At the end
of July 2019, the Government again belatedly released the latest recommendations of
the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) for the 2019/20 national pay award for teachers in England.
STRB share
responsibility for the disastrous effects of pay restraint and performance pay
This was
the STRB’s 29th Report since it was set up under the Conservative Government
in 1991, as part of the neo-liberal ‘education reform’ measures designed to
undermine teacher trade unionism and to cut and privatise education. In the
succeeding three decades, where teacher trade unions in England have been left without
direct negotiating rights over national pay and conditions, the Tories’
original objectives have largely been achieved. Pay levels have fallen overall
while teacher workload has risen, a clear national pay structure has been
shattered by performance pay and ‘freedom’ for schools to set their own pay scales,
and school budgets have been cut with UK education spending as a proportion of
GDP falling back to levels last seen in the 1960s.
In all
those years the STRB has, of course, proved to be far from the ‘independent’
body that it claims to be. In reality, the Review Body’s various dignitaries
have, with very few exceptions, faithfully carried out their role of making
recommendations in line with Government policy – i.e. pay restraint and, as was
their remit from the outset, to “consider how the pay of schoolteachers might
be more closely related to their performance”. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1991/dec/17/teachers-pay-and-conditions-act-1987.
The
members of the STRB have to share responsibility for the disastrous effects
these policies have had on teacher retention and morale. Ironically, with the
greater ‘freedoms’ that academy chains were given to ignore the findings of the
STRB altogether, some chains, like E-Act, are now discussing using them to get
rid of performance pay in their schools because of the damaging effect it has
had on teamwork and creativity. https://www.tes.com/news/meet-academy-boss-who-wants-scrap-performance-related-pay.
2019 Report fails to seriously challenge the
spending limits placed on them by Government
The latest
remit given by the Secretary of State to the STRB in 2018 contained an obvious
contradiction. It asked them for recommendations that would “promote
recruitment and retention, within the bounds of affordability across the school
system as a whole”. But, of course, unless the imposed spending limits are
seriously challenged, teacher pay and conditions, and the resulting teacher retention
crisis, cannot be seriously addressed.
The
Government remit stated that only a 2% increase in
per teacher pay was affordable nationally. Faced with the damning evidence that
it had collected about the threat of teacher shortages (see below), the STRB recommendations
pushed that figure up slightly to a 2.75% increase for 2019/20 and this
has been accepted by Government. For the full 2019 STRB Report, see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-teachers-review-body-29th-report-2019.
A 2.75% pay
award is still only equivalent to current RPI inflation. It does nothing to
address the 15% fall in the real terms value of teachers’ pay since 2010
estimated by the NEU. The STRB doesn’t challenge this claim, itself accepting that
“A decade of relative decline has taken the teachers’ national pay framework
too low in relation to the graduate labour market and the wider economy”.
Instead of
demanding the additional funding needed to significantly increase salaries, the
STRB Report makes clear that their 2.75% recommendation was based without any “assumptions
about additional funding being provided to schools by
the Government from September 2019”. While the Report accepts that “for
some schools, the implementation of a pay uplift in September 2019 will be a
significant challenge” their main emphasis is on the ‘autonomy’ that schools
have both over their finances and over individual performance pay decisions, and
the fact that most schools still carry surpluses from past savings. In other
words, when push comes to shove, it’s up to schools to balance their budgets
not for the Government to fund schools adequately.
While most
schools might still be formally in surplus, the reality, as acknowledged in the
STRB Report when reporting on Education Policy Institute’s 2019 research, https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/school-revenue-balances/,
is that 48 per cent of maintained primary schools and 60 per cent of maintained
secondary schools spent more than their income in 2017-18. 30% of maintained secondary
schools are already in actual deficit with an average deficit of a staggering
£484,000! (Fig 32).
The danger
is clearly therefore that some cash-strapped schools will indeed try to hold
back their pay bill in other ways, particularly through denying pay
progression. Alternatively, more jobs and resources could be cut to pay for
increased pay costs.
Schools should
refuse to make such invidious choices and budget for what is needed to fund pay
progression and annual increases for all staff, as well as the staffing and
non-staffing resources needed to meet needs. In turn, Local Authorities should
support schools going into deficit as a result and call Boris Johnson’s bluff. In
standing to become the new Tory leader, Johnson promised more school spending.
So, rather than make cuts, schools should demand the Tories – or whatever Government
might emerge over the next weeks and months – provides the funding needed.
Interestingly,
the STRB itself cautions that prioritising short-term savings “instead of teacher
supply through an investment in pay” will only lead to “additional costs and
reduced productivity across the education system in the longer term”. It does advise the Government to make funding
for teachers’ pay a priority in their forthcoming Spending Review. Of course, what
is really needed is a Government that is seriously investing in education and for
the future, not just considering the usual short-term objectives of capitalist economics.
2019 STRB
Report confirms the depth of the recruitment and retention crisis
As with previous
STRB Reports, the data hidden within the 2019 Report reveals the real costs of
failing to invest in staff salaries and education as a whole and is in
contradiction with its final timid pay recommendation that fails to challenge
the Government’s spending limits.
The STRB’s
summary of its findings on teacher recruitment and retention presents what it
itself describes as “a worrying picture”, made worse by the fact that rising
pupil numbers mean more teachers will be needed in future, particularly in secondary
schools. They include these facts:
·
The Government’s target for recruitment to
postgraduate Initial Teacher Training (ITT) was missed in 2018/19 for the
seventh successive year.
·
Retention rates for teachers in the early
years of their careers have continued to worsen.
·
Retention
rates are starting to deteriorate for experienced teachers, and there has been
a marked increase in the number of teachers aged over 50 leaving the
profession.
·
Retention rates for head teachers have also fallen
in recent years.
The STRB
Report shows how, in the latest year where there is data available - up to
November 2017 - the number of teachers leaving the profession was slightly greater
than the number joining (both figures are around 10% of the overall numbers of
full-time equivalent teachers in state schools. This translates into a 1 in 10
annual teacher turnover in schools, although in some schools it will be considerably
higher, causing considerable instability for both staff and students (STRB 2019
Fig.1).
This fall
in the overall number of full-time equivalent teachers is happening at the same
time as pupil numbers continue to rise. As the Report also explains, this translates
into an ongoing trend of increasing pupil to teacher ratios in both the primary
and secondary sectors. Again, this can only be damaging to education.
While the
annual leaving rate of around 10% of the profession has been fairly consistent
over recent years, Figure 7 within the 2019 Report illustrates a significant
change in who is leaving teaching. With an increasing divergence between
the two figures over recent years, the vast majority of leavers are now through
resignations ‘out of service’ rather than teachers retiring at the end of their
careers.
Pay is a
significant factor behind the recruitment crisis
Some argue
that pay is not a significant factor for teachers. Clearly other pressures, not
least intolerable levels of workload, are also significant – pressures which,
if the STRB were serious about their concerns, should also be addressed by a recommendation
that the effectively open-ended nature of working hours set out under the
current Pay and Conditions Document is removed.
Of course,
pay and workload are linked, particularly when teachers consider what their hourly
rate of pay might be. For example, a Newly Qualified Teacher on M1 in England will now have a monthly gross salary of £2,031. However, if they are working, as many will be, 60 hours a
week, that works out at less than £8 an hour! That may well have to cover
pension contributions and student loan repayments too.
There is
an interesting observation in the Appendix to the STRB Report describing meetings
with teachers on school visits carried out by STRB members: “Even when [some] teachers
did view their overall level of pay as fair in itself, their outlook changed
when workload was factored in. When taking account of the hours worked, these
teachers did not consider the level of remuneration received to be reasonable”.
Overall,
the STRB’s clear view is that the “steady decline in
the competitiveness of the teachers’ pay framework is a significant contributor
to teacher supply difficulties”. They evidence that decline by pointing out
that:
·
Median starting salaries for other graduate
careers remain higher than those for teachers in most areas of England, and the
earnings of experienced teachers are lower than those available in other professional occupations.
·
Over the last decade, the position of the
national teachers’ pay framework in the earnings distributions for both professional occupations and the
wider economy has deteriorated. In other words, more people in more occupations
are becoming better paid than teachers (STRB Fig 13).
STRB 2019 Fig 14 shows that the gap
between the median earnings of teachers aged 21 to 30 and others in this age
group in professional occupations is stark – and getting worse across England.
London Pay
As
the chart above confirms, the gap in earnings is particularly pronounced in
London. The latest recommendations will increase the effective “London Weighting”
for a teacher working in London compared to the rest of England and Wales – but
will continue to fail to adequately compensate for the greater cost of living
in the capital.
The
STRB Report contains some anecdotes that confirm the particular difficulty
facing teachers in London. It states that “we were told that teachers in London
schools often left at the point when they wanted to start a family as they
could not afford housing” and that “all of the NQTs we spoke to in Tower
Hamlets said that they had opted out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, with one
telling us this was because they “needed every penny” to afford to live in the
area” (STRB 2019 Appendix C).
Retention
crisis includes the loss of experienced teachers as well as newly qualified
staff
The STRB
had been asked to consider targeting increases towards early career teachers to
address the particularly high turnover amongst that group of teachers.
The
data provided certainly confirms the scale of the problem, and that it’s a
problem that is only getting worse (STRB 2019 Fig. 19)
·
Between 2011 and 2017, the percentage of
teachers leaving within three years’ service increased from 20 per cent to 27
per cent, while the percentage leaving within their first five years increased
from 27 per cent to 33 per cent over the same period.
·
The
leaving rate between 1 and 2 years’ service has increased markedly from 5 per
cent for 2010 & 2011 NQTs to 9 per cent for 2015 NQTs. There has also been
a notable increase in the leaving rate between 2 and 3 years’ service.
However,
the Report shows that it’s not just an issue confined to early career teachers.
After all, those teachers who manage to progress onto the Upper Pay Range will
find that their salaries are beneath the national average for other
professional occupations – and that the relative comparison is getting worse (STRB
2019 Fig 22a).
The
STRB concluded that “targeting starting pay risks being ineffective even in its
own terms. Those considering joining the profession, and particularly career
changers, look ahead to potential future earnings, as well as at starting pay”.
They
also provide data (Fig. 23) that starkly shows how the earnings for more
experienced teachers fall behind those in other professional occupations across
England, particularly in London – and that, again, the decline is getting worse.
The
pay differential might not be quite as pronounced for the over 50s but, perhaps
linked to the pressure of teacher workload, the rate of leaving has also risen
sharply in that age bracket, in both primary and secondary sectors (STRB 2019 Fig.
25)
Looking
ahead – what threats to come?
The
2019 Report only confirms that urgent action is needed but that the STRB, while
providing some of the data that shows that need, will never seriously challenge
the austerity policies that have held down and fragmented teachers’ pay.
Indeed, the Report hints at other possible future attacks, perhaps targeting increases
geographically or by sector and/or subject according to market pressures, if
unions fail to act and a future Government facing economic downturn then feels
confident to further drive down pay.
Despite
the barriers thrown up by the Trade Union Act ballot thresholds, teachers in
England need to take heart at the successes of the EiS in Scotland in winning the
first stage of their pay campaign: http://socialistpartyscotland.org.uk/2019/04/07/lessons-of-the-scottish-teachers-pay-victory/.
After all, when labour is in short supply, combative unions have traditionally been
able to translate those shortages into salary gains for its members through a
clear and determined campaign. Of course, a gain for teachers would also be a
gain for education as a whole through tackling the retention crisis.
