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Teachers’ strikes: How academisation could be driving down pay and conditions [1]
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Date: 2023-05
Teachers in England are on strike today after teaching unions voted to reject the government’s latest pay offer of a bonus this year of £1,000 and an average 4.5% pay rise for next year.
The largest teaching union last week accused the government of refusing to negotiate, while the Department for Education insisted its pay offer was “fair and reasonable”. But teachers and union figures who spoke to openDemocracy say a factor that is often overlooked in the battle for wages is the drive to convert England’s schools into academies.
Although both academies and more traditional council-run schools get central government funding, only teachers at the latter are automatically bound by the minimum standards in the national pay framework. This means the government’s recent pay offer doesn’t necessarily apply to teachers at academies. Instead, academies can choose to adopt it, or negotiate with unions independently.
That, says Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary at the National Education Union (NEU), is a problem for collective bargaining.
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“Where once there was a single local authority employer,” he said, “now many academy trusts can operate in one area.
“This has undermined local collective agreements and accelerated deregulation of school staff’s terms and conditions.”
His warning appears to be borne out by government statistics, which show that pay in academies is lower in both primary and secondary settings. Teachers at council-run nurseries and primary schools earnt an average of £38,022 in 2021/22 while those at academies earnt an average £1,352 (3.5%) less. For secondary schools, the gap is slightly smaller: average pay in council-run secondaries is £41,449 a year; for academies, it’s £40,119, just over 3.2% lower. A Department for Education spokesperson claimed it was “not possible to draw conclusions” from the discrepancies.
All this is before taking into account the fact that average pay for classroom teachers across all school settings has risen by just under £4,500 since 2010. This amounts to a substantial real-terms pay cut after inflation, though the extent is not uniformly felt across all levels of seniority.
By contrast, average MAT CEO pay in 2021/22 was 10% more than the previous year, and more than half the country’s largest MATs increased the salaries of their top earners in the same period. In some cases, CEOs received inflation-busting rises. The NEU says these decisions can’t be challenged by unions. The government itself has abandoned efforts to rein CEO pay in academies.
openDemocracy spoke to two teachers about their experiences of working in academies.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/teachers-strikes-education-england-academies-pay-schools/
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