Mary Bousted on Tory education: ‘To destroy children’s hope is wicked. We do it on a grand scale’

Mary Bousted once ‘literally’ banged her head on a desk, she says, during a meeting with Nick Gibb, then schools minister, and had ‘three stand-up rows’ with Michael Gove. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

At the beginning of January 2021, when the Delta variant of coronavirus was sweeping across the UK, sending the Covid death toll spiralling, Boris Johnson was still insisting schools were safe for unvaccinated staff and children.

The weekend before term began, Mary Bousted sprang into action. The joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) felt she had to step in to secure teachers’ safety. Knowing her employment law, she acted swiftly. “We advised members they had an individual right not to enter a workplace which would cause them harm,” she says, reeling off details of the 1996 Employment Rights Act.