There are six school term weeks until the summer holiday. Up and down the country, head teachers are trying to plan their school budgets for next year, and trying to cope with the rapidly growing problem of recruiting enough teachers to fill their classrooms.
The Department for Education (DE) is withholding vital information about what proposals the School Teacher Review Body (STRB) has made on teacher pay, which may or may not help with the recruitment difficulties. It is also withholding vital information about the funding of pay rises, that will determine whether those headteachers will have to make further cuts to their school's staffing and provision for children.
The DE is refusing to publish the information it has, and is refusing to discuss its attitude to the STRB report or the funding of it with the teacher and school leader unions.
On Monday, 5 June, in response to a Parliamentary Question from shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson about when the Government would publish the STRB report, Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said: "The Department is considering the recommendations and will publish its response in the usual way, in due course."
But last year, as in previous years, "in due course" meant that the DfE didn't publish the STRB report until late in July - after some schools had already broken up.
Now, there is no technical reason for this delay: in the union talks with the DfE in April they told us they could publish sooner.
Their delay in giving vital information to our headteachers is disrespectful in the extreme.
Their failure to engage with the union to discuss this year's pay, the STRB report, workload and funding is disgraceful.
They are fiddling while teacher recruitment and retention gets worse and worse.
The NEU national executive next meets on 17 June. Today we are calling upon Gillian Keegan to publish the STRB Report and to meet us next week, in an effort to resolve the dispute and help to solve the problems facing our children's schools. We are calling upon Rishi Sunak to ensure that his Secretary of State for Education meets this entirely reasonable request. Failure to do so will have no other result than raising suspicions that the Government is planning not to implement the recommendations of the independent review body.
If she refuses to do this, next steps - including the option of taking further strike action in the week beginning 3 July - will be considered by the NEU national executive at the meeting on 17 June.