At the general election in July the Labour Party made a commitment to restore public services. Five months later, when the new government announced its intentions on pay for 2025/26, teachers were horrified.
It was a signal that the fight goes on for the status of the profession and the protection of education.
The government’s evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) in England proposed an unfunded 2.8% pay increase for September this year (DfE, 2024).
This in spite of teacher pay being cut by a fifth against inflation since 2010. This in spite of living standards hitting everyone hard. This in spite of teachers having the largest number of unpaid working hours of any profession – and some of the highest workloads (TUC, 2024).
This in spite of a severe recruitment and retention crisis, the worst in decades.
Put simply, any pay deal that is unfunded is not worth the paper it is written on. It could well be yet another real-terms cut against inflation. This is no way to restore the competitiveness of teacher pay and is more likely to make matters worse.
Everyone in education knows that we need a major teacher pay correction. Teacher shortages won’t be tackled unless we reverse the pay cuts against inflation and repair the damage to the pay of teachers relative to other graduate professions and the wider economy.
Of course, the government knows this. Instead of doing the right thing they are expecting schools to make “efficiencies”. That is a very long word for cuts.
But everyone who works in education knows that our schools are already cut to the bone. There are no more efficiencies to be made. It is an insult to suggest otherwise.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Drayton et al, 2025) has reported, school costs are predicted to rise by 3.6% next year, but mainstream funding from government will go up by just 2.2%.
As part of the School Cuts campaign, we recently released new research showing that 76% of primary schools and 94% of secondary schools will not be able to afford their costs this year. Overall, that is a staggering 15,562 schools out of the 19,725 for which we have data.
Just 3% of primary schools and 6% of secondary schools say they are financially secure. An unfunded pay award, such as the 2.8% recommended by government, will deepen that insecurity for the vast majority of schools. School funding will be at its lowest in real terms since 2010.
I have checked and this was not in Labour’s election manifesto. It is not just teachers who were promised an unfunded 2.8% pay increase. It was also nurses.
The struggles in health and education are joined. Both services have been decimated by 14 years of underfunding – Conservative neglect, plain and simple. Both professions are seeing recruitment and retention crises fuelled by excessive workload and pay that has been held back. The problem is, the more pay is held back, the higher workloads increase – and the deeper the crisis gets.
That is why, late last term, I wrote to the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing asking that we work together to convince the prime minister and the chancellor to reverse this decision and make a reality of their promise to repair the NHS and our education service.
More recently, the NEU executive took the difficult decision to proceed with a preliminary ballot of members, asking if they are prepared to strike over pay and funding.
This will open on March 1 and close on April 11. It will establish the strength of feeling about the government’s unfunded 2.8% offer – I am in no doubt that it will be a very clear condemnation. The government would be wise to listen to the profession and fully fund a fair and significantly above-inflation pay rise for all educators.
People voted in this Labour government on a promise of change. Labour politicians promised to value education and to secure the life chances of our children. We want the government to do the right thing and make the investment in education that is essential.
Rather than being the architects of continuity austerity, the new administration must deliver on promises made and commit to prioritising school funding.
- Daniel Kebede is general secretary of the National Education Union. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/daniel-kebede
Further information & resources
- DfE: Policy paper: Evidence to the STRB: 2025 pay award for teachers and leaders, December 2024: www.gov.uk/government/publications/evidence-to-the-strb-2025-pay-award-for-teachers-and-leaders
- Drayton et al: Annual report on education spending in England: 2024–25, IFS, January 2025: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/annual-report-education-spending-england-2024-25
- School Cuts: https://schoolcuts.org.uk/
- TUC: UK workers put in £26 billion worth of unpaid overtime during the last year, 2024: www.tuc.org.uk/news/uk-workers-put-26-billion-worth-unpaid-overtime-during-last-year-tuc-analysis