When a union that claims to “stand up for the future of education” campaigns to overturn the UK’s highest court, it stops being a professional body and starts becoming a parody of itself. And yet this is exactly what the National Education Union (NEU) has done.

Over the weekend, the NEU — the UK’s largest teaching union — voted to defy a Supreme Court ruling which clarified that it is lawful to exclude men, no matter how they identify, from women’s spaces. The decision was not put to the union’s half a million members, but to the 52 people on its National Executive Committee. The motion, which with wearisome predictability was entitled “Trans Rights Are Human Rights”, attacked the ruling and derided the EHRC’s interim guidance as “incoherent [and] unclear”.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s General Secretary, bemoaned that “a toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.” He chose not to pass comment on the environment fostered within his union under his leadership: not a whisper for the teachers hounded out of classrooms, or dragged through tribunals, for the crime of asking basic questions about gender ideology.

And there have been many such cases. Take the recent example of an anonymous Nottinghamshire teacher who raised a safeguarding concern about an eight-year-old girl who was being affirmed in a cross-sex identity at school. She was accused of gross misconduct and sacked, and is now suing her employer.

Kebede’s position not only lets teachers down — it also runs counter to public opinion, with widespread support for the Supreme Court ruling across the political spectrum. Polls show 88% of Reform voters, 83% of Conservatives, 41% of Liberal Democrats, and 42% of Labour voters backing the decision.

Clearly, this stance is driving out women. Sue, a primary school teacher with more than 30 years’ experience, left the NEU in protest. “By ignoring the Supreme Court judgement,” she said, “the NEU is telling female staff to disregard their own need for privacy, safety, and dignity in order to let men into single-sex spaces such as women’s staff toilets.” Another secondary teacher also walked, expressing dismay that her “classroom was becoming tangled in ideology”.

Additionally, the NEU has pledged to distribute “myth-busting” literature, train schools in “trans-inclusive” toilet policies, and offer legal support to any male teacher who is told he can’t enter women’s bathrooms. They’re free to try — but it’s likely to end in yet another taxpayer-funded legal circus.

Meanwhile, in the real world — far from the NEU’s executive — classrooms are crumbling, behaviour is spiralling out of control, and burnout is baked into the job description. Teachers have spent years begging for clear, practical guidance on how to legally navigate the rising number of trans-identified students and staff. Now, the NEU’s overwhelmingly female membership has been let down by the very body charged with advocating for their rights at work.

The NEU isn’t standing up for the future of education — it’s preening in the mirror, nodding smugly while waging war on its own members. It’s time someone reminded union executives that teachers don’t need lectures from those to whom they pay their subs. They need safe workplaces and a union that puts safeguarding above student activist slogans.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.

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