Teachers in England to get 3.5% pay rise

Image source, Getty Images By Hazel Shearing Education correspondent Published 47 minutes ago Teachers in England will get a 3.5% pay rise from September and 3% the following year, the government has said. The Department for Education (DfE) announced £1.8bn in additional funding but said schools would have to fund the first 1% of each rise from existing budgets. It also announced it was curbing pay of top leaders in academy trusts. The National Education Union (NEU), the largest teaching union in England, rejected the offer because it "still means cuts to education". Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the offer demonstrated the "immense value we place in our teachers". She added that teachers should not be "seeing executive pay rise faster than their own" and "tighter controls will mean unjustifiable exec salaries become a thing of the past". The changes mean that from September, trusts will need the government to approve any jobs advertised with salaries of more than £174,000, and executives will not be able to receive higher pay rises than classroom teachers. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said the government had been "forced" to go beyond its original offer but still had not gone far enough. "With inflation set to rise, members know this offer is not the decisive shift needed to reverse real-terms pay cuts since 2010 or restore the competitiveness of teacher pay," he said. He added that the pay award needed to be fully funded so that schools do not have to find money in their existing budgets to pay for it. "A partially funded settlement still means cuts to education, and the NEU will never accept that," he said. He said the curb on executive pay was "a start" but "not enough", adding that it would not be retrospective. Teachers in England to vote on striking over pay Published 9 May What is happening to UK prices? Published 17 June Jessica Featonby, who left her job as a primary school teacher to found an education technology company, said higher salaries would get more people into teaching but the "core problem" was "wellbeing". Image source, Supplied Image caption, Jessica Featonby founded Teacher Tonic, which offers training with a focus on addressing workload and retention issues She said she worked early mornings, evenings, weekends, and during school holidays when she was teaching - well beyond the hours she was paid for. "The demand within that time was huge, so realistically, you didn't get your work done in that time," she said. "If I came at 8:30am [and] left at 3:30pm, there would be so much question around my commitment to the job." Inflation in the UK was 2.8% in the year to May. That was lower than experts had forecast given the impact of the war in the Middle East on prices, but it is still expected to rise further. Paul Whiteman, general secretary at school leaders' union NAHT, said the offer itself was "another step in the right direction so long as we don't see a big spike in inflation", but the partial fundi