Teacher pay cap to stay but PM warned schools will lose staff
The 1 per cent cap on teachers’ pay increases will remain in place, the education Secretary announced yesterday.
Justine Greening said she accepted the headline findings of the independent School Teachers’ Review Body that pay should rise by 1 per cent in September.
It means 500,000 teachers in england and Wales face a seventh consecutive year of pay restraint.
The decision was made despite the STRB’s warnings that the cumulative impact of pay restraint may mean schools struggle to recruit and hold on to good staff.
The review body said further pay restraint ‘presents a substantial risk’ to school standards, and called for the cap to be lifted in future years.
The warning will pile pressure on Chancellor Philip hammond to ease the public sector pay cap at the Budget in the autumn.
he headed off a Cabinet revolt over the issue last week, after warning ministers that taxes would have to rise to cover the £5billion cost of increasing public sector pay by an extra 1 per cent.
The cap is due to run until 2020 to help tackle the deficit. But ministers have said they will ‘listen’ to the advice of the pay review bodies, whose work covers more than five million public sector workers.
In a report yesterday, the STRB said: ‘ We consider it likely that further uplifts of more than 1 per cent will be required to elements of the pay framework in the coming years … to make pay more competitive for teachers.’
In a bleak warning, it added: ‘ We are deeply concerned about the cumulative effect of these trends on teacher supply. We consider that this presents a substantial risk to the functioning of an effective education system.’
The report notes that cashstrapped schools have been offered no additional funding to cover a pay rise – and says that even paying an additional 1 per cent will require some to take ‘difficult decisions’.
The STRB’s findings mean some teachers starting their careers will qualify for a 2 per cent rise as minimum salaries are increased, though even this is below the 2.9 per cent inflation rate.
But Miss Greening said the overall recommendations ‘are consistent with the Government’s 1 per cent public sector pay policy’.
She added: ‘ Following previous reforms, schools already have significant flexibility, within the pay ranges, to set pay for individual teachers, taking account of performance and retention.’ A Department for education spokesman said: ‘We recognise and value the hard work of teachers which is why we have accepted the pay deal proposed by the independent STRB in line with the 1 per cent public sector pay policy.
‘This will ensure we continue to strike the balance between being fair to public sector workers and fair to taxpayers.’
Some ministers, including Boris Johnson, Jeremy hunt and Michael Gove are pushing for the pay cap to be axed. But last week, Prime Minister Theresa May came down on the side of Mr hammond, who has warned any additional pay rise would have to be funded by taxes or spending cuts.
The Treasury is due to publish the remit for next year’s pay round in the coming weeks.
Unless the remit allows them to increase total pay by more than 1 per cent, the review bodies that rule on the pay of groups including teachers, nurses and police officers will have little choice but to continue with the cap.
Last week Mrs May said the findings of the pay bodies would be ‘very carefully considered’, but added that ‘we need to be fair to public sector workers, to protect jobs in the public sector and to be fair to those who pay for it’.
Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said the Government’s decision meant teachers faced ‘a real terms pay cut’. The Lib Dems last night described the 1 per cent rise for teachers as ‘an insult’.
The NUT’s Kevin Courtney said: ‘This is a missed opportunity which the Government will come to regret as the teacher recruitment and retention crisis gets worse.’
Chris Keates of the NASUWT union described the pay cap as ‘disgraceful’, adding: ‘everyone except the Government appears to accept that there is a crisis in teacher supply.’
‘Recruitment crisis’