What Exactly Were Teachers Offered?
By Adi Bloom
How do you find money that you don’t have?
This is a question that has troubled humanity for centuries, if not millennia. Alchemists – whose art involved transforming base metals into gold – existed long before anyone ever phoned a friend for the £1 million answer to a question.
In the 21st century, of course, only fools think you can boil lead to make gold. Fools and, quite possibly, the education secretary. Finding money where there is none now appears to be the official government plan for funding a pay increase for teachers.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan has made the four teaching unions a pay offer: a £1,000 one-off payment for 2022-23, followed by an average 4.5 per cent pay rise for 2023-24. She has pledged to provide additional funding to cover the £1,000 one-off payment, as well as 0.5 per cent of next year’s pay award.
We now reach the part where someone needs to bring in a maths teacher to explain the problem with these calculations. Can we have the maths teacher in here, please?
Pause.
Hello?
Still nothing.
No-one?
Oh, yes. That’s right: there are barely any maths teachers left any more. Fine – could we make do with a physics teacher instead then, please?
No? None of those, either?
On the bright side, the maths here isn’t particularly complicated. Besides, given the shortage of specialist maths teachers, by now pretty much every other teacher in the school has had to have a go at covering a maths lesson.
So here’s the problem: four per cent of the pay rise remains unfunded by the government.
The Department for Education has said that schools will be able to afford to cover this pay rise themselves – and falling energy prices will help. Headteachers didn’t respond immediately, because they were too busy stuffing pages of old textbooks underneath classroom doors, in an effort to keep the heat in.
The NEU teachers’ union says that its analysis shows that between 40 and 58 per cent of schools would not be able to fund the pay rise without making cuts. (Though it’s hard to work out what there is left to cut. Many have already looked at their budgets and deemed teachers a nice-to-have, rather than a necessity. Perhaps they could sell off their buildings, and teach pupils from a tent in the carpark. This would at least deal with the pesky problem of spiralling heating costs.)
The NEU also argues that the deal would mean that pay for teachers in England would fall significantly behind pay for teachers in Scotland and Wales. Nor, it said, would the deal resolve the recruitment and retention crisis.
The union has urged its members to reject the pay offer, in a ballot that closes on 2 April. If it does reject the offer, there will be two further days of strike action: on 27 April and 2 May.
If the union rejects the offer, it will also mean a significant amount of work landing in the lap of Daniel Kebede, who will take over as general secretary of the NEU in August. Kebede is a qualified primary teacher, who has taught all ages, from early years to key stage 4. He has not yet commented on whether he believes that his experience working with toddlers and teenagers will help when it comes to negotiating with the government.
Meanwhile, headteachers are no happier with Gillian Keegan’s pay offer than their staff are. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “We do not believe that this offer addresses the pay erosion the teaching profession has seen for more than a decade.”
Plus, he added, there isn’t sufficient funding available “to meet even this inadequate offer”. Which is the education equivalent of the old joke: “Waiter, the food here is dreadful. And such small portions.”
The NAHT, too, would consider industrial action in protest against the offer. “If members reject the offer,” Whiteman said, “it is clear that industrial action by NAHT members will be necessary.”
In a move that at best demands cries of “Read the room, won’t you?”, the education secretary sent an email to school leaders, attempting to persuade them that her offer was fair. “Whether you have engaged in industrial action in recent months or not, I know all of you care deeply about your pupils and giving them the best possible support,” she wrote.
However, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that Keegan’s email only contained partial facts. For example, it failed to mention that, even with the new pay offer, salaries for experienced and senior teachers in England in 2023 would still be 13 per cent lower than they were in 2010.
His assessment of the situation jumps straight to the “at worst” version: “Her letter isn’t a frank account of the situation,” he said. “It is propaganda.”
Determined to show teachers that theirs can be a glass-half-full world if only they try hard enough to see it, Keegan delivered a speech at the Bett educational technology show in London this week, arguing that they didn’t need to worry, because their workload could soon be decreasing, anyway.
She claimed that artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, could ultimately save teachers time. She talked about using such programs to write lesson plans, and potentially mark pupils’ work. “Could we get to a point where the tasks that really drain teachers’ time are significantly reduced?” she asked. “I think we will.”
No union general secretary was on hand to offer a pithy assessment of this claim. So it was left to the government to undermine its own secretary of state: a leaked government report into teacher workload revealed that a quarter of teachers are thinking of leaving the profession within the next year.
The Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey of 11,000 members of school staff, seen by Schools Week, also found that almost one in five teachers and more than two in five school leaders work a 60-hour week. Two-thirds of teachers said that they spent more than half their working time on tasks other than teaching.
One can only hope that at least some of these non-teaching tasks involved boiling base metals until they alchemised into gold. That may well be the best route to a proper pay rise that teachers have right now.
You can read other articles by Adi Bloom here.
