Money, Money, Money
It makes the world go around. It’s always funny in a rich man’s world. It makes Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof break out into diddle-diddle-dums.
Yup, money. As the subject of songs, it is perhaps second only to love. And yet, like love, its absence shapes lives and leads to rash decisions and desperate acts.
Or, indeed, to control freakery and delusion. Enter Gillian Keegan, who this week invited education unions to formal talks about pay, on the condition that next week’s planned strikes were called off.
This feels like the pay-dispute version of the Stanford marshmallow experiment, where small children were offered the choice between one marshmallow right now, or two later, if they were able to resist eating the one on the table in front of them. Except, of course, that Keegan hasn’t put the marshmallow on the table in front of them: she’s showing them an upturned cup, and asking the unions to believe that there’s a marshmallow hidden underneath it.
Or, as Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, put it: “There is nothing substantial in the secretary of state’s letter that suggests to us we should call off strikes for next week.”
The following day, however, the NEU countered with a hidden marshmallow of their own. They would be prepared to pause next week’s strikes, they said, “if the government comes forward with a serious proposal to end the dispute ahead of Saturday and we consider it compelling enough.”
Perhaps marshmallows are the wrong point of comparison here. Perhaps, in fact, it’s more accurate to think of Keegan as a carpet seller in a Central Asian souk. The NEU are the carpet-buying tourists, eager to show that they are no foreign fools.
“You don’t have to buy my carpet,” says Keegan, drinking her mint tea through a sugar lump. “This is a good-quality carpet. Plenty of other people will be willing to buy it if you don’t.”
Kevin Courtney carefully puts down his own tulip glass. “Your price is too high,” he says. “Can you offer me a better price?”
Keegan clutches her chest, miming offence. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “Agree to buy the carpet, and I promise I’ll give you a good price. Best price.”
Courtney is equally incredulous: “You want me to agree to buy the carpet before you’ve told me how much it’s going to cost?”
Keegan takes another swig of tea. “You have my word I’ll give you the best price.” She whips out her card machine. “Visa or Mastercard?”
Courtney stands up. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m leaving.”
And now the entire teaching profession waits to see whether Keegan will run after Courtney into the lanes of the souk, card machine waving, undercutting her own previous best offers with every step away that he takes.
Meanwhile, school leaders are concerned that they will be joining Keegan in the souk, forced to sell the carpets from under the feet of their pupils to fund a proposed new pay rise for teachers.
The School Teachers’ Review Body has recommended a three per cent pay rise for teachers from September this year. In its evidence to the STRB, published this week, the DfE said that this pay rise would be “affordable” for schools. So too would be the increase in teacher starting salaries, from £28,000 to £30,000.
“Affordable”, of course, is all relative: heating the building is probably affordable if you only employ teachers for half the classes.
Meanwhile, the DfE’s statement indicated that there would be no further funding for schools to cover the pay increase, other than the money already allocated in the chancellor’s autumn statement. It said that it was up to school leaders “to carefully plan their budgets to manage the 2023 teacher pay award within core funding”.
But multi-academy trust CEOs and headteachers have said that finding the money to meet these costs will be impossible. They added that they would consider delaying recruitment, not replacing departing staff or even restructuring staff teams in order to reduce costs. It turns out that only employing teachers for half the classes is an actual budget-balancing strategy in education in 2023.
But it’s not just teachers who are expendable – learning is, too. Nine out of 10 schools have already made cuts to their spending over the last 12 months, with 73 per cent reducing spending on learning resources, according to a new DfE survey.
Of more than 3,300 teachers and school leaders questioned, 71 per cent said the cuts had reduced staff morale. And 69 per cent said that they had increased teacher workload – which is inevitable, really, if you have fewer learning resources to draw on. The vast majority of those surveyed said that they anticipated needing to make further cuts over the coming year.
Anyone wondering what there is left to cut, once you’ve taken out teachers and learning resources, might be cheered to hear that schools do already have a handy cost-cutting strategy built into their staffing structure. This is the fact that they employ a largely female workforce.
Analysis by the Trades Union Congress has revealed that women working in teaching and other education roles effectively work for free for an average of 81 days a year, when their salaries are compared with those of men in the same sector.
The analysis, calculated using data from the Office for National Statistics, showed that the pay gap between the sexes in education is 22.2 per cent. Only the financial and insurance sector had a larger pay gap.
Meanwhile – because every little helps in straitened times – the government is developing a new teaching-degree apprenticeship for aspiring teachers without degrees. In other words, one suspects, cheaper teachers.
In its submission to the STRB (which, you may recall, offered a pay rise to teachers in exchange for their headteachers’ immortal souls), the DfE said that it was developing a teaching apprenticeship that would allow students to gain both qualified teacher status and a degree while doing the job. At the moment, teacher-training apprenticeships are only offered at postgraduate level.
Teacher-recruitment targets this year have been missed with same regularity with which Gillian Keegan fails to sell a carpet for the full asking price. The DfE hopes that, by bribing would-be teachers with the promise of qualifications without student debt, they might improve on these numbers. Unions, meanwhile, suggest that low pay and high workload may also need to be addressed.
But it’s not all doom, gloom and empty bank accounts in education. No, really.
More than half of the country’s largest multi-academy trusts increased the six-figure salaries of their top earners last year, despite teachers and heads facing a pay freeze.
An analysis by Tes revealed that most of the multi-academy trusts running 25 or more schools increased the salary of their chief executive in 2021-22. One trust increased the salary of its highest earner by at least £55,000, or 31 per cent. (Six trusts paid their chief executive less in 2021-22 than in the preceding year.)
In the absence of teachers and learning resources, you need to take your lessons wherever you can find them. So here is today’s: it’s possible to work in schools and still be able to afford to heat and light your own home, after all, provided you’re the one running the schools. Everyone else is working for hidden marshmallows.
You can find more articles by Adi Bloom here.
