Teacher Pay Rises - Some Context

The public sector pay rises that made news headlines today included those for teachers in England. They were presented as a "new" increase and somehow connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact it was the detailed announcement of pay rises that were first put forward by the government in January 2020. This is an implementation of the recommendations made by the School Teachers' Review Body, whose report has also been published today: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-teachers-review-body-30th-report-2020.

The pay award is skewed to give those on lower pay scales a larger percentage pay rise than those at the higher levels; this is part of an effort to attempt to recruit and retain more people in the teaching profession.

The reaction by some people to today's announcement on radio programmes and in social media has shocked me. I've felt the need to calm myself down by writing this blog and putting the rise into some sort of context - mainly for my own sanity.

I did my engineering degree in the 1980s and worked for almost 20 years in the electronics industry. By the end of that period, I earned a good salary with lots of benefits including private healthcare, 5-weeks paid holiday, a generous, final-salary pension scheme etc. At no point do I recall anyone trying to tell me that I was overpaid, or that I didn't deserve any of the pay rises or benefits that I was given or that my job was cushy. Perhaps this is because I was working in the private sector and because people didn't generally feel that they understood what my job entailed? 

After spending the last decade working in my own business I have just spent a year training to be a teacher, completing a PGCE in secondary science. I love physics and I really want to try to encourage more young people to be interested in learning science.

So, now I am about to start work as a newly-qualified teacher. I'm using the same degree qualification that I gained 30 years ago; I've topped that up with a year at University gaining a PGCE. I won't be starting at the very bottom of the teachers' pay scale, but just to put teachers' salaries in context: my starting wage will be approximately 42% of the salary that I gave up when I resigned from my engineering job in 2007.

On top of that, I know that teaching will be a much more challenging role than my previous jobs in industry, and I will have far greater responsibility: I will actually be responsible for part of a young person's education. And yet now I am opening myself up to the kind of criticism I have seen today?

We need more teachers. We need more people to enter the profession. I'm really saddened to read the kind of anti-teacher comments that I've seen today because they will only serve to put people off taking the kind of steps that I have just done.

I guess this will pass as yesterday's news, but we really need, as a country, to elevate the status of the teaching profession.