UNISON has launched a ballot of more than 360,000 local government workers in England and Wales, asking them if they’re prepared to take strike action over their pay.
The six-week ballot closes on July 4 and among those being balloted are 150,000 school support staff.
The local government employers have offered a pay increase of £1,925 for 2023. While that might seem tempting at first glance, food prices, energy bills and other everyday costs are rising faster than wages and the offer is well below inflation, wherever you are on the pay scale.
And it’s also the “full-time equivalent” pay rise – so those on term-time-only contracts and those who are part-time would get a smaller amount.
So this offer represents yet more managed decline in school pay, continuing the deterioration in the value of pay that we’ve seen since 2010.
In the meantime, school support staff are having to contend with a massive cost-of-living crisis. Our own survey results, which I wrote about recently in SecEd, make clear the scale and nature of the problem.
Half of school support staff are actively looking for better paid work, 28% told us that they’re having to take on second or even third jobs to make ends meet, and 43% have had to borrow money from family to tide themselves over.
Most alarmingly, research by Portsmouth University (Hall & Webster, 2022) found that 96% of teaching assistants said their pay was not enough to cover their needs. This is not an acceptable state of affairs for anyone – and especially not those who provide such vital services to our children and young people.
That is why we are balloting our members on whether they want to take strike action as part of our campaign for a better pay increase.
We know this is a hard call for many staff, and we don’t do this lightly. School support staff are committed to their jobs, and they want to carry on providing the excellent education and support that they always have. So we wouldn’t ask our members to vote yes to action if there was any other way.
We also know that the funding crisis in schools is real. Schools are forced to deal with insufficient funding every year. This is harming the education of millions of children and it’s leaving the workforce underpaid and over-worked.
Research by Landman Economics for UNISON has shown that even with increased funding promised for each pupil in last year’s Autumn Statement, real-terms funding remains significantly below 2010 levels. A pupil who started school in 2010 will have lost out on £5,384 of funding as a result of government cuts and inflation. And between 2010/11 and 2022/23, per-pupil spending fell from £7,274 to £6,982 – a drop of 4% (see UNISON, 2023).
This funding crisis has resulted in a lack of resources going into our children’s education, low pay, staff leaving their jobs, redundancies and unsafe school buildings. It’s high time the government takes responsibility for the damage their policies have caused and implements urgent steps to rectify this.
That’s why we’re making clear that while the employers need to make a decent pay offer, the government needs to fund it. We’re campaigning hard for more money from Westminster for schools, including for school support staff pay.
For this reason, while we’re campaigning for more money for schools, and for the wider local government family, we need the employers’ side to join with us. If they’re right that employers cannot afford any more, then they need to be far more vocal in demanding more from central government.
Because at Westminster level, the money is there. Compare the choices that the government made in its Spring Budget: it would cost just £1bn to fund a decent pay rise for local government workers and school support staff, but instead the government announced tax cuts of £9bn for big businesses. Oil and gas companies making record profits could be charged proper windfall taxes that could help to properly fund our public services.
Meanwhile, half of the cost of paying our members a decent increase would be recouped due to increased tax revenue and reduced spending on benefits.
Our children and young people deserve the best start in life – and that means well-resourced schools with support staff as well as teachers working together to ensure an excellent education. After years of real-terms pay cuts, those support staff deserve support from us all. We’re asking them to vote for strike action to send a message: they need fair pay for the vital work that they do.
- Mike Short is head of education at UNISON.
Further information
- Hall & Webster: From Covid to the cost of living: The crises remaking the role of teaching assistants, Education Research, Innovation and Consultancy Unit, University of Portsmouth, 2022.
- UNISON: Cuts since 2010 have cost pupils £5,000 each in lost education, 2023: https://bit.ly/3Wtn7oA