Charlotte Lawrence has been a primary school teacher for 14 years and has one word for the government’s latest pay offer for teachers in England: insulting.
“The government hasn’t listened,” said Lawrence, a delegate at the National Education Union’s annual conference in Harrogate. “When the strike ballot was carried, I thought the government would see that teachers are serious and start to negotiate. But it just hasn’t happened.”
Lawrence and other teachers at the conference say pay alone is not what drove 98% of nearly 200,000 NEU members to reject the offer. What has angered them is that school budgets would be expected to fund most of the pay increase – forcing teachers to choose between their own spending and resources and staff for their pupils. Teachers outside the conference chanted: “Hey, Gill, now it’s time to pay the bill,” in a message to the education secretary, Gillian Keegan.
“I know a school in Portsmouth that has 10 pencils to last until the end of the academic year,” said Lawrence, who worries that some school budgets are so tightly stretched that having to find even part of the pay rise promised by the government would be too difficult.
“As a profession we need well-remunerated teachers and well-funded schools. We should be able to have both.”
