The £30,000 starting salary for teachers should be raised as it has become “less ambitious” since it was introduced in 2019, before the cost-of-living crisis and soaring inflation, and it needs to be more “competitive”, an education workforce specialist has warned.
The landscape has “really changed” since the new starting salary was announced as an ambition, according to Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), who said “labour shortages” and the post-pandemic bounce back in the wider labour market are hitting the sector hard.
Speaking at the launch of the NFER labour market report this week, Mr Worth said that “average earnings have increased by more than we expected them to in 2019”, which has had a knock-on effect on the competitiveness of the £30,000 level.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) also warned that “soaring inflation and real-terms pay cuts” have watered down the impact the policy will have.
Louise Hatswell, pay and conditions specialist at ASCL, also told Tes she was worried over the “competitiveness” of the £30,000 as a starting salary in comparison with other graduate professions following the “disastrous initial teacher training (ITT) recruitment figures for the 2022 cohort”, who are set to become the first to receive the salary.
Concerns over the £30,000 starting salary have emerged as the sector braces for what looks to be another year of low recruitment for teacher trainees, with experts predicting the government is likely to miss its recruitment targets for a second year running, despite an increase in bursary payments.
Last year, teacher trainee recruitment was described as “catastrophic” by school leaders as the Department for Education missed its target for secondary teacher trainee entrants by 41 per cent.
In 2019, the government had pledged to reach a starting salary of £30,000 by September 2022, however, this was pushed back to 2023 after a pay freeze was imposed across much of the public sector.
A new target date was proposed in December 2021, when then education secretary Nadhim Zahawi wrote to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) to ask for a two-year pay plan to reach a £30,000 starting salary.
Mr Worth said the delay to the implementation of the policy, plus a “big increase in outside earnings and in the post-pandemic labour market” as a result of labour shortages and increased inflation, means the target is now less attractive to young people.
He said: “In terms of how actually ambitious and attractive it is, that situation has really changed since 2019 when it was announced as an ambition, so it’s almost less ambitious than it originally was.
“It hasn’t really kept up with reality in terms of how attractive £30,000 is on the graduate labour market. And I wouldn’t be surprised if pay has got ahead of that in other sectors.”
But Mr Worth also warned that while the starting salary could be increased beyond £30,000 to make it more competitive, you then risked a “knock-on effect” of “effectively reducing experienced teachers’ pay” in relative terms.
The last available government figures for employment and earning outcomes for graduates and postgraduates are based on 2019-20 data, which sets the median earnings of graduates the year after graduation from a master’s degree at £26,700.
This is the closest comparison available for the postgraduate study of a postgraduate certificate in education.
Starting salary ’barely covers inflation’
Former DfE policy adviser Sam Freedman said the starting salary “barely covers inflation since the last election”.
He added: “This is a crisis and it needs a crisis solution. That means addressing the widening pay gap between teaching and other professions, and also looking at other ways of making it easier and more attractive to become a teacher, such as scrapping tuition fees for ITT.”
Mark Lehain, former special adviser to Mr Zahawi, said that there was “no doubt that the high inflation” over the last 18 months had “eroded the value of the £30,000 starting salary” and that this “might have an impact on choices people make when considering careers”.
But he added that “all the negative messages coming out of the strike action” was “probably more significant”.
He said: “The past six months have seen endless complaints from unions and some teachers about how awful working conditions and pay are.
“I’d be amazed if this hasn’t put a lot of people off the profession, and it will take a while for the damage here to be undone.”
Unions and the DfE are currently in a period of “intensive” talks focusing on teacher pay, conditions and workload reduction following a period of strike action by the NEU teaching union.
Tom Richmond, former ministerial adviser, said that the £30,000 starting salary “should be competitive” if paired with “subject-specific bursaries, good early training and progression opportunities and a reduced workload burden for teachers”.
However, he added that there were “much bigger questions unresolved around restoring teacher pay to 2010 levels that need to be addressed to tackle retention problems”, and “workload is also still in need of far more attention”.
The NFER labour market report, published this week, revealed that despite bursary rises for a number of secondary subjects, the DfE’s initial teacher trainee recruitment target for secondary teachers could be missed by 42 per cent this year.
The report also claimed that the DfE should offer a pay rise “that exceeds 4.1 per cent” for teachers next year to address the recruitment and retention crisis.
Yesterday, the NFER recommended that the government should “develop a long-term strategy for improving the competitiveness of teacher pay relative to other occupations” but stressed the importance of “ensuring that schools have sufficient funding to enact these pay increases without making cuts elsewhere”.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said that the government “should not fool itself” that £30,000 starting salary “is nearly as attractive as when it was promised in 2019”, adding “inflation is now much higher and starting salaries and lifetime earnings potential in other professions have increased”.
In its evidence to the STRB last month, the DfE recommended a pay rise of 3 per cent for experienced teachers in 2023-24.
