Last summer, NUT members at Kingsland School, Hackney, made a principled stand against the victimisation of Indro Sen, the joint rep at the school.

Sen has taught at Kingsland School for as long as the school has existed — nearly twenty years.

Kingsland School — and teaching maths — is his life. Even at the weekends he teaches students in the local park. He is completely committed to the school and to its students.

Sen defends mixed ability teaching. He wants all children to do well.

As NUT representative, he led the campaign against the EAZ (Education Action Zone) at the school. As a nationally-known Black activist within the NUT, he has represented many members who have been discriminated against and victimised.

These things do not make Sen a bad teacher. They just make him unpopular with management in the school and in the LEA.

The school group voted to take action if the headteacher did not back down. When she pressed ahead with capability procedures, NUT members came out on a one-day strike.

The Kingsland members were then charged with gross misconduct by the headteacher — the same charge that is used against teachers who have abused children in their care.

But the governors’ disciplinary panel refused to accept the headteacher’s view. The panel’s judgement acknowledged that those who took strike action on 16 June did so out of a conviction that a colleague was being victimised in an act of institutional racism. The governors also accepted that the action had been taken collectively, and that it was therefore appropriate to treat all individual cases alike.

The teachers were given massive support by students, former students and parents — who distributed leaflets, collected signatures on petitions and demonstrated outside the school.

But at the same time that members were facing disciplinary charges against them from their employers, they learned that their own Union had turned against them. Their names had been passed on to the NUT by the LEA — and the National Officers suspended them from membership without even bothering to check if these were the members who had been on strike. Whose side were the National Officers on?

Since the summer, the people who were so keen to sack Indro Sen have quit. The headteacher who started the proceedings against him has left the school. Elizabeth Reid, the Director of Education who had pressured the headteacher to take this action, has also resigned.

Following a flood of petitions from schools around the country, the National Union of Teachers also dropped the suspension of all the teachers who had supported Sen.

Finally, in September, the new acting headteacher announced that the capability procedures were to be abandoned.