Pay review body recommends 4% pay rise for teachers - government screwed

[noblegiraffe]

It is being reported that the teachers independent pay review body has recommended a pay rise of close to 4% for teachers. The government told it to recommend 2.8%. Schools can afford about 1.3% with funding increases, anything above that will have to come out of budget cuts.

If the government reject the 4% and go for 2.8%, both main teachers' unions have said that they will immediately start balloting for strike action. If any pay rise is unfunded, strike action is also on the cards.

This is not 'teachers demanding more money', this is the independent pay review body saying that teachers need to be paid more because the profession is underpaid and in crisis.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/strb-recomments-teacher-pay-rise-close-to-4-reports/

It’s definitely part of the recruitment problem, particularly when teaching is competing to recruit graduates from a pool who are considering careers that offer some ability to work from home.

It's precisely this. Same with the NHS, chickens are coming home to roost, gosh who would have thought eh?

without raising taxes there is no money to support the sick and disabled , the NHS including social and mental aspects both of which I would prioritise over teachers

perhaps people could propose solutions that are palatable ( tax the rich isn’t good enough - do you mean raid people’s pensions plans, taxes on homes worth over a million, businesses not in the uk , inheritance and would your suggestion mean you pay more )

The solution to that problem is not to ‘reform’ (ie make worse) the pension. The teachers in receipt of pensions now paid what was asked of them, and were paid what was agreed, in the expectation of the pension that they are now getting. To reduce that would be grossly unfair (far worse a fate than that affecting the WASPI women, for example).

Reducing pension provision for future pensioners is also a terrible idea and just stores up problems for the future.

If teachers aren’t joining the TPS now that is very bad financial planning on their part (IMO). I can understand COL pressures but cutting down pension contributions is about the least sensible thing you can do.

The solution to the problem is multi-faceted and involves both better pay and reduced COL. But the measures to achieve it won’t be popular.

It’s partly that. But it’s too simplistic to say that the NHS (say) is ‘under funded’. It’s funded more now than ever. The problem is that it’s under funded relative to demand. It’s the demand that is the issue. What can be done about the fact that there are far more old people than ever, a lot of whom cost a lot of money to keep alive?
That’s not a dig at the elderly, just a fact.

If more money is going to be spent on schools I’d be happier if it went towards SEN support and teaching assistants

We had a quick meeting at my school this yesterday re the budget-it's looking like we will have to make nearly all of our support staff redundant if this 4% comes in unfunded.

Here’s some:

• Digital transaction tax
• Abolish IHT but replace with a gift receipt tax paid by the recipients of all inheritances, paid at marginal income tax rate.
• Take Social Care out of Councils and into the control of the NHS. This would generate enormous efficiencies.
• Reform Council Tax to allow for more bands. Allow for payments to be deferred and for charges to be placed on properties instead, to help asset rich / cash poor people.
• Immediate one-off tax on cash and investment balances over £10m.
• 100% tax on interest on balances above £10m
• Imposition of rent controls on all private rented properties
• Imposition of significant property taxes on 2nd (and 3rd etc) homes, with incentives for private landlords to sell to not for profit landlords.

Well that requires a national conversation about what the public want the NHS to fund, how much they themselves are prepared to contribute, and how those contributions could be made.

@Redlocks30 that’s appalling! How incredibly short sighted. It’s the students that will suffer! And of course the staff that will be losing their jobs.

If more money is going to be spent on schools I’d be happier if it went towards SEN support and teaching assistants

Which all sounds very noble until your kid is the one without a teacher in their exam years.

People seem to think that we have enough teachers and this is about paying the ones we have more as a nice to have rather than a necessary measure to support recruitment in a profession where there are critical shortages.

Absolutely it does. It’s obviously a tough conversation but honesty is required when modern medicine is as technologically advanced and expensive as it now is. NYE Bevan didn’t contemplate proton beam therapy machines at £25m a pop when the NHS was founded.

This is part of a wider issue with the public sector. We've just been offered 3.2% in social services / local government. It sounds reasonable and does come off the back of a couple years of larger pay rises, but like teaching, we had a decade of below inflation pay rises.

Not sure what it's like in Children's, but in my Adult's service, we are hemorrhaging staff. Some teams have someone stepping up as temporary manager and one agency worker covering that specialism for the entire county.

The UK has some serious structural problems that need addressing. We can't have Nordic levels public services with American levels of taxation, and it's time the public wake up to that. Hard choices need to be made. Our aging population means it's only going to get worse as more people fall out of work and are dependent on the state for their income.

In the last few years we have made all our midday supervisors and all but one of cleaners redundant. We’ve hugely cut support staff hours. We haven't replaced any staff that have left. Several of our classes have “class teachers” that are actually HLTAs or cover supervisors. Heating is turned low in rooms where there are children and OFF in offices to save costs. We can’t afford any sort of pay rise!

@heroinechic what is the answer then? The majority of school costs (70 - 80%) are staffing. The funding they get is limited, if staffing costs increase and no additional funding and schools aren’t allowed to run a deficit what can they do?

No one seems to have mentioned labour’s VAT on private school fees with the money raised supposedly funding public services this year, specifically education.

Yeah right. Instead we have state schools under even more pressure as previously privately educated kids are put into the state system.

schools are indeed screwed.

Imagine how much worse it would be without that VAT eh?

And Nye Bevan didn't expect people to rock up to their GP for coughs and sniffles.

We need the population to stop expecting champagne service on lemonade budget.

@crumblingschools I’m afraid I’m not qualified to offer all the answers, but if the money isn’t there then the obvious answer is no 4% pay rise for teachers at the moment, especially if it means that the support staff (who are already very low in numbers) will lose their jobs.

Perhaps they can encourage teacher recruitment by suspending fees for the PGCE for a few years to encourage people who already have degrees to retrain into teaching, or generally making access to qualification easier. If they don’t stay within the profession for a certain number of years they have to pay the PGCE cost back at a staggered figure (I.e 80% if they leave within 2 years, 40% if they leave within 4 years etc).

Is there any evidence that this money is being funnelled into the state system?

Tax the rich. Anyone with a billion should have half taken off them.

Well the education budget has gone up by £2.3bn this year. VAT might raise £1.5bn so I guess there’d be £1.5bn less than that £2.3bn if it wasn’t for the VAT.

@heroinechic currently a third of teachers leave after 5 years of qualifying. Teachers already have to pay back fees under student loan mechanism. Conditions need to improve, and it isn't all about pay.

I was only in the TPS Sept 18 -Dec 24, (career changer to teaching at 54) but got a 30k lump sum and now 6k a year pension /more than I would have expected for that time period, and this was the less generous later TPS. My closing salary was just over 50k (enhanced payment for experience outside teaching. That, together with the long holidays seemed pretty good remuneration to me.
Yes conditions can be improved but if teachers aren’t permitted to strike over that then yes if they strike they are only striking for more money.

Its difficult for people outside of teaching to appreciate the issues within teaching.
Acadamisation has lead to a massive increase in management posts in schools with a relatively small number of individuals taking a large proportion of the budget in a school.
So you can have secondary classroom teachers on between £35K-£45K who teach upwards of 350 different individuals, planning up to 21 hours of lessons every week and marking up to 350 books.
This compared to senior teachers who earn £55K+ who might only teach a couple of 6th form lessons to less than a dozen students.
Removing a senior teacher from a structure has far less impact on student teaching (see above ) but that rarely happens.
Instead it is normally the experienced teacher who is lost/made redundant/pushed to early retirement. This has a much greater impact on students , but parents rarely complain.
This is why massive injections of money for teacher pay has little effect on pupil outcomes or teacher retention. The money being put in needs targetting at the teachers who have most pupil contact.
The return of schools to LEA control to cut admin costs and direct funds back to the chalkface would save millions and allow proper funding of teachers.

Regarding pensions. The gold plated pension of the Boomer generation went out about a decade ago. The new TP although good, does not have the value it used to have.
Finally, the shortage of teachers in STEM subjects is directly linked to pay. Why would a 25 year old accept a teaching job at £30K after a PGCE and a couple of years experience when they can earn £50K with the same degree and 2 years in industry?

The workload is unbearable partly because we are understaffed. We are understaffed because the pay hasn’t kept pace with comparable roles.