Last week, a group of teachers in Sherlock Holmes masks could be found protesting after work outside the Department for Education in Westminster as the sun streamed down.

The detective headgear worn by the NEU teaching union activists was a light-hearted attempt to draw attention to the fact that a crucial report on teachers’ pay had effectively gone “missing”.

But, beneath the humour, there was - and is - a palpable anger at what has become the longest delay in an announcement on salary increases than anyone can remember.

Teachers have been warning of the mistrust that has been created by the government’s “disrespectful” deafening silence on teacher pay.

That ill feeling has now been compounded by the fact that the profession has had to break for summer still in the dark about whether it would finally receive a real-terms pay rise. So it is unlikely to dissipate quickly even if the government does now belatedly come up with goods.

The toll on school leaders and their staff has been inevitable. It has meant “massive worry”, sleepless nights, the delay of conversations vital to the financial future of schools and the “ridiculous” prospect of cramming teacher appraisals into the first weeks of September.

Schools have also had no choice to but to “gamble” and set budgets that they admit are “speculative”.

Here, heads and teachers outline the damage already done by this year’s pay delay:

Headteacher Robin Bevan feels that he’s been embroiled in a “silly game” not of his own choosing.

The head of Southend High School for Boys, in Southend, Essex has spent the last few weeks of term trying to work out what to put down in his budget and for the forecast return for his school for the following two years.  

The irony is that his team and the school governors will be submitting that forecast to the Education and Skills Funding Agency, an arm of the Department for Education. Yet it is the DfE that has delayed crucial information about what the teacher pay rise will be from September, and who will pay for it.

As an academy, the school budget is set to run from September to August, but Bevan feels he has had to work it out with one hand tied behind his back.

“It’s become a silly game in which a failure by the DfE to announce is causing school leaders and financial staff to have to generate documents that are - fictitious would be a strong word, but certainly speculative,” he says.

“And they’re all doing it en masse, simply because those that at the centre, the secretary of state in particular, simply failed to do what he should have done a couple of months ago.”

He has “gambled” that the pay increase will be 2 per cent, and budgeted accordingly. But, after years of declining per-pupil funding, this, together with other financial pressures, means that his school has been forced to warn the ESFA that the school is going to plunge into deficit for the first time

A teacher pay rise above what he has budgeted for and with no money attached would mean the budget will need revision over the summer holidays.

“Assuming it’s announced this week, I will be busy with governors resolving things that we should have done in meetings that we have already had and had planned appropriately for the autumn term,” Bevan says. “And of course that replicates across every single school in the country.”

Rachel Younger has had her share of sleepless nights worrying about teacher pay rises.

As business manager at St Nicholas C of E primary school in Blackpool for the past eight years, she has become used to coping with such difficulties. She says her survival technique for tricky business of trying to balance budgets each year with ever-dwindling resources is to “become numb”.

But the lack of information on this year’s pay round has really taken its toll. “The last few weeks have been really stressful, to be honest,” Younger says. “It’s just not knowing.

“We had the case where we could have been going into the holidays not knowing, or it could have been the day before we break up and then you don’t have the opportunities to have those important conversations with governors and staff.”

The school paid all its staff a 2 per cent rise last year and prizes staff wellbeing, says Younger. But it’s difficult to achieve “when you’ve not got any money” and when you don’t know if pay will be funded.

She, like many, wonders what the hold-up has been about and fears the worst. It’s been bad enough these past four years, drawing up increasingly straitened budgets in March and only finding out weeks later whether the funds they’ve allocated for teacher pay rises was enough.

This year’s extended delay means the school, now four months into its fiscal year, still doesn’t know whether the 2 per cent it allocated for a teacher pay rise for 2018-2019 is going to cover it.

“There are organisational practical issues with it as well,” Younger says. “All of these things tend to get sorted over the summer or the beginning of September. Then governors have got to implement a pay policy straight away at the beginning of the autumn term without a chance to talk to anybody, talk to the staff and unions to discuss what is happening.

“People have to have their appraisal reviews. Trying to do all of that in the first couple of weeks of September is ridiculous.”

Younger is flummoxed by the long silence from the DfE: “There is no apparent excuse for it is there? The secretary of state has had that [STRB pay reccomendations] information for three months now. So what is he waiting for?

“When people keep pressing but there is nothing coming back, it’s hard not to assume the worst. You do start thinking they obviously don’t care about us and are they hanging on to announce it in the summer holidays, hoping that nobody will notice.

“But it’s worse because people will know about it but they’ll be in a position where they can’t do anything about it because school is out.”

Amy Johnson has been a design and technology teacher since public sector pay restraint first began eight years ago.

During the first five years of her teaching career, she worked at weekends teaching crafts to adults to be able to afford the cost of living in London. It was only when she took a leadership role at her school that she was finally able to quit the weekend work.

Johnson, who works in a maintained secondary school in East London, was among the NEU activists who turned up to protest outside the Department for Education offices in Westminster last week, fed up with the delay over what she can expect in her pay packet next term.

She is “massively offended” that as teachers headed for the summer break, they still had no idea what increase they could expect in their pay packets next term.

“I also feel offended for our students that the service that we provide to our students seems to be so undervalued,” she says.

Johnson has moved into key worker housing, where the rent is kept just below the average market rent levels. 

“I’m 33 years old and it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to afford to live on my own and I’m just about managing,” she says.

“Half my wage is used to pay my rent and that’s a considerable amount of money. I find it very hard to save every month, having to pay out that rent. It’s really tricky.

“It’s an ok salary but I’m having to make sacrifices. My rent has gone up but my wage isn’t going up in line with that. My bills are going up, my council tax has gone up. Everything else is rising but my wage isn’t going up in line with that.”

A member of the NEU, she is intent on a 5 per cent fully funded pay rise called for by most school unions “to make up for eight years of pay cuts,” and is prepared to take part in industrial action for anything short of that. 

“I have a good salary at the moment because my school is able to pay me that salary. But with the budget cuts happening, I can’t see how it’s going to be possible for that to increase without the government funding it.”

She says not knowing how much a pay rise will be and who is going to pay for has also been a “massive worry” for her headteacher because of budget cuts.

“Obviously they want to award staff their pay, they want to be able to do that,” says Johnson. “But they’ve also got to pay for book and resources; something’s got to give.”

Arwel Jones, head of Brentside High School in Ealing, west London, has been dismayed by the lengthy delay in the teacher pay announcement.

“The pressure it’s putting on the system by the announcement being so late is that we really don’t know if we will be able to afford the staff we have actually employed,” he says.

“I’ve actually employed people for September - I’m fully staffed now - but if this had been announced at the beginning of June, let’s say, and I had a vacancy still to fill, I could have then made a decision in June before filling it by mid-July.

“We could have made an informed decision and possibly organised staffing in a different way. But we are now in a position that the school is on summer vacation.

“I can’t consult with my leadership team and governors to try and think strategically if difficult choices regarding pay and affordability need to be made, so we will have to wait until September now. But the bottom line is that we are committed to paying what the STRB report says. If we can’t afford it, how do we make that affordable?”

Months ago, when he set his budget for last April, Jones made a calculated guess that the government would announce 2 per cent and budgeted accordingly in the event that it was unfunded.

With the pay deal still unannounced, he laid out the choices that were available to schools.

“We built 2 per cent into the budget but some schools haven’t had that luxury and have used 1 per cent.”

Different scenarios signal different headaches: “If it’s 1 per cent, most schools will run it straight away and complain because they’ll lose teachers again,” Jones explains.

On the other hand, an unfunded 3.5 per cent increase would cause different problems. “I just haven’t got that - schools haven’t got that spare cash, however large they are - lying around at the moment,” he says.