With the general election looming and the predictions that the Conservatives could suffer its worst performance in history, you might expect the party to be doing everything it can to extend an olive branch to a teaching profession battered and bruised from 14 years of Tory rule.
Not a bit of it. We have just witnessed a Spring Budget which contained no new measures to even begin to address the crisis this government has created in teacher supply, children’s services, school budgets, or school buildings.
More than that – the message from the Chancellor was to demand that already overworked and overstretched teachers and school leaders work more efficiently.
And, despite the crisis which this government has created in teacher supply, ministers are continuing to insist that the pay review body should hold back in its central recommendations on teachers’ pay.
In its belated submission to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), ministers called for a “return to a more sustainable level” of pay awards. That’s code for a below-inflation award for teachers.
This against a backdrop where inflation remains high and when teachers’ pay has seen a real-terms fall of more than 20% over the last decade when measured against inflation.
The NASUWT has called for a minimum 8% award for all teachers and headteachers. It also needs to be fully funded. We think that is the least that is needed, given the extent of the difficulties schools are facing in recruiting and retaining teachers.
The government has only met its own targets for teacher recruitment once in the last nine years and last year recruitment into secondary teacher training programmes was only 50% of the target required to sustain teacher numbers.
Government data shows that in 2021 less than half of those who had entered the teaching profession 10 years previously were still employed as teachers in state schools, while 40,000 teachers left teaching for reasons other than retirement in 2021/22.
It is not sustainable for the taxpayer to foot the bill for training new teachers only for large numbers of them to drop out of the profession within the first decade, burned out and demoralised by unsustainable workloads and declining levels of pay.
It is not sustainable for teachers to be increasingly expected to teach outside their subject specialism or age range because schools are struggling to fill teaching vacancies, nor for students to be routinely taught by these teachers.
The very idea that the last two pay awards were in some way unsustainable is a fallacy in itself. The pay awards of 6.5% in 2023 and 5% in 2022 were still below the rate of inflation and came after 14 years of real-terms pay cuts.
We calculate that teachers and school leaders who have remained in the profession since 2010 are in effect between £42,088 and £262,562 worse off, in real terms, depending on where they sit on the pay scale, due to the cumulative shortfall in pay.
After 14 years of real-terms pay cuts, and a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention which is getting worse by the day, teachers will expect the pay review body to do its job free from the shackles of government.
The country wants a world-class education for our children and young people. But this government thinks we can have world-class standards on the cheap. If this government refuses to deliver the change that is needed, we need a government that is willing to work with us to do so.
That’s the message we will be making ahead of the general election – teachers, children and young people deserve better.
- Dr Patrick Roach is general secretary of the NASUWT. Find his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/dr-patrick-roach