26 July 2018
The DfE made the surprise announcement this week that it will help fund pay rises for teachers next year. But is it all that it seems, and with only so much money in the public sector pot, will it be another case of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’?
The School Teachers’ Review Body has called for the 3.5% rise that the DfE have now confirmed, but despite the headlines, not everybody will be awarded this rise. The 3.5% rise will not apply to all classroom teachers and is just for those on the unqualified teacher and main pay scale. More experienced classroom teachers, on the upper pay scale, will only increase by 2%, and leadership pay ranges will rise by 1.5%. Teaching assistants are unaffected by the announcement. The rise is also less than the 5% demanded by teaching and leadership unions. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that only 40% of teachers in England would be eligible for the higher 3.5% pay rise.
Of course it is also still at each school’s discretion what they pay their teachers. Some teachers, at the very top or bottom of a pay scale, will receive automatic rises, but these scales only apply to local authority maintained schools and academy trusts are free to set their own pay scales. The great majority of academy trusts follow the school teachers’ pay and conditions document ('STPCD') and stick closely to the pay scales, but they do have the option not to. Some of the larger multi-academy trusts in particular negotiate their own pay awards, often slightly preferable to the STPCD to help them attract and retain the very best staff. It seems unlikely that many, if any trusts, will offer pay rises at less than the STPCD rates because of the potential backlash, impact on staff morale, and possible loss of staff. High quality teacher recruitment and retention is already a big issue for many trusts.
Schools were expecting to have to fund the 1% pay rise that would have come into force had the public sector pay not been lifted. Seemingly in a nod to the financial pressures in the sector, the DfE move to fund the remaining increase is welcome. Money will be available for at least the next two years via a teachers’ pay grant. This will be worth a total of £508 million over the next two years.
The big question is how the DfE will find the money to fund the teachers’ pay grant. There appears to be no additional money available from the Treasury and so the DfE will need to find the money themselves, presumably by re-allocating budgets. This may well mean some lose out with cuts to other funding. For now the DfE have only confirmed the money will come from 'unallocated resources' and the full details are expected to follow. The suggestion is that existing programmes such as the strategic school improvement fund may be curbed.
Schools should already have budgeted for the 1% rise, and if the additional 0.5%/1%/2.5% rises are being funded there will be no bottom line impact on academy budgets. The timing of the announcement is nevertheless strange with thousands of academy trusts either busily finalising, or having already submitted, their Budget Forecast Returns for 2018-19. Coupled with the announcement last week that the hard implementation of the National Funding Formula will be delayed by a year, school budgets for 2018-19 and beyond are already out of date.
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