EVERY school in Oxfordshire will be affected when up to 4,000 teachers walk out in two weeks’ time, according to union officials.

Those behind the strike say most of the county’s 269 state primary and secondary schools would close – as well as many private schools and colleges.

They claimed the one-day strike on Thursday, June 30, would be the biggest for 25 years as two teaching unions yesterday voted to back strike action.

A National Union of Teachers chief said every school in the county would be affected and it would be bigger than the 2008 strike, which closed 32 Oxfordshire schools.

Ninety-two per cent of the NUT’s members who voted backed strike action to protest against plans to change their pensions.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers will join the NUT, with 83 per cent of its members who voted supporting action.

The changes will see newly-qualified teachers contributing £60 a month more to their pensions and retiring at 68. At present, teachers can take pensions at 60.

From April, public pensions started to be linked to the Consumer Prices Index inflation rate, rather than the higher Retail Prices Index.

NUT Oxfordshire official Gawain Little: said “I would suspect there would be an impact on every school in Oxfordshire and a large number of the schools could close for the day.”

The Government’s plans will see teachers work longer and pay more into their pension funds, but receive less money on retirement.

Mr Little, a teacher at St Ebbe’s Primary School in Oxford, said Oxfordshire NUT members – of which there are about 2,200 – would lose up to £230,000 in pension benefits. Oxfordshire ATL committee member Frank Havemann, maths teacher at Oxford’s Cheney School, said: “Teachers are concerned about the retirement age and the fact that if the scheme makes teaching sufficiently unattractive it is going to make good teachers leave the profession.”

Stuart Robinson, science and ICT teacher at Iffley Mead School in Oxford, said: “I cannot see myself working in a classroom until 68. I do not think I am going to have the physical energy.”

The National Association of Head Teachers’ national executive will decide later this week whether it will take industrial action.

But mum Paula Mitty, 44, of Dunnock Way, Oxford, who has three boys at Orchard Meadow Primary School, said: “I appreciate they do a hard job and want to protect their pensions, but it’s not just them that’s going to be affected. There are parents who are going to struggle to find childcare in time.”