Further strains on school budgets reach the headlines this week in the form of teachers lobbying for additional funding to be allocated for a 5% pay rise. Earlier in the month, it was announced that many schools could face severe cuts to their budgets as governments intend to level out the budgets allocated to state-funded institutions. However, it has now come to light that the public sector pay cap has resulted in a retention crisis in schools as teachers look elsewhere for better-paid opportunities. Unions are therefore demanding an immediate 5% pay rise for teaching staff to be provided by government funds to improve the retention rates of staff.
The teaching salary has remained stagnant for the past seven years because of the pay cap initiated by the government that saw many other public-sector staff, such as NHS workers, seeing the same salary suppression.
Union leaders highlighted in a letter to the education secretary, Justine Greening, that teachers pay are ranked significantly behind other graduate professions, and this is one of the reasons why the teacher supply problem is critical. The letter further indicates that this issue is causing “a substantial risk to the functioning of an effective education system.”
Within another letter, that saw the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, the National Education Union, the UCAC and Voice join forces, it was argued that the teacher salary is no longer competitive within the market. Because of this, it can make opportunities in other industries more appealing for recent graduates. Meanwhile, the waning pay rates and increasing levels of accountability are steering current teachers out of the profession altogether.
The letter also states: “No education system can exceed the quality of its teachers. In England, we are failing to recruit sufficient trainee teachers, particularly in the EBacc subjects which the government requires schools in England to offer to the majority of their pupils.”
The letter highlights an increase in pay as the main solution for the growing issue of recruitment, commenting: “The situation is now so critical that it requires firm and decisive action. In order to support and secure recruitment and retention… we believe that teachers must be given an immediate pay rise of 5% in 2018 as a step towards this.”
In September, it was announced by the chief secretary to the Treasury that skill shortages have encouraged the government to consider a pay rise above the 1% limit for the following year. Unions felt this was the step in the right direction but worried, at the time, that the government would extract this money from the already over-stretched school budgets. The government, therefore, promised to assign the £1.3bn saved from other departments to fund state schools; however, unions have indicated that this budget is simply not enough to alleviate the funding pressures of schools.
Teachers, along with other public-sector workers, will lobby for more money to be assigned in budget allocations this month for salaries.
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Article by: Steve Stiles