Sean McCauley, Worcestershire NEU district secretary, personal capacity
The National Education Union (NEU) is running a ‘snap poll’ of teachers in England on the Labour government’s pay award from 21 – 30 September.
The National Executive is recommending members accept the 5.5% award. However, a third of Exec members, including Socialist Party members, argued to recommend rejection. Socialist Party members are continuing to recommend members vote to reject.
There can be little doubt that striking works. Eight days of strike action in 2023 forced the Tories to come up with 6.5% and £900 million in funding.
Last year’s award was below inflation and not fully funded. Despite the Exec recommending acceptance, many local activists believed that last year’s pay deal did not go anywhere near redressing the 15% fall in teacher pay in real terms since 2010. What’s more, it was not fully funded. Socialist Party members argued that we could have continued to fight for more.
This year, the mere threat of strike action in the autumn term has forced Keir Starmer and his New Labour government to implement a 5.5% uplift.
Not fully funded and not enough
However, while it will cost £1.1 billion, Starmer’s government is providing only an extra £417 million. £683 million will come from existing school budgets – budgets that were given by the Tories in April. It was believed at the time and we believe now that the “headroom” for a pay award in the Tory budgets was no more than £400 million for a 2% pay award. This means that £283 million, on top of what New Labour has pledged, is still needed. Heads will again dig into existing school budgets.
According to the NEU’s own School Cuts website, £12.2 billion is needed immediately to reverse 14 years of Tory spending cuts. If any part of our pay award is unfunded, it will result in more cuts and, potentially, redundancies and cost-saving restructures. The lowest-paid members of our union, support staff, could face cuts to hours and jobs.
While 5.5% is above current inflation, it is not enough to recover lost real-terms pay. Teachers in Scotland won 14.6% over two years in 2023. A teacher on M6 pay grade in Scotland earns £8,000 more than a teacher in England!
The government has failed again to meet its teacher recruitment targets in more than 50% of areas. New Labour wants to recruit an extra 6,500 teachers but the NEU estimates we need 33,000 extra teachers. With unsustainable levels of workload, this pay award is unlikely to be enough to attract more new entrants, and retain them and experienced staff.
Cannot afford to give them time
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have continuously striven to lower expectations, claiming that it will “get worse before it gets better”. A further round of austerity is on the cards. We cannot afford to ‘go easy’ on Starmer or ‘give him time’. We need to fight now on pay, funding and workload. Voting ‘Reject’ will give us the chance to launch that fight immediately.
Starmer and Reeves claim the cupboard is bare, but the money is there. They could stop further academisation immediately, and boot out the fat-cat academy chain CEOs and their entourages on inflated salaries. Bring all schools into genuinely democratic local authority control, with the requisite levels of funding.
Energy, Royal Mail, railways, water and telecoms should all be renationalised under the democratic control of those who work in the industries and those who use the services. Use the wealth for the greater need of society rather than greed of a few directors and wealthy shareholders.
Whatever we get from a Starmer-led New Labour government will only be won by a fight.
