Due to the budgetary pressures of the 2008 financial crisis the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced a public sector pay freeze in 2010. In 2013 the pay freeze was replaced by a 1 per cent cap on public sector pay that remained in place until 2018.
As a consequence of that 2010 public sector pay freeze, the salaries of more experienced teachers’ have fallen by more than 9 per cent (Sibieta, 2022). Not only has this made teaching less attractive to prospective entrants – the Department for Education has consistently missed recruitment targets since 2013 – but there are also concerns over the implications for the composition of the school workforce. My latest research investigates how the composition of the school workforce has changed in England, over the past decade, and contrasts these changes with the other UK home nations (Fullard, 2022).
