this is bbc news. i'm shaun ley. the headlines: the former president of pakistan, pervez musharraf, has died in hospital in dubai after a long illness. he was 79. general musharraf took power in a coup in 1999, and served as president for seven years from 2001. he portrayed himself as a moderniser, but his opposition to islamist extremism made him a controversialfigure. the united states is trying to find the wreckage of a chinese surveillance balloon, which it shot down over the atlantic. the pentagon believes it had been spying on sensitive sites. beijing has accused the us of an overreaction, insisting the balloon was for meteorological research. pope francis�* historic visit comes to an end with an open air mass. he's urged people to make themselves

immune to the "venom of hatred" to achieve the peace and prosperity that have eluded them through years of bloody ethnic conflicts. more news at the top of the hour. now it's time for political thinking with nick robinson. his guest this week as mary bousted, one of the teaching union leaders. hello and welcome to political thinking. it was another week when children and parents had to wait anxiously for an early morning text or an email to tell them whether their classroom or their school would open that day. thanks not to covid—19, not to a big dump of snow, but to strike action by members of the national education union this

week on political thinking, a conversation with rather than an interrogation of someone in the news, my guest is the joint general secretary of that union, the neu, mary bousted. she is notjust the general secretary of the largest education union in europe, she has been a leader of a trade union for longer than almost anybody else in the country. she was an english teacher herself, the daughter of a primary head teacher, and she once revealed that she found meeting with government ministers so frustrating that in one meeting, she had to bang her head on the desk. mary bousted, welcome to political thinking. hi. are you doing a lot of head banging at the moment? not with ministers, but quite often when i get out of the meetings, yes. did you actually bang your head on the desk? idid. it was with nick gibb. the schools minister. he has actually has been schools minister for virtually

longer than anybody else. and personally, i get on with him very well. i don't agree with what he's doing to schools and what he's done, but, you know, he's a serious politician and he works very hard. he just comes to the wrong conclusions. but the thing about nick is that once he's got an idea in his head, it will not be dislodged. and he said something which i had, you know, told him was wrong and given the evidence it was wrong three times. and i said, i don't know what to do, nick, so i think i'm just going to bang my head on the desk, which i ceremoniously did. you wrote a book about what you thought should happen in education, and you called it a polemic, but with evidence. is that what you try to do? you are clearly a passionate person and we're going to talk about why you feel so passionately in a moment, but you feel that you can prove your case. i think that's so important. and when i wrote the book, and i'm going to give it a title so that if readers want to get it, they can, which is it's called support, not surveillance, how to solve the teacher retention crisis. and i wrote it because i've done,

as you say, i've done this job leading an education, two education trade unions now for 20 years, and in that time, i have really worked hard to amass the evidence. and i think that's so important when you are representing your members. i think it is so important to be as expert as you can about the data to underpin your argument. and obviously it's essential when i'm facing you on the today programme and as a union leader, you don't expect an easy ride. it's very important that you have the data to back up the assertions you've made, and that's something that's always been important to me. but you will know that the education secretary, gillian keegan, has been on political thinking, sat in that chair. she says, "look, iam meeting with the trade unions," she's meeting with you, "and i am interested in the evidence. i've studied which subjects are struggling to recruit teachers and i'm willing to give them a bit more.

i've looked at which areas of the country are struggling to recruit and retain teachers. it's precisely that sort of conversation i want to have, and you just come in and say, give us more money." well, that's just a complete misrepresentation of what we're actually doing. i mean, i said to gillian keegan when she said, well, we'll pay teachers and shortage subjects more. the fact of the matter is, 14 out of 17 of the secondary subjects are shortage and government failed to meet their targets catastrophically. i mean, english, which is, as you say, my subject. and then i, after i taught, i trained teachers in three universities and english was always, of course, first to close because it had so many applicants with such high degrees. last year, the government missed it, missed its english target for teachers by a0%. when i get frustrated, it's when evidence is misused, when it's misrepresented for political purposes, because ultimately myjob in the end isn't political. the national education union isn't affiliated to any political party. myjob is to work with government, whichever government, to try and do the best for education

and the best for my members. and when i get frustrated, it's when i do not think that the evidence is really being looked at and the political decisions that politicians should take comes out of that. the determination is clear. the willingness to try to strike a hard bargain is clear. let's talk about where that fight comes from. might itjust have something to do with being one of eight children? yeah, i'm sure it does. i'm the seventh of eight children. and, you know, so as you can imagine, it's a big northern catholic family, irish catholic family. growing up in bolton, in lancashire. growing up in bolton. and my father was the headmaster of the local primary school. my mother, in between having eight children taught and yeah, i was the seventh of eight, got five elder brothers and an elder sister. and in that environment, a very loving environment. but you soon learn you're not the centre of the universe, and you soon learn that you have

to be determined to get your voice heard. you once described yourself as an expert in warfare and diplomacy. yeah, i mean... what was the warfare over? well, listen, monopoly was banned in our house because it led to physical violence. on my mother's 90th birthday, my brother gave a speech and he said, "well, these are the three things you learned in the bleasdale family," which is my family name. "first, is that a good row clears the air. second is it's important to cheat at monopoly. and third, it's a mortal sin to vote tory." so those were the cultural lines that i was brought up with. you just told me my dayjob is political, but you obviously had a pretty political upbringing then. yeah, but not sort of party political in that way. i think my dad voted liberal. i think my mum, you know, veered between liberal and labour. but what we were brought up with was a strong catholic tradition.

and catholic social teaching is about equality. it's about recognising unions, it's about paying someone a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. it's about protection of the environment, and it's about dignity at work. was politics constantly being discussed when you weren't having a row about monopoly? yeah, i mean, at the dinnertable, one of the ways that my dad would keep order is to... he was an avid reader of the manchester guardian, and he would take a news item from the manchester guardian and we'd be expected, required to give our opinions on it. with notice orjust say, "well, i'm just reading out the clipping, what do you think?" well, no, we usually talked about it a bit. he'd introduce it and then we were expected to give our opinions and we were allowed to say whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrespectful to him or my mother, or we didn't go against

the teachings of the church. that was a step too far. absolutely. if you went there, you were out and you didn't finish your meal, you were out. out the room? out the room, yeah. this was quite a disciplined family then. my father, all my father had to do was say both your names, your first name and your middle name, and you knew we were in trouble. that's all he had to do to stop you misbehaving. how often did you get kicked out of the room? my younger sister got kicked out more than me because she was outrageous. i was quite a good girl really, but so very rarely. but my youngest sister, who sadly died now, she was also out of the room quite a lot. so there you are sitting around the table, the eight kids, the mum and dad who don't agree on which party they back, but you all agree it's a mortal sin to vote tory? yeah. really? well, actually, it'sjust a choice, you know, some plenty of people listening, watching will say i vote conservative in some elections, labour in other elections. it's just a choice, like whether you go to sainsbury�*s or aldi. yeah, well, some of my family do commit mortal sins according to the culture of my family,

because they are conservative voters. and i still speak to them and love them very much, but that was a bit of sort of it was the, the zeitgeist in our house was that the conservative party was not liked, the politicians were not agreed with. and my father in particular, he was the head teacher, the headmaster of a small primary school on the biggest council estate in bolton. and he had to deal every day with children coming to school who clearly their lives were being blighted by poverty. and he always said that that got worse under a conservative government and it made him mad. and that anger that he had about inequality and poverty is the thing which drives me. so when you go on to be an english teacher and you come to london leaving lancashire, leaving your education at university in hull and you come to harrow, life, i guess, was pretty different there from what you'd seen before? it really was.

and one of the biggest differences, well, you're in london and that's a different place, i don't think london is like anywhere else. and i wasn't really ready for it. i wasn't really ready for how big it is and how anonymous you are in london. it can be a very, i think, lonely place. and i wasn't ready also for working and teaching and living in such a multicultural society. and the school i taught at had 32 first languages other than english spoken, and i'd grown up in, you know, a white catholic environment. and so just the culture shock and the learning to love living in such a multicultural, such an exciting environment, that took a while to get used to. but i did get used to it. but you gave it up. i mean, you were a teacher not even a decade were you before you went

on to do teacher training? i taught for 11 years and then i went to train teachers. why did you give it up? because i was working... well, i was in london. we were finding it... i was married then to a musician. we were finding it very difficult to pay the mortgage and pay the bills. i taught for 11 years. i was a head of english. i had my daughter, i was working, i would say, 65 hour week. and we decided that we... i was working full time. i had to work full time because my husband was working part time and i'd done an ma in language and education, just finished that and really felt that i had a very good handle on theory and practice. i taught for 11 years, had a good theory handle. so i thought, "well, i'lljust train teachers for a while and then i'll go back to school." while my daughter is very little,

i'll go into teacher training, do that for four or five years and then come back into school. and i'd really like to end up as a head teacher. that's what i wanted to do. but you did, in fact, end up as a union leader and a surprise one, a union that no longer exists. it merged with the old nut, the national union of teachers, your union, the association of teachers and lecturers. when i was growing up as a journalist, you were regarded as the right wing union, the moderate union, the contrast with those who were often portrayed in the popular press of the time as the loony left controlling the nut. was that a conscious decision? that's where you felt more comfortable? well, i was a member of the nut when i was at school, when i was working in schools. what happened about the atljob was that in 2002 they advertised in the guardian for a general secretary, and i had then worked in universities for about ten years, three universities, and thought, "well, i know the policy environment very well. i think i've got good instincts about children and young people and about the profession. i'lljust give it a go." i had no, no expectation, really.

and people say, "oh, i didn't expect to" when they really did. listen, i really didn't expect to. because you'd not worked your way up through the committees and the meetings and all that. i'd always been a union member, but i hadn't been an activist within the union. the reason i ask you is because the nut had a pretty bad reputation with ministers in both parties. they famously, delegates at one conference, barricaded david blunkett, the labour education secretary, into a cupboard — something that shocks people. they have long had that union and parts of it that survive in your union now, the national education union, farfrom not being political, as you said before, are seen as political extremists. and i think that's a complete misrepresentation of the people i meet on the executive, the executive members who... you know, even when i don't agree with them, and sometimes let me be frank, sometimes i do feel like banging my head on a desk when i'm not agreeing with some of them,

even then, it's absolutely clear to me that they are thinking about education, they're thinking about the profession, they're thinking about their members, and they're thinking about what's best for them, even when i don't agree with them. really? when they have debates about things that are nothing to do with education? 13 members of the national education union executive signed a statement apparently blaming nato for the invasion of ukraine, including one who's currently running to be your successor. look, people can have their political views. those political views are not the policy of the union. i can't speak for their independent political views. i can speak for the union. and the national education union, since it's been formed, i think has been a fantastic force for good, both in education and in the trade union and in the political world. why do your executive, why does your conference feel it is right for the largest teaching union to opine on ukraine or nato

or the many other things that there are bitter and angry debates at the easter conference each and every year? well, we don't opine about them all the time. and most of the time spent at that conference is spent on education debates. we have one motion on international affairs and, you know, members are interested in international affairs. we have an international committee and we have a strong policies on palestine and we have strong policies on a range of international issues. i just wonder if you think that when you retire and you said you'll retire this summer in august, that moderating influence that came from your smaller union, the atl, will be removed and someone who's been condemned as an extremist will be your replacement. well, i can't comment on that because that has the election for the next general secretary's an election amongst the membership.

i have no vote in that and it's quite right that i should have no voice in that. let's turn to your agenda for schools. what's set out in your book and what has been your life's work in many ways. imagine i make you education secretary for a day. happy days. other than pay, we know what you'd do on pay, what would you do? oh, well, i mean, the agenda would last longer than a day. but what i would do, i think, first of all is, well, i'd tackle three things. first of all, a funding system, which means that schools in challenging areas with deprived pupils are getting less of a real terms increase over the next few years than schools in the leafy suburbs because money is being directed towards them. so i would fund that — school budget. secondly, i would completely, from the top to the bottom reform the inspection system — 0fsted. i think it's a dysfunctional regulator. it knows the price of everything and the value of nothing in education. it's inspection.

judgments are unreliable and usually invalid. so i'd stop them. and thirdly, i would work to get the profession able to be involved again in decisions around curriculum and assessment so that teachers could once again exercise their professional knowledge and expertise. imagine you were just privately advising the education secretary, she's quite new in the job, the prime minister says he wants to get inflation out of the system, she got you what you asked for, which is more money for schools, surprised everybody in the budget when jeremy hunt announced that there would be more money for schools. of course you want more. but it was more than i suspect you were expecting before he stood up. how is she meant to give what you say she can give, which is an across the board pay increase for everybody? i'm really struck now by the, first of all,

the mumsnet poll last week. 62% of the parents there blame the government for the current dispute, and there's other research coming through about that. i was struck also by a conversation this morning with a journalist from a very right wing newspaper who said, "well, we're very puzzled that our readers, when we look at reader comments, they're still so supportive of teachers." so my advice would be to gillian keegan to stop the anti—teacher rhetoric, stop the anti—union rhetoric and get round the table, and let's negotiate seriously about this dispute because once you get into serious negotiations, you find ways through which previously either haven't thought about or you hadn't considered. we've got, you know, 28 days now before the next round of industrial action. we want yesterday's strike to be the last. so really, let's negotiate. that's my advice. negotiate. now, one person who did give advice

as well is former union leader, used to be leader of the postman's union as they would have been called then, postal workers, no doubt now. alanjohnson, who then went on to be a labour education secretary and health secretary, he said, look, the way through this is a multi—year deal. yeah. you think that'll work? well, i think it's certainly something... and we have said to gillian keegan, look, in wales they're negotiating. you need to do that. there are many ways that you can do that. there are two issues with teachers. the first is that their pay has declined virtually more than any other profession since 2010. particularly that's bad for experienced teachers and that's leading to a massive recruitment and retention crisis and it's leading to our schools just not getting the teachers they need. so we need a longer term correction in teacher pay. one of the ways you can do that, the most powerful way you can do that, and that was done in the past by the houghton award and the clegg

award is a longer term correction on teachers pay. so you accept that, you know, you're not going to correct it in one year. but we need a long—term plan because you can't carry on paying teachers so poorly that they won't join the profession and they won't stay in it. so they don't have to pay inflation this year if they come up with a deal, that means over time, teachers claw back some of their losses? well, i'm not negotiating now, but what you asked me is are there propositions? and there are indeed propositions that they can do. we don't accept that actually public sector pay drives inflation, many economists would argue, with the secretary of state and the government on that. at the moment this will really buy these disputes is in the lead up to exams. will teachers strike during exams? i think that that would be very unlikely. i think that when you, you know, teachers work some of the longest working weeks of any profession, they take the education of their pupils incredibly seriously.

they devote hours to it. they come, you know, teachers are in school at 7:00 in the morning. they're leaving school at six in the evening. they're going home to do more work. teachers in england work longer hours outside the classroom than any other 0ecd country apart from japan. so these are dedicated, hardworking people. they don't want to be taking this strike action and they will not harm the exam and life chances of the pupils in their care. but i don't want the government to therefore just think that it can sit and wait this out because that would be extremely cynical. the gap seems enormous at the moment. can you give us any sense of how this might end, when it might end? well, we've got 27 days before the next regional round of industrial action. there's a day in wales before that, but in england. and the way it will end and we want

this to happen is for the government to sit down and start to negotiate. the government should not think that it can just run down the clock and that members will get exhausted. and if we're talking about politics, let me remind the government that we've got half a million teachers and the majority of them are in the national education union and they're very likley to vote. and they're not going to vote for a government which they think disregards their views, devalues their work, and leaves them worrying about bills at the end of the month. but you think there'll come a moment when that secretary of state looks you in the eyes and starts talking? well, i hope so. i mean, that would seem to be the sensible, reasonable and rewarding thing to do. and listen, you know, kevin and i, we're experienced negotiators. we don't go in with if we can't get what we want, we'll just flounce out. we do know how to negotiate, and it seems to me that the government has to relearn how to do that.

one thing the prime minister said upset him this week was the fact that teachers didn't have to tell their heads whether they were going on strike, making it pretty much impossible to make contingency plans to work out how to keep schooling going for people who really needed it. i wonder if your dad was still around as head teacher, he would have been pretty cross about that, wouldn't he? my dad was always a member of the union, always knew that his most valuable asset in the school was his teachers. he was a good leader. i'm very sure that my dad would have addressed poor performance very well. his school was one of the most successful in bolton. from the poorest area. got the highest number of 11 plus passes because he refused to let the poverty of the children be...hold them back in their lives. but my dad was a good union member,

and if the teachers were on strike, he would have been on strike with them. now, in theory, you're retiring in august. you don't sound like someone who's ready to retire at all. well, i think kevin courtney and myself, we're bothjoint general secretaries, and we both said we would do one term and then we would leave because we brought the union together. i think it's been in trade union terms, when you get two general secretaries that's regarded as a, you know, an outbreak of war. we've managed it, i think, really well. we get on together well. we have, you know, different strengths and we've brought those together to lead the union and lead it i think effectively. you know, we've over the last 12 days, we have 50,000 new members. but are you looking to retire? have you got another plan in mind?

the problem with the job at the moment is it's full—on, and it's very difficult to get a plan for after. but what i'll tell you i won't be doing is back—seat driving in the nue. we will leave the union on the 31st of august and then the union will take its chances and chart its own course. i will not stop being interested politically. i will not stop wanting to change the world. to make the world a fairer place, and i will not stop being outraged by child poverty. mary bousted, thanks forjoining me on political thinking. now, there are plenty of people asking the question that mary bousted is asking — why don't ministers simply negotiate? i think the answer is in two parts — economics and politics. they're worried that a good pay settlement for one set of workers is a good pay settlement for millions of workers. and they don't want to set a precedent that they think might undermine the effort to curb inflation. politics, because to some extent, tory ministers want to portray labour as the friend of the striker and want to portray themselves

as tough enough to withstand calls for more and more public spending, tough enough to take the right decisions for the economy. one day, of course, someone will have to blink. thanks for watching. hello there. part two of the weekend looking much brighter than part one. we had a lot of cloud around on saturday. today feels very different. lots of sunshine around, but feeling a little bit chillier than what we've been used to. in fact, temperatures will be closer to the seasonal norm for the next few days, in fact, for much of this upcoming week. high pressure sitting right on top of the uk, bringing all this fine and settled weather through the afternoon. a bit more of a breeze there for the far southeast, east anglia

and for northern and western scotland and many northern and western parts will see some high cloud at times which will turn the sunshine a little bit hazy. but a fine and bright afternoon to come. bit cooler than of late — 7 to 9 celsius. now through tonight, our area of high pressure or the centre of it pushes towards the eastern side of the country, influencing much of england and wales. so here, lighterwinds, clearskies. it will turn cold with the widespread frost. also, some mist and fog patches, some which could be quite dense across the southeast. but for scotland, northern ireland, more cloud, more breeze. so, less cold here. but it does mean for monday we will see more cloud around generally. scotland and northern ireland, maybe the odd shower for the western isles, more of a breeze. england and wales, a cold, frosty start with some early mist and fog. but again, it's going to be bright with the best of the sunshine down here, albeit a little bit hazy at times. temperatures, again, single figures for most, up to ten degrees in the north and the west, though with more breeze for tuesday,

generally, i think mist and fog could be stubborn to clear across parts of england and wales, but it's here where we'll see the best of the sunshine, although here will be the lowest of the temperatures. variable cloud, some sunshine for scotland and northern ireland. for wednesday, a strong area of high pressure holds on across the continents, influencing our weather for the majority of the time. but these weather fronts will try to flirt with the north and the west of the uk, so it will be windier on wednesday across the northwest, more cloud, maybe one or two showers generally. scotland and northern ireland, these are mean wind speeds. gusts could be quite higher than that. england and wales, lighter winds, a cold, frosty start with some mist and fog. probably the best of the sunshine as we head through the course of the afternoon. for most of us, temperatures remain in single digits closer to where we should be this time in february. could see a spell of wet, windy weather for a time across scotland on thursday. otherwise, for most, it'll stay fine and settled, and on the cool side.

this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. our top stories: the former president of pakistan, general pervez musharraf, has died at the age of 79. shot out of the sky — the us continues to search and recover the wreckage of a chinese balloon suspected of spying, which was brought down by an american fighterjet. when he successfully took it down and i want to compliment the aviators who did it. china condemns the move — accusing the us of an over—reaction — insisting the balloon was for meteorological research. the former uk prime minister, liz truss, blames what she's calls a "powerful economic establishment" for her downfall.