A poll of nearly 34,000 teachers has uncovered “alarming levels of dissatisfaction” over pay, the National Education Union has said.
The results of a survey conducted by the union in December 2018 also found that 79% of respondents felt their pay was less or significantly less than what they would expect given their job weight, role and responsibilities.
NEU’s poll found that 90% of teachers who were denied progression up the pay scale thought the decision was unfair. Of these, 19% were told that their failure to progress was explicitly due to funding pressures.
The union said performance-related pay (PRP) had no place in schools and called for a fully funded 5% pay increase for every teacher.
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU, said: “In the interests of teachers, parents and children the government must now take heed and act. PRP is not suitable for schools – it promotes unfairness and inequality and makes pay determination costlier and more bureaucratic.
“The government’s proposed 2% increase would be yet another real-terms pay cut and yet more fuel for the teacher supply crisis.
“The government must realise that education funding needs to be increased to reverse the cuts for teachers’ pay and all the other cuts that schools have had to make in recent years.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Last summer saw the biggest teacher pay rise in almost 10 years, worth between £800 and £1,366 for classroom teachers and supported by a £508 million government grant. Building on this, the education secretary has written to the independent School Teachers’ Review Body to ask its panel to provide its recommendations on teacher pay for the coming year."
Education secretary Damian Hinds recently suggested that more schools should convert to academies.
