UK strikes: 500,000 workers walk out in today’s strike - what has been said?

Striking workers revealed they are "one paycheque away from being homeless" on the picket lines of the biggest industrial action for a decade.

Standing on the civil service picket line outside the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, PCS union rep Ellie Clarke, 31, explained: "We are just living in poverty. There is absolutely no chance we could go to the theatre or even just have some dinner with friends.”

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union announced that its members in 124 government departments and other bodies are walking out. It is calling for 10% payrise.

Ellie added: “It is really, really hard. I am terrified every day. I am always worried I am one crisis away from homelessness. I am just one paycheque away from being homeless. We shouldn’t be in this situation… we are working for the government.

While outside a school in east London, assistant headteacher Sydney Heighington, 33, told PA no teacher “actually wants to strike”.

Giving his reasons for joining the walkout, he said: “I’ve been a teacher for over a decade, I’m an assistant headteacher now. There are so many reasons, and it goes beyond pay. The reality is, I don’t think you’ll find a teacher that actually wants to strike.”

Members of seven trade unions are taking industrial action, affecting schools, universities, trains and buses in the biggest strike in a decade. Sydney added: “This is our last resort, this is something that has taken a long time for us to gather the strength to do because we don’t ever want to take anything away from the children because they are the most important thing to us – that’s why we do what we do.

“But we are left with no other real option. It’s almost like the government’s saying each year we give our lives to the profession and everything that we do for the kids, we’re worth less. The job gets harder, more stress and strain is put on teachers and we barely get by on what we see for it. Teachers are tired, I’m tired, and we’re doing this because we need to have our system fixed and we need to have it funded.”

Around 23,000 schools have been affected by today’s teachers’ strikes but teachers on the picket lines have said they have been “left with no other real option” but to take part in the walkout, while university workers said their pay had been “eroded very substantially” over the past 10 years.

Howard Stevenson, a professor in education at the University of Nottingham and a UCU Officer, said staff were “really, really dissatisfied” with a number of issues but said employers had only engaged on “the most minor details”.

He said: “Alongside the pension issue, we also have concerns about pay because pay has been eroded very substantially, over the last 10 years in particular.

“Workloads are very high, pay gaps are a concern, across the sector they are very high and at the University of Nottingham and we have something like a 20% gender pay gap.

“This campaign is about tackling those issues, and in the higher education sector generally there is systemic misuse of precarious contracts, so many of our colleagues are on hourly paid contracts or fixed-term contracts, so there are very high levels of job insecurity.

“It makes life really difficult in terms of just planning basic things, but also has a really negative impact on quality of education, because those colleagues never know, from one moment to the next, what they’re going to be teaching.”