STRB – Community gives evidence

This week, a team from Community Education & Early Years gave oral evidence before the School Teachers’ Pay Review Body (England). Our Head of Education Policy, Martin Hodge, has provided an update on the evidence session.

Every year we prepare lots of written evidence which is read by the School Teachers’ Pay Review Body and we are then questioned on the points that we have raised and points the Review Body wants extra information on.

We have outlined very clearly the financial position of schools up and down England, and also considered the economic picture across other businesses which shows that in order for teacher pay to remain competitive, there needs to be a pay award of 5.6%. This is the average of what is being paid in wider industry and is similar to what teachers were awarded last year. We have recommended an award of 7%, which after inflation (2%) would raise teacher pay by around 5% again. But we were clear that schools cannot afford this from existing budgets, and that it must be supported with extra money from the DfE.

The recruitment and retention problems being faced by many schools were at the forefront of many of the questions we were asked, and we outlined some of the ways that this could be addressed at a national level as well as in schools. Action to tackle workload was a key ask, as was flexible working, and we outlined how this might be possible across Primary and Secondary school settings. We compared schools to other industries that offer four-day working weeks and allow working from home, and suggested where this might work in school settings such as online meetings and staff training, and the use of shared documents for planning. We also noted that in some schools, subject leaders work part-time and we argued they should be awarded the full TLR payment if they were the sole post-holder recognising that the duties were not shared.

Something we have been passionate about for a number of years is expanding the entitlement to PPA time from 10% to 20%. We have seen evidence that this can reduce workload and improve health and wellbeing meaning that there is less staff absence and supply costs are reduced. We paired this with a desire for effective CPD, which has more of an individual basis that teachers can put into place in their subject areas and classrooms: sharing good practices as well as delivering important policy updates.

Finally, we spoke about the damaging impact that student loans are having on recruitment and retention in the education workforce. The level of repayment may not be huge but it has a sizeable impact on young teachers and those who work part-time with an increasing number of teachers struggling to ever pay it off. We have produced a booklet busting many of the myths around student loans and we feel that supporting teachers and other public sector employees with loans repayment would attract people into the sector.

You can read our written evidence submission to the STRB here and here.

You can also download our student loans booklet here.

Pictured above: Community officials Martin Hodge (Head of Education Policy), Helen Osgood (National Secretary for Education & Early Years and Operations Director) and David Weeks (National Secretary for London and the South-East) at the evidence session this week.