoric from far-Right movements” on social media is helping to “fuel a rise in antisemitic and racist abuse in schools”. Wrack, you see, is a former supporter of the Militant Tendency, and as such not only sees the world through the prism of the 1970s and 80s, but is oblivious – I am putting this charitably – to the reality of where the rise in antisemitism comes from. Namely, of course, the “Red-Green alliance” of the left and Islamism.
The NASUWT’s survey has some basic utility, since it draws attention to an issue that needs attention. But as the JC reveals, it deliberately ignores the fundamental issue of left-wing antisemitism and Israel-focused antisemitism. And thus it avoids the most important aspect of antisemitism in schools – how it has affected the teaching profession. How, in other words, left-wing, “progressive” teachers are a large – I would say the largest - part of the problem.
If the NASUWT was going to examine antisemitism in schools with intellectual honesty rather than as part of a political fight by Wrack for his own career, it would direct itself to its fellow teaching union, the National Education Union, which has over half a million members and is the largest and most powerful education union in Europe. Nicole Lampert has done sterling work pointing out how, for example, the NEU had 23 official speakers at the 41 main PSC protests between October 2023 and November 2024 – nearly twice as many as the next union, the RMT. And the NEU’s leader, Daniel Kebede, has said, “It’s about time we globalise the intifada.”
The story of the NASUWT’s survey is revealing, because it shows that even when it appears that one of the teaching unions is taking Jew hate seriously, in reality it is simply using it for its own political purposes. Jews are, as ever, fodder for the hard left.
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