The TES is reporting that funding for teachers’ pay rises is to be limited to an annual 1 per cent for four years between 2016-2020…
Chancellor George Osborne announced in the budget today that public sector pay rises would be 1 per cent for 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20. A Treasury spokeswoman confirmed to TES that this would apply to funding for teacher pay.
Some teachers are set for a 2 per cent pay rise from September 2015, and the spokeswoman said this would not be affected by today’s announcement.
Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said: “The Chancellor cannot continue to hold teachers’ pay behind private sector pay and expect teaching to remain an attractive profession. It would be a recipe for disaster to have fewer teachers when it’s expected that there will be thousands more pupils in schools…”
More at: Teachers’ pay rises limited to 1 per cent for four years
Fwiw I’m not sure how accurate Mary Bousted’s claim is on the state of teachers’ pay against private sector pay (at least as detailed in the most recent DfE submission to the STRB – see this chart) as it has been a tough few years for many in the private sector too.
However, presumably this will come down to supply and demand and if the recruitment crisis escalates surely the government will have no option but to increase pay to attract/retain more in the profession?
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SchoolsImprove Private sector suffered pay cuts, pension holidays, lived within means.
rrunsworth Yes – I don’t think Mary Bousted’s comments on public v private stand up – hence the graph I linked to at the end
SchoolsImprove Indeed. Think they are automatically conditioned to make these comments.
SchoolsImprove having just completed a Secondary PGCE in MFL I can see why people leave teaching. Overworked and underpaid. Not for me!
SchoolsImprove if you think its the pay which is keeping people out you are mistaken.
Dai_James1942 SchoolsImprove Doesn’t help though!
When I started out in teaching senior teachers/ Headteachers tended to live in large, double fronted houses in the ‘nicer’ suburbs. They had holidays abroad and many had ‘a little place in France’. These have all now retired very comfortably. Now you will be lucky if you can afford an ex- local authority property way out of the centre of town/ city or in a run down area or be in a ‘shared ownership’ scheme and have an occasional camping trip.
I acknowledge this is still a better position that many are in and it’s not really about ‘property’ but about status and being valued and your worth acknowledged.
rrunsworth SchoolsImprove ‘pension holidays – wasn’t that the consequence of Lawson’s Law brought in when Thatcher was around. Both the CBI and the TUC warned it would result in the collapse of private pensions.
And so it came to pass. But it’s the public sector which is to blame, apparently.
That should help the teacher recruitment and retention ‘challenge’.
Janet2 rrunsworth SchoolsImprove The Thatcher government also sanctioned raids on ‘overfunded’ pension schemes claiming that should schemes ever become underfunded then they would be topped up by employers. Ho ho ho
SchoolsImprove freezing pay and undermining the profession is the way to attract teachers?