Teachers to strike for nine days at Birmingham school

Teachers are set to strike at a failing Birmingham school for nine days after a staff member was suspended in a bitter dispute over its future.

Simon O’Hara, a member of the National Union of Teachers, was suspended from Small Heath School earlier this month.

Teachers have already staged five days of strikes since last May amid fears it will be turned into an academy.

Peviously rated ‘outstanding’, the school was plunged in to special measures by education watchdog Ofsted 12 months ago.

NUT officials claimed Mr O’Hara had been “victimised” for his role in the campaign against any move to take Small Heath out of council control.

More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition demanding his reinstatement.

The petition said: “We call for an immediate lifting of Simon’s suspension and for the management to lift the threat of making the school an academy.”

NUT members at the school will now strike again today, tomorrow and Thursday, as well as January 26, 27 and 28 and February 2, 3 and 4.

Members of the Rednal-based NASUWT will also take strike action today and tomorrow.

As a result, the school says it will be closed from today for three days.

Last summer, the Government announced plans to change the law so that all schools rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted would be turned into academies, but Birmingham City Council has always insisted there were no plans to academise Small Heath.

Small Heath was among 21 Birmingham schools which faced snap inspections in April 2014 following the emergence of the Trojan Horse letter, alleging a plot by hard-line Islamists to seize control of governing bodies.

Small Heath was given a clean bill of health but was rated inadequate by Ofsted in January 2015.

Inspectors found “tensions” between the leadership team and longer-serving staff members were “damaging the school’s progress and capacity to improve”.