For all the bitter arguments generated by the ASTI pay dispute, there is one thing at least on which everyone can agree. The campaign has been a disaster. For those who were gung-ho for 30 per cent or nothing, the disaster lies in the rather pitiful facesaving formula that is to be put to ballot. For those who always thought that the tactics being used were bound to fail, there can be no pleasure in seeing a vital profession so alienated, embittered and, at times, bewildered.
Almost a full school year of disruption has produced no genuine gains. The deal brokered by the Labour Court is, to adapt Seamus Mallon, benchmarking for slow learners.
The union itself is now so badly split that many of those who voted against industrial action last year will now vote against the Labour Court offer as well. Even a decisive rejection of the deal will lead only to another set of rows about what tactics are then to be employed.
This is a game without winners. That the ASTI has lost must be clear even to the most ardent militant. That the teaching profession has been seriously damaged is clear from the genuine anger of pupils and parents at the decision to target the exams. That the public in general has nothing to gain from kicking teachers while they're down should be obvious to anyone who cares to ask how many decades it will take the British education system to recover from the systematic demoralisation of teachers under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s.
When things go this badly wrong, the natural instinct of most people is to look for scapegoats. Since pinning anything, even blame, on Michael Woods is like trying to nail jelly to a wall, other targets must be found. It is easy to guess where the spleen will be vented at this week's ASTI conference.
Charlie Lennon, the greatest stoic since Epictetus, will come in for a share of abuse, though he has become so good at soaking up punishment in the course of the dispute that delegates may soon tire of hitting the human punch bag.
The all-purpose anger-absorber in these situations is the media. The belief that everything would have been okay but for a media conspiracy to do you down is a comfort-blanket for all sorts of organisations in all sorts of trouble.
Self-pity has its own pleasures and the joys of victimhood should not be understated. Eventually, though, we all have to grow up and accept responsibility for our own failings. The energies of the conference would be better spent on trying to come to a realistic analysis of what went wrong and how it can be put right.
The first thing that went wrong was the failure to conduct a ballot of the entire union membership on the decision to reject the PPF and benchmarking and to pull out of the ICTU. Even if that decision was a good one, it was clearly momentous. It meant that the ASTI was going to start a fight, not just with the Government, but with its own most obvious allies, the other public sector unions and in particular the leadership of the other teacher unions.
A union-wide debate and a ballot would have ensured that the general union membership knew what it was getting into, and that, if the decision was endorsed, the leadership would be operating with a clear mandate.
There was, of course, a ballot on industrial action and it did overwhelmingly authorise action up to and including an attack on the exams. Yet it became quite clear as the dispute became serious that many ASTI members had voted for that action without ever really believing that it would come to pass. Many teachers thought they were engaged in a game of bluff. They did not quite believe in their own threats and were thus unprepared for the nasty nature of what followed.
Anyone seriously contemplating an operation to sabotage the exam system would have been prepared for a ferocious public backlash and for the rage of students who had been told, week-in week-out for six years, that this was the most important time in their entire lives.
That so many teachers were genuinely shocked to find that they had stirred up a wasps' nest of criticism suggests a deep uncertainty behind the official face of mad-as-hell militants.
That underlying hesitancy accounts for the fact that the ASTI managed not so much to lose the key battle in the entire dispute as to fail to turn up on the battlefield. It was obvious that if the ASTI was going to win it would have to bring down the PPF. For a period last autumn, with inflation gobbling up the gains that workers had made under PPF, that key aim was within an inch of being achieved.
Most public sector union officials will privately admit that, had the ASTI gone on an all-out strike in those weeks, the PPF would almost certainly have fallen. Instead, the ASTI embarked on a bizarre campaign of targeting classroom supervision, an activity which the union itself claims is not the job of its members.
Once the PPF survived, the ASTI leadership clearly had to re-think its tactics. Instead, the campaign trundled on like a clockwork mouse, dragging teachers blindly onwards into an area where few of them felt comfortable. As intelligent people, most teachers must have understood that not only were they not making progress, they were actually going backwards. The strengths with which they started the campaign - a high standing in public opinion, a hard won image as a caring profession, even, believe it or not, a large reservoir of sympathy in the media - were being dissipated. A campaign that started out with the aim of enhancing the standing of teachers was rapidly lowering it.
There must come a point when the embattled excitement of a campaign gives way to a rational reflection on the harm that the ASTI has done to itself. When that point is reached (and it might as well be this week as next year) the thing to do is to go back to basics. What do teachers want to achieve? A significant pay rise? A serious look at the state of the profession and its needs for the 21st century? Real action on real problems like supervision and the casualisation of the profession? Or the sickly satisfaction of being able to insist that you were right and everyone else was wrong? With the first three of those options now firmly within sight, it is time, surely, to move on.
