Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Under Doug McAvoy’s leadership, membership of the NUT rose from 187,000 to 267,000. One of his greatest achievements was getting the John Major administration to abandon league tables of Sats results for seven-year-olds.
Under Doug McAvoy’s leadership, membership of the NUT rose from 187,000 to 267,000. One of his greatest achievements was getting the John Major administration to abandon league tables of Sats results for seven-year-olds. Photograph: John Giles/PA
Under Doug McAvoy’s leadership, membership of the NUT rose from 187,000 to 267,000. One of his greatest achievements was getting the John Major administration to abandon league tables of Sats results for seven-year-olds. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Doug McAvoy obituary

This article is more than 4 years old
General secretary of the National Union of Teachers respected for his determination and negotiating skills

Doug McAvoy, the former general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, who has died aged 80, was known by his colleagues in the education world as a fierce and canny negotiator. McAvoy, whose tenure lasted from 1989 to 2004, was a difficult person to pigeonhole. Instinctively, people would think of him as most sympathetic to the Labour right of the trade union movement of the time. However, if there was a cause that he believed in, he would pursue it doggedly, no matter where it came from.

He established good working relationships with Conservative and Labour politicians alike. One of his greatest achievements was getting the John Major administration to abandon league tables of Sats results for seven-year-olds. The union had been engaged in a boycott of the tests earlier on the grounds that they put too much pressure on children – and increased teachers’ workloads.

It was symptomatic of his ability to get on with all sides of the political spectrum that he wrung this agreement out of the then Conservative education secretary, Gillian Shephard, and that she rang him to give him prior warning of her announcement. In addition to Shephard, he got on well with Kenneth Clarke and Labour’s Estelle Morris during his time at the helm. His most spectacular coup, though, came when the Labour government, with Charles Clarke as education secretary, was planning to put a typical New Labour gloss on a workload agreement they had secured with all the other education unions. A press spectacular had been arranged.

The NUT alone opposed this agreement, on the grounds that it allowed classroom assistants to take lessons, and McAvoy had spotted a clause in the agreement that said this could lead to 80 children in a class. He invited all the education journalists to a lunch just a few hundred yards from where the government launch was to take place and rammed home the message that class sizes could be that large.

The result was that Labour was questioned about little else at its launch and McAvoy stole all the headlines in the next day’s papers.

Born in Jarrow, McAvoy got his grounding in trade unionism from his father, Wilson, who worked at CWS Printworks in Gateshead, and was father of the chapel there. Doug attended Jarrow grammar school, and won awards for athletics in his youth – including holding the school record for the 100 metres and the triple jump. He was also offered a trial at Burnley football club but turned it down after his father persuaded him there was more money to be made out of a career in teaching than football.

After a first job as a mineworker, he went to Culham teacher training college in Oxfordshire. He was appointed as a PE and maths teacher at Walkergate secondary modern school in Newcastle upon Tyne. NUT activism soon beckoned, though, and he became secretary of the Newcastle branch of the NUT – and joined the union’s executive in 1970. He went on to become deputy general secretary, serving under Fred Jarvis, in 1974.

He first came to national prominence in the late 1980s during the height of national strikes by teachers over pay. He assumed control of the union when Jarvis was knocked down by a car and had a lengthy spell in hospital. It was during this time of protracted strike action that he was compared to the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill by Philip Merridale, the lead negotiator for the local authorities. McAvoy was Scargill’s “Little Sir Echo”, he said.

As if to emphasise again that he could not be pigeonholed, on becoming general secretary he made a major speech warning of the danger that the union was being taken over by the far left group Militant, and as a result its activists at the NUT conference were unrepresentative of the union membership as a whole.

One of his closest colleagues when he was general secretary said of him: “He could be ruthless to those whose policies he despised, but there was a caring side to him that was seldom portrayed. If a staff member was in a difficult time, he would support them. All the staff will tell you that – and there are countless cases of him offering help beyond the call of duty.”

Membership rose significantly during his reign – from 187,000 when he became general secretary (a low ebb) to 267,000 by the time he left. “He was championing policies which were close to teachers’ hearts,” said one erstwhile colleague, “like the campaign against the Sats tests.”

When his working day was over, he could often be seen in what was often known as “Committee Room D” – the Dolphin pub near the union’s headquarters in King’s Cross. “It wasn’t always just a relaxing drink,” said one colleague. “He would spend the time planning and plotting for what lay ahead.” But he did have time to support his favourite football team, Newcastle United.

He moved to York towards the end of his time in office, retiring there in 2004. Later he moved to Harrogate.

McAvoy is survived by his second wife, Elaine (nee Derbyshire), whom he married in 1995, two children from their marriage, Neil and Jennifer, and a third child, Rob, from his first marriage to Margaret, which ended in divorce.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed