One of the key problems is the NEU haven’t emphasised that they want funded pay rises. They have just stressed pay. On their own website this is what it says about the strikes:
Why have NEU members voted to take strike action?
Pay for experienced teachers has fallen by one fifth in real terms since 2010. And now Britain is facing the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. Yet while your bills keep going up, your pay is not keeping pace.
Energy bills are soaring, inflation is at 12.3 per cent (August 2022) – a forty-year high. But the Government is suggesting experienced teachers’ pay should only go up by five per cent this year. This is a seven per cent cut.
Long hours and poor pay are the main reasons teachers are leaving the profession in their droves. This Government is presiding over one of the worst recruitment and retention crises ever seen in education.
Children are losing out because there are not enough teachers. Even when there is a teacher in the classroom, increasingly they are not qualified in the subject they are teaching. Parents and grandparents hear their children and grandchildren talking about ‘new’ teachers in the middle of the school year; of lessons being ‘covered’ by supply teachers, of teachers leaving. Lack of qualified teachers harms the education that children and young people receive.
To save education, we must take action to ensure that educators get an inflation-plus pay increase.
None of that mentions that schools are funding pay rises.