Ballots, thresholds, picket lines, strikes and protests form the public architecture of industrial disputes.

But it is in the quiet spaces between that they are resolved.

It is several weeks until the next scheduled teacher walkout and this affords time for talks, negotiations and - we can all hope - a settlement.

Union members will be looking to their elected leaders, assured that their concerns will be strongly represented behind closed doors.

The education workforce, however, needs equal assurance that the government “side” has a robust understanding of the issues, an intelligent appreciation of the context and the leadership necessary to secure a resolution. This remains far from certain.

Worrying comments

Last Wednesday, in a frantic round of media interviews, Gillian Keegan declared on Sky News that teacher pay claims were “economically incoherent”.

More specifically, the secretary of state assigned this phrase to demands, from the NEU teaching union, for an “inflation-plus” settlement.

Her argument appears to be supported by the intriguing, but nonetheless disingenuous, synthesis of two fiscal undesirables. “We can’t bake in inflation,” she declared, “which is what will happen if we start to get wages spiralling out of control”.

The idea that a modest uplift to public sector pay, after years of pay erosion, could be construed as “spiralling out of control” is, of course, laughable.

The relationship between pay growth and inflation is complex, but even the IMF acknowledge that “wage-price spirals” are rarely associated with subsequent inflationary episodes.

Private sector pay grew by 7 per cent in just three months from August 2022, and no one attributes the current inflationary environment to an uplift in salaries for those employees. The government has consistently explained the rapid rise in inflation with reference to global factors.

Pay scale importance

Business analysts are universal in supplementing that with references to the UK’s unique circumstances, having left the EU and experienced the market-collapse shock of the Kwasi Kwarteng/Liz Truss mini-budget.

No one is campaigning to maintain inflation at current levels: to “bake it in,” as Keegan would prefer to frame it, echoing Boris Johnson’s oven-ready Brexit metaphors. Asserting, however, that the NEU’s demands would be significantly inflationary is - to borrow the phrase - economically incoherent.

On the same day, Keegan also alluded to evidence that 40 per cent of teachers would gain up to 15.9 per cent pay increases due to “progression pay”. This, it has to be said, is an extraordinary diversion.

A well-pitched salary scale attracts high-quality new applicants, retains those who develop in the profession and rewards those who stay. In simplistic terms, the issue of attraction depends on the level of the starting salary.

The challenge of retention rests on the rate of progress up the pay scale and the levels of the differentials between the spine points. To reward longer-serving colleagues, it’s the “real terms” value of pay at the top of the scale that matters.

Keegan’s conflation of the size of the differentials for those who are due for pay progression with the value of those scale points over time is inexcusable.

Teachers are in dispute because the purchasing power of their pay has been eroded for more than a decade.

It is economically incoherent to attempt to offset this profound issue by referring to the percentage differential between M1 and M2.

Long-term pay decline

Indeed, it is an assertion that masks a fundamental truth that, at every spine point on the teacher pay scale, those who have been awarded progression this year will now be earning less - in real terms, due to inflation - than those who were doing the same job, on that same spine point, this time last year.

It might also just have caused Keegan some alarm, had she noticed that with 40 per cent of the profession due for pay progression, there must be a national crisis in teacher retention if so many are on the lower rungs of the pay scale.

It would then be economically incoherent not to apply the fundamental imperatives of supply and demand: if the only issue is to attract and retain, then pay needs to be attractive, competitive and ultimately rewarding.

A trusted colleague recently provided me with a stark, simple and devastatingly truthful observation.

Earning at the top of the teacher pay scale, but with thirty more years in the classroom ahead of him, he commented: “Unless something changes, every year for the rest of my working life the value of my pay will go down.”

The basis of his observation is a matter of public record. Annually, for more than ten years, the cost of living settlements for teacher pay has been below inflation.

Action must be taken

This year, at 5 per cent, it may be touted as the largest increase for years, but it would be economically incoherent not to observe that, in the current inflationary climate, it actually represents the single biggest reduction in value of pay for a decade.

If, as Keegan seems to think, the economic conditions are not right to afford teachers an inflation-plus pay rise, then the question she must answer is under what conditions would such an offer be forthcoming. It hasn’t happened in the living memory of most teachers, so when will it happen?

Most teachers seem to think it needs to happen now.

It would be economically incoherent not to understand that unless something changes, without an inflation-plus pay award, every year for the rest of their working lives the value of teachers’ pay will go down.

Dr Robin Bevan has been headteacher at Southend High School for Boys since 2007 and was the elected national president of the NEU teaching union for 2020-21