ATL is in favour of multi-year pay deals because they bring stability to school finances. But that doesn’t mean we support all of the government’s pay objectives.  When we gave evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), we made it clear that we totally rejected the government’s 2% limit on public sector pay.

In fact, ATL led the challenge to the government’s case for a pay limit. Giving evidence along with other teacher unions, ATL said: “We suspect that the Department may be using worse-case scenarios on teachers’ pay and supply to justify its call for an increase in teachers’ pay that is limited to 2% a year for the period 2008-11”.  The STRB believed our evidence and not the government’s. They recommended an increase of 2.45% for 2008 and increases above 2% for the subsequent years. The government accepted the increases in full.

To get an increase well above the government’s limit is a significant achievement although I’m not pretending that it is as much as teachers deserve or as much as the profession needs to maintain recruitment and retention. It is, however, more than the police, prison officers, fire service, doctors and civil servants and equal to local government staff. And we shouldn’t forget that teachers’ pay rose by 15% above inflation between 1997 and 2005.

When we surveyed thousands of our members to gauge their views, many were unhappy about the level of the rise but less than a quarter wanted to take industrial action.  A number of members noted they could not realistically have expected more. This view was reflected in our response to the government.

Another key concession that we won from the STRB is an automatic review of the three-year deal.  We will use that review to make sure that teachers’ pay does not fall behind comparable workers, nor fail to maintain pace with inflation for September 2008 and beyond.

If we are not satisfied with the outcome of the review, we will come back to you – our members – to get a steer on what we should do next.  In the meantime, we will use all available channels to press home our case for proper levels of pay for teachers. We need your support to help us build that case.

Mary Bousted
General secretary