Where teachers go, the rest of our public services will follow
Faced with bare-bones budgets, increased demands and an exodus of talent, education unions are primed for more strikes in 2025. They won’t be the only ones
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Question: what do you get when you cross an administrator, a counsellor, a psychologist, a social worker and, occasionally, a stand-in parent? Answer: the role performed by the average UK teacher on top of their already demanding educational duties. One moment they are preparing students for exams, the next they are supporting those with complex emotional needs and addressing safeguarding issues.
For all that, teachers receive little recognition and even less reward. The average starting salary is £31,650 — around £15 an hour for a 40-hour week, but many report working late into their evenings and through weekends. The heavy responsibilities and intense workloads have driven thousands to burnout.
In 2023 around 40,000 teachers left the profession – almost 9% of the workforce. In the 2023-24 academic year, postgraduate teacher recruitment was 38% below target. Secondary teacher trainee recruitment now stands at 50% below target.
Our education system is in the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis that is only set to get worse. Large numbers of teachers who want to stay in the classroom are taking jobs in places such as Australia and Dubai, where pay and conditions are substantially better.
‘“Excellent colleagues with many years of experience are leaving in droves. They work just as hard in other countries but earn triple the salary now,” said one Muslim sixth-form teacher I know. They asked to speak anonymously, believing that going on the record could affect their career. “In STEM, the calibre of teachers is now very weak. They just don’t know the content.”
The UK now has some of the biggest class sizes in the developed world. The most deprived areas of the country are disproportionately diverse, working-class communities in inner-city areas. It is their schools that are most deeply affected by this growing crisis.
With successive governments slashing funds for social care and mental health services, teachers are increasingly left as the primary support for thousands of children. According to research by YouGov, more than six in 10 staff reported offering increased emotional support to students since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost half reported taking on increased pastoral duties.
Today, 30% of UK children — 4.3 million — are growing up in poverty. As a result, more are coming to school exhausted, hungry, anxious, unable to focus and lacking the basic equipment needed to participate in lessons.
Teachers see the severity of this problem every day and many dip into their own pockets to feed hungry students. At the same time, teacher pay has declined by one fifth in real terms since 2010.
During strikes by the National Education Union (NEU) and others in 2023, I heard stories of teachers taking second jobs — delivering takeaways, working in restaurants, driving taxis — to supplement their salaries. Some even arrived at school early because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes.
Teachers have repeatedly cited unbearable workloads and poor pay as their reason for quitting the profession. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: those who remain in the job are forced to take up the slack, struggling with soaring class sizes and dwindling staff numbers, making them more inclined to leave too.
So what is being done? Last month, the government proposed a mere 2.8% pay rise to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB). Any increase in teacher pay is expected to come out of existing school budgets. In other words, despite promising no return to austerity, the government is asking headteachers to make cuts to already overstretched budgets to fund marginally better pay for staff.
Where can savings be made? Building maintenance? Pastoral support? Curriculum options? Classroom facilities? After 14 years of deep cuts to school budgets — 70% of schools in England have less funding in real terms than in 2010 — there is nowhere left for the axe to fall.
“Laughable” was the verdict of a friend who started teaching three years ago. “We are massively disrespected. You’d have hoped this government would be different.”
According to new research by the School Cuts coalition, the vast majority of schools — 76% of primaries and 94% of secondaries — will not be able to afford their costs in 2025. Costs are expected to rise by 3.4% next year, but mainstream funding will increase by just 2.2%. This leaves £700m for the government to find to fund staff pay awards. What that means in practice is per-pupil funding dropping to the lowest real-terms levels in England for at least 15 years.
One group of teachers have already taken to the picket lines over underfunding. More than 2,000 members of the NEU at 32 sixth-form colleges have taken seven days of strike action since November over the government’s decision to deny funding for a 5.5% pay rise. They are set to take three further days of action on Wednesday 29 January, Thursday 6 February and Friday 7 February.
On a national level, the NEU will now hold an indicative strike ballot over teacher pay, having described the government’s planned raises an “insult”. And where teachers are going, others will follow. The same 2.8% offer is being made to millions more public sector workers, including nurses and doctors.
In a statement made in December, the Royal College of Nursing said that the government’s offer was effectively telling “nursing staff they are worth as little as £2 extra a day, less than the price of a coffee”. The proposed pay rise was described as “deeply offensive to nursing staff, detrimental to their patients and contradictory to hopes of rebuilding the NHS”. The pay of an experienced nurse has fallen by 25% in real terms since 2010. Meanwhile, resident doctors have experienced real-terms pay erosion of 20.8% since 2008.
Similar to teachers, many NHS workers are leaving their professions or the country. In England alone, between September 2022 and September 2023, at least 15,000 doctors left the NHS prematurely, according to the British Medical Association. The effects of that include a draining away of skills and unsafe staffing levels.
The government justifies such decisions as “fiscal responsibility” but few benefit from such a short-term approach. In the long run, it will only result in more money being spent on costly agency nurses and supply teachers to plug the gaps an exodus of salaried workers will leave behind.
As I’ve said before, there are many ways for the government to fund investment in our public services and treat the people who form the backbone of them fairly. If it persists on this path, a new wave of national strikes is almost inevitable.
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