In March 2023, the government offered teachers in England higher salary increases, as well as extra grant funding for schools. The salary rises and extra funding were rejected by teaching unions as being insufficient. As a result, there is ongoing industrial action in schools and continued debate on teacher salaries. In this article, we seek to describe the offer made by the government and how it affects the long-term changes to teacher pay in England over time.
In short, our analysis comes to three main conclusions:
- The offer of higher salaries is only part-funded. The government has offered to pay the full cost of a one-off £1,000 bonus, but it will only pay half the cost of an extra 1% on pay settlements. Schools will need to fund the other half from existing budgets.
- The higher salary offer is still, on average, affordable for schools. Even with the higher teacher pay offer, we still expect total school funding to be growing faster than costs for most schools this year and next.
- The underlying position on school funding and teacher pay is basically unchanged. School funding will still be about the same level in real-terms in 2024 as it was in 2010, and most teacher salaries in 2023 will be about 12% lower in real-terms than in 2010.
