When Daniel Kebede takes to the Harrogate stage this week to address the National Education Union’s annual conference, he will do so as one of the most powerful figures in British education.
The NEU general secretary has been a regular visitor to the Department for Education, meeting Bridget Phillipson a week after she took up office there, and telling a podcast a few months later the pair had “a very good relationship”. The department announced a 5.5 per cent pay rise for teachers and leaders on July 30.
Kebede, 35, was elected in November 2023 to a role representing half a million British teachers and controlling a £100 million war chest.
His supporters and detractors agree on one thing: he is more hardline than Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted, his joint predecessors. The word they keep coming back to is “militant”.
Whether it’s calling for industrial action, describing British education as “fundamentally and institutionally racist”, or comparing private schools to “apartheid”, Kebede has been unafraid of the media spotlight. Since becoming general secretary he has used his platform to condemn Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, and Israel, over the war in Gaza.
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Kebede grew up in a single-parent household in London and studied law at the University of Wales in Cardiff before becoming a primary school teacher. He has described the boxer Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War in the 1960s as one of his biggest political inspirations. “Kevin and Mary were older and wiser,” said one education source. “They came across like your grandparents. Daniel is more militant.” An NEU spokesman insisted that rather being about militancy it was “ensuring we get the best possible outcomes for teachers, leaders, support staff and our children and young people”.
One of Kebede’s key campaigning issues is against academy schools, which make up half of England’s state-funded institutions. The NEU’s conference will debate bringing such schools — which have greater freedom over curriculum, teachers’ pay and spending — back under local authority control.
Earlier this year, the union encouraged industrial action at the Harris Federation, a successful academy chain that runs 18 schools in south London. Before the confrontation with NEU, it had a reputation for turning around some of the toughest schools in Britain.
During the battle, the NEU alleged Harris was mistreating teachers from the Caribbean. In the end, proposed walkouts over pay and conditions did not happen but after the strike action was called off at the end of February, Kebede told The Guardian: “Addressing the exploitation of overseas-trained teachers by Harris Federation is a victory. This was Harris Federation’s Windrush. This is a record they should be ashamed of, and it is right that it is finally being addressed.”
“It was a clever, concerted attack,” said a Harris source. “They tried to enlist parents into an NEU WhatsApp group when there was already a complaints mechanism in place.” Each school in the federation has a clear complaints procedure available on their website. The source said the NEU’s strategy was to cause “unrest” among staff and parents. A union spokesman said the WhatsApp group was clearly identified as being NEU.
“They are a hard-left political campaigning union that has objectives that go way beyond the interests of kids,” said the source, and the union made demands that were impossible for the federation to meet. “Not all of their members are like this but there is a small core of radicals.”
Kebede has been supportive of Phillipson’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is going through parliament and which critics say seeks to dismantle the academies system. In December, he told Schools Week it was a “significant, decisive bill with an exciting set of announcements … It’s got ambition but also action.”
His executive report, released on the eve of the conference, revealed that the NEU “provides research to support regional staff, branches, reps and activists engaged in anti-academy campaigns”.
Other motions brought by members at next week’s conference include “opposing the far right” and “additional executive seats for black members”.
Palestine, a subject close to Kebede’s heart, will also be on the agenda. On March 30 last year, he was among the demonstrators gathered in central London to protest on Palestine Land Day, a celebration of Palestinian resistance and resolve and an increasingly prominent fixture in the calendar of left-wing British organisations.
Among the tens of thousands who marched that day were Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, Raghad Altikriti, head of the Shura Council of Muslim Association of Britain, and Adnan Hmidan, vice-president of the Palestinian Forum. Kebede has been a regular presence at Palestine demos before and after the October 7 attacks.
British teaching unions have a record of activism over the conflict stretching back to the 1980s. In 2021, Kebede appeared at a pro-Palestine rally in Newcastle where he addressed a crowd. “It’s time to stand together and oppose apartheid, oppose the occupation and fight for Palestinian liberation,” he said. “Let’s do it for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza — it’s about time we globalise the intifada.”
Intifada is an Arabic term for an uprising. Calls to “globalise the intifada”, while common at pro-Palestine rallies, have been criticised by some Jewish as an incitement to violence.
Intifadas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 1987 and 2000 killed thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. “Other words are available,” said a practising Jewish teacher who did not wish to be named. “One of my friends died in the Second Intifada. Kebede could make the same point without using that term.” In a post on X in April last year Kebede clarified: “I used them [the words] in regards to civic protest and oppose violence.”
At the Palestine Land Day demo, Kebede carried a banner with Altikriti. Her organisation, the Muslim Association of Britain, was named in parliament a fortnight earlier as one of several regarded as “a cause for concern”, under a newly introduced official government definition of extremism.
Michael Gove, who was then the communities secretary, described the association as “the British affiliate” of the Muslim Brotherhood. In response, the association challenged him to repeat the allegations without parliamentary privilege so it could sue.
In August 2024, The Sun obtained a picture of Kebede at a union conference in Argentina with Saed Erziqat, the head of the Palestinian teachers’ union. Erziqat had previously described October 7 in a Facebook post as a “bright day”.
A NEU spokesman said that the union opposed violence, had called for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages Hamas took to Israel. “Daniel Kebede has continually called for peace and justice in the Middle East and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people as well as calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas,” he said. “Intifada means mass civic protest against oppression and was making reference to a general strike in the West Bank at the time, which was called as a peaceful protest.”
Kebede’s report conference report highlights how union resources are allocated to international and identity-based campaigns. It notes the union responded to the previous government’s consultation on new relationships, sex and health education lessons by “raising serious concerns about the ban on teaching of gender identity”.
The NEU’s “priority countries” in 2024 were Cuba, Colombia, Palestine and Turkey. The union’s investments were audited “to ensure that none are complicit in the Israeli occupation or the arms trade”.
Relations between Kebede and the government appear to have cooled since the immediate aftermath of the election and Kebede has criticised ministers over changes to benefits and the winter fuel allowance.
He had hoped to push the government for above-inflation pay awards for teachers year on year over the course of this parliament. In December, government departments recommended a pay rise of 2.8 per cent for millions of public sector workers including teachers, NHS staff and senior civil servants for 2025-26.
Any further increases will have to be found from within the budgets of each department. Last month, the DfE admitted schools will be able to afford less than half of the 2.8 per cent pay rise proposed. The result is likely to be a battle over pay between Phillipson, the NEU and possibly other teaching unions. The NEU has sent out an indicative ballot asking its members if they accept or reject the government’s recommendation of an unfunded 2.8 per cent pay rise, which closed last week.
Kebede once told the NEU’s in-house magazine that he admired Muhammad Ali most for sacrificing “a lot of his own career for the very principled belief of not engaging in war”. In the potential industrial battles to come, Bridget Phillipson may end up hoping that the general secretary follows his idol’s example.
