Why I'll be voting in favour of strike action this autumn

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The government has just announced the 2022 pay deal for teachers. I've waited until now to make a decision on how I'll vote in my union's (the NEU) ballot on strike action in the autumn term. I thought there might be an outside chance that the government would do the right thing and offer a fully funded real terms pay rise for teachers. Unfortunately this didn't happen and their pay offer falls short of what teachers deserve and what the sector requires. 

Teachers continue to get poorer

The graphic in the below tweet is a good visual for this. It's not just about teachers getting a real terms pay cut this year, although following the pandemic the least we deserve is a real terms raise. It's about the fact that for more than a decade, teachers have been getting poorer over time. 

Using the NEU pay calculator, I worked out that as a result of this, I'm £322 worse off per month and my hourly rate (excluding my TLR) is less than the living wage. It's not hard to see why teaching is becoming a less and less attractive option.

No new money

The fact that the government aren't providing any new money to schools to fund the pay offer shows just how little they value education. School budgets are already squeezed and that leads me to wonder how some schools will manage to balance their books. I suspect the result will be further cuts to things like the number of support staff that schools are able to employ. These staff enable us teachers to do our work more effectively, so any such cuts will make it more difficult for us to provide a decent quality of education to our students. 

Other consequences could include schools having to reduce the number of specialist teachers they employ which will result in a narrowing of the curriculum. The fact that the arm of the government known as Ofsted is going around schools judging them, in part, on their ability to offer a broad and balanced curriculum just demonstrates the short sightedness of failing to fund this pay deal. 

The future of education

I don't know a teacher that would rather be on strike than in the classroom, however there comes a point at which educators must take a stand to protect the future of education. The pay cut on offer will not do anything do boost the attractiveness of the profession to graduates who, especially in subjects like computing, can often find much better paid work elsewhere which comes with a reduced and less stressful workload.  

If the government is unwilling to address teacher workload (which, in an ideal world, they should be doing as well), they must at least keep pay competitive to compensate for the long hours teachers put into their work. We know that high quality teaching is one of the most significant factors in educational outcomes, so failure to do this will make the recruitment crisis worse, experienced teachers and RQTs alike will continue to leave the profession in large numbers, and the quality of education available in this country will decline.  

Education can't wait for a future government that values education to come along. We don't know when, if ever, we'll get that. What we do know is that the current government isn't willing, currently, to do what's required to ensure children and young people have a high quality, broad and balanced education available to them for years to come. Therefore voting in favour of strike action is the right thing for educators to do to show our care for not just our current students, but also their children and their children's children.