Our prime minister and our chancellor are both out of step with public opinion on what is a fair price to pay the people who work in our public services.
Nurses, teachers and other public servants are being paid less in real terms than they were in 2010. That’s a long time to go without a meaningful increase. And most people now think that they deserve more money.
Many government ministers have begun to reflect public opinion through the windows of Number 10, shining it on the Cabinet table.
That’s why the announcement from the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) that the 1 per cent pay cap is to be maintained in education was generally received with astonishment.
The STRB warned of an increasing crisis in recruitment and retention arising out of successive years of pay restraint. Headlines have failed to highlight that this was not the first year that the review body has given such a warning. Real-terms salaries have dropped by more than 10 per cent during the period of pay restraint.
Recruitment advertisements promising riches to graduates or attack headlines highlighting the top end of leadership pay shouldn’t divert your eyes from the truth.
The next time you see a headline about exorbitant headteacher pay, just remember the November 2016 School Workforce Census. It said that there were 74 headteachers earning more than £150,000 per year. This represented 0.3 per cent of all headteachers in state-funded schools in England.
The electorate said clearly, only a few weeks ago, that public servants should be well rewarded.
Anyone who attempts to paint a picture that the ability to award 2 per cent to some teachers begins to meet the expectation of the electorate will be misleading you.
The STRB was constrained by a 1 per cent remit before it even began its work. The only way to match the possible 2 per cent for some will be to deny others. Even if school leaders were prepared to do so, extra funding for the 1 per cent has not been provided. That means provisions will fall at the first hurdle.
Extra funding is essential
The School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions document offers some superficially attractive flexibilities on pay but these can only be used for some when others are denied. For such flexibilities to work properly there has to be additional funding.
All teachers deserve reasonable pay awards. To fail to fund flexibility will only ever serve to create divisiveness and potential equality problems.
Successive years of pay restraint have created an unfair, overly complex, underfunded pay system for education that does not serve anyone. A 2 per cent increase to the main pay scale, and just 1 per cent for upper and leadership scales, will not help to retain staff or make leadership roles more appealing.
Education is a sector that is rightly obsessed by quality. School leaders are constantly striving for the highest quality provision and the highest quality staff. For me, the argument about unfair pay for teachers gets to the heart of that ambition.
Sure, public servants have been denied pay rises for years but if good teachers decide to quit and new recruits opt for other careers instead, that’s going to harm standards and ultimately narrow opportunities for young people to succeed.
There is a moral element to the public sector pay debate. At one end, the government believes that it’s morally right to continue with the cap so that debt is not stored up for future generations. I don’t buy that - it’s just stubborn political rhetoric.
The stronger moral argument is that we need to invest in the future. If we don’t, the next generation will be ill-equipped for what lies ahead.
We can’t allow our young people to become products of pre-Brexit austerity trying to support a post-Brexit society.
Paul Whiteman is general secretary designate of the NAHT heads’ union. He tweets @PaulWhiteman6
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