First up, pay. The explosive response to the latest pay offer was audible as far as Iceland and the Canaries – so we had a pretty good guess what we would see. No surprises, 89% of you said you would reject it. Just 4% said you’d accept it, and 7% were unsure. But it gets more interesting…
Teachers’ anger is as much about the effect on schools as the effect on their pockets. We asked whether you would be more likely to accept the pay offer if the government funded it fully (rather than expecting schools to find most of the money from existing budgets). This made a huge difference. 41% of teachers said they would vote to accept the offer, 31% to reject, and 27% were unsure. It seems likely the government could have brought the strike action to a close by fully funding the pay offer across all schools.
Everyone’s angry. Looking at the offer on the table (mostly unfunded by the government), we broke it down by your role. Classroom teachers (89% intending to reject) were just as unhappy as middle leaders (89%), SLT (86%) and heads (88%).
We can’t say much about the future, but – with two more days of (NEU) strikes already timetabled, we know this dispute will be with us for a while. Stay tuned.
