The general secretary of Scotland’s biggest teaching union has said a new pay offer for teachers is a “tiny baby step” rather than a “significant improvement”.
The offer announced yesterday evening would involve teachers who earn up to £80,000 getting a 6 per cent pay boost backdated to April 2022 and a further 5.5 per cent from the start of the 2023-24 financial year, representing 11.5 per cent over two years.
EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland this morning: “I would say what’s been put through the media and subsequently put on the table for negotiation later this week amounts to a tiny baby step in the right direction rather than a significant improvement.”
She said the union’s salaries committee would consider the offer this morning before a decision on scheduled strike action would be made.
Ms Bradley criticised the Scottish government for releasing details of the new offer to the media before formally presenting them to the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT).
She went on to say that her union and others will look seriously at the offer, but added that it would still amount to a real-terms pay cut over the next two years.
Teacher pay offer ‘will be taken very seriously’
“Our members have not had a proper chance to look at this - I think the offer came in after 9pm last night when many of them would have been getting ready to go to their beds,” Ms Bradley said.
“Their first careful look at it will be probably as we’re speaking just now ahead of the meeting at 10am.
“I can absolutely assure you that our members will look very, very carefully and will take very, very seriously the terms of this offer and the way in which those terms have been shared with them.”
But education secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville insisted on the same programme that the offer is “good and fair”.
She called for education unions to suspend ongoing strike action while the offer is considered.
“I think this is a fair deal,” she said. “I appreciate it’s not the 10 per cent that teaching unions wanted, but that is unaffordable. But I do think it’s a fair deal, and that’s why I’ve written to the trade unions asking them to put this new deal to the members.
“They asked for a new offer - the new offer is now on the table.”
Ms Somerville was asked where the £156 million for the new offer has come from.
She said: “We’ve managed to find a sum so that we can increase the offer for this year and we’ve also put money on the table to help for the next financial year.
“The challenge that we’ve set ourselves is how can we improve when we had an already allocated budget.
“We’ve taken very difficult decisions to ensure that we’ve been able to improve their offer, respecting the unions already rejected that (previous offer).”
Teachers across Scotland have taken industrial action on several occasions over the past few months, including a 16-day programme of rolling strikes in January.
The EIS union has earmarked 28 February and 1 March for two days of national strike action as well as a further 20 days of rolling strikes across local authorities from 13 March until 21 April.
They had also planned to target the constituencies of first minister Nicola Sturgeon (who, it emerged this morning, is to resign from that role), deputy first minister John Swinney, Ms Somerville and Katie Hagmann, resources spokesperson for local authorities’ body Cosla and a councillor.
Ms Bradley told Good Morning Scotland that the union’s executive committee would make a decision after the EIS salaries committee has looked at the pay offer.
