Nurseries fight starts
Socialist Press1977 1977-06-08Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 4 →
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Over 60. parents and children over the statutory age of teachers attended a meeting last Thursday in Oxford to organise a campaign to stop nursery closures.
As part of the council's education cuts 80 out of the City's 500 nursery places are threatened and four teachers and six nursery assistants face the sack or redeployment.
Mothers of young children from all areas of the city spoke up about the effects of these cuts on an already grossly inadequate service.
A speaker from the National Union of Teachers gave a report on the overwhelming support of local teachers for a call to take strike action.
But she warned that NUT leaders had announced that they would "settle" for terms which only require the Authority to safeguard the teaching standards for children over the five.
She pointed out the necessity for parents to give teachers their full support in their actions and to urge them to include other aspects on the cuts such as nurseries in their demands.
Other trade unionists spoke of the need to fight the cuts in their entirety otherwise a victory over nurseries might mean merely shifting the burden onto other sections.
The importance of Trades Council was emphasised and it was suggested that the Trades Council could campaign to expose more information to the labour movement.
Questions such as why the council turned down a government grant for more nursery provision last year and still pays for school places in private schools were raised.
The meeting agreed th The meeting agreed that an umbrella body be set up to coordinate the campaign across the city and local committees be set up in each area to canvass the streets to estimate the true demand locally for nursery provision.
A warning note was sounded on this however by Jenny Bancroft who led the unsuccessful campaign two years ago to save a nursery school in North Oxford.
She said:
"We did all this-and it certainly was a necessary exercise-but the council chose to ignore our information. We must direct also into the unions-especially the NUT, NALGO and NUPE who have members in the schools.
Direct forms of action such as dumping children on the council's doorstep and occupying nurseries were also discussed and voted for when the time came!