Gillian Keegan’s insistence that schools can afford the pay offer cannot alter reality

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan is obviously worried that schools will regard her pay offer with dismay not just because it isn’t enough to boost recruitment and retention but because of the more immediate problem that many will feel they cannot afford the cost of the pay award.
 
This is presumably why she wrote to headteachers and teachers on Wednesday in an attempt to persuade them that schools do in fact have enough money. This is odd because, surely, they know their own budgets better than the Education Secretary does and are only too aware of what impact a 4% increase to teacher pay in 2023/24 would have on their finances (the government would put in the other 0.5% to make it up to 4.5% on average).
 
Assurances from Ms Keegan that they can afford the cost will not alter the reality of the figures that they have in front of them. And the reality for many schools and trusts is that they are desperately short of money. An extra 4% on top of their existing costs will necessitate another round of cost cutting.
 
Ms Keegan was particularly keen to explain why the Department for Education’s own assessment had changed. Last month it told the pay review body that 3.5% was the figure it considered affordable for 2023/24. The extra half a percent that it now considers affordable, she said, is because school energy costs will not rise as much as expected. Again, schools probably know their energy costs better than the Education Secretary does and judging from the emails we’ve received on this subject the Department for Education has got its sums spectacularly wrong. Our feedback suggests that energy costs continue to be very high and represent a huge extra strain on finances.