The Mary Bousted One
Political Thinking with Nick Robinson
BBC
4.6 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nick Robinson talks to the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, Mary Bousted, about how her headteacher father inspired a passion for education, why she quit her job as an English teacher and whether, in a week of widespread teacher strikes, she can see the current crisis coming to an end anytime soon.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello and welcome to Political Thinking. |
| 0:07.4 | It was another week when children and parents had to wait anxiously for an early morning |
| 0:11.6 | text or an email to tell them whether their classroom or their school would open that day. |
| 0:18.5 | Thanks not to COVID-19, not to a big dump of snow, but to strike action by members of |
| 0:24.4 | the National Education Union. |
| 0:26.8 | This week on Political Thinking, a conversation with rather than an interrogation of someone |
| 0:32.0 | in the news, my guest is the Joint General Secretary of that Union, the NEU, Mary Bousted. |
| 0:38.6 | She is not just the General Secretary of the largest education union in Europe, she has |
| 0:45.4 | been a leader of a trade union for longer than almost anybody else in the country. |
| 0:50.8 | She was an English teacher herself, the daughter of a primary head teacher, and she wants |
| 0:57.1 | revealed that she found meeting with government ministers so frustrating that in one meeting |
| 1:02.9 | she had to bang her head on the desk. |
| 1:06.3 | Mary Bousted, welcome to Political Thinking. |
| 1:08.6 | Hi. |
| 1:09.6 | You do a lot of head banging at the moment? |
| 1:12.4 | Not with ministers, but quite often when I get out of the meetings, yes. |
| 1:15.6 | Did you actually bang your head on the desk? |
| 1:17.8 | I did. |
| 1:18.8 | I did. |
| 1:19.8 | The schools minister. |
| 1:20.8 | The schools minister, who actually has been schools minister for virtually longer than |
... |
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