The delay to introducing teacher starting salaries of £30,000 from September this year will give schools “headroom” to spend money on other things, the Department for Education (DfE) permanent secretary said this morning.
The increase in starting salaries by £6,000 - along with a corresponding “levelling up” of higher pay grades - were announced by education secretary Gavin Williamson in 2019 as a way of helping ease the recruitment crisis in the profession - with new teachers in London starting on £36,000.
But when questioned by the Commons Public Accounts Committee today, DfE permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood could not say when the uplift would be introduced, and said she could only give clarity after the forthcoming government spending review.
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The delay, which was announced as part of the last spending review in November, was described as being among policies which have seen “slippage on what was promised” by Mr Williamson’s former special adviser Richard Holden, who is now MP for North West Durham.
Mr Holden asked Ms Acland-Hood: “It was something that was meant to have started this September, if I’m correct?”
She replied: “That’s true and we’ve had to adjust our rate of progress based on conversations we’ve been having with the Treasury and also the wider context, but if you look at the September teachers’ pay increases, you’ll see that there’s an average increase of 3.1 per cent there, but it’s significantly tilted towards starting salaries, with 5.5 per cent going on salaries for new teachers.”
Last year, teachers were angered when the government changed the wording in its pledge on the starting salaries to say they would only be introduced “by the end of this Parliament”.
Mr Holden added: “One of the issues, I imagine, that’s changed is that the Treasury are now saying to you, ‘With the Covid pandemic etc, you’ll probably see a different labour market, so maybe you didn’t need that starting salary quite as quickly’. Is that the argument that was put to you?”
Ms Acland-Hood said there had been a cross-government decision to exercise pay restraint across the whole of the public sector.
She said: “We’ve had conversations in which the argument about the labour market has been made but I think all of us understand, first, that effects in the economy on teacher recruitment tend to be relatively transient and, second, that there are broader arguments for the £30,000 starting salary that we don’t think should be driven by year-on-year fluctuations on the labour market.”
Mr Holden also asked: “Where is the money now going that would have gone to those teachers in that £30,000? Seeing as your overall departmental budget hasn’t changed, where is that money being shifted to? Is that [to] Covid response?”
Ms Acland-Hood replied: “It still goes out to schools. The fact that we’ve got teacher pay restraint is actually giving schools a little more headroom for other things.”
Mr Holden also asked: “So, when are we going to hit that £30,000 starting figure then?”
Ms Acland-Hood replied: “I think that’s a question I’ll have to answer once we’ve got through the spending review.”
