Teacher pay deal a 'challenge' for schools, STRB admits

Despite recommending that teachers receive a 2.75 per cent salary rise from September, the teacher pay review body has admitted it will be “challenging” for some schools to fund it.The recommendations of the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB) were today accepted by the Department for Education, although the DfE said schools would have to fund first the 2 per cent themselves.In its report today, the STRB identified the reasons behind its recommendations, including that there had been ‘decades of decline’ in teacher pay compared to other professions, and that this was affecting the recruitment and retention of teachers.opportunities. However, it admitted that “there remains considerable variation in the state of schools’ finances across the system" and stated: "This is likely to mean that some schools in difficult financial circumstances will find it challenging to implement any uplift to pay and allowance ranges in September 2019." The NASUWT teaching union found 12 per cent of teachers went without a pay rise last year – despite a pay grant of £187m from the DfE grant to help fund it – and that teachers were being told by employers that there may be job cuts if their schools had to fund pay awards.