As a member of the National Union of Teachers, I can assure everyone that no striking teacher was paid any money by the Union for walking out on Thursday.

The teaching unions negotiated, reluctantly, a worsening of their pension provisions in 2007, in which they accepted, among other things, that they would have to wait until 65 before drawing their full pensions (instead of 60). Now, the coalition is proposing to impose an increase to 68, to make teachers contribute 50% more than they do now into their pensions, and for them to receive far less when they retire by dint of their pensions being tied to the consumer prices index instead of the far more realistic retail prices index, as now. None of this is on the negotiating table, in spite of what the ConDems, Miliband and the Daily F*cking Mail are insinuating. And all this guff about how unfair it is that the public sector should have better pensions (the average is £4000) than the private sector. The truth is that the private sector, when times were good, took pensions holidays instead of paying into the funds, and the beneficiaries of that were the shareholders with their inflated dividends, not the workers. Then when times got hard the good pension schemes all collapsed, courtesy of the gross mismanagement that was the routine order of the day. What should really be happening now is the private sector workers should be out out there on the streets, demanding that their pension schemes be reinstated to equal status with the public sector.