Teacher pay demands ‘economically incoherent’, Keegan says

Union demands to increase teacher pay are “economically incoherent”, the education secretary has said, as staff begin the first national school teachers’ strike in over six years.

Teachers in thousands of schools walked out today after National Education Union members voted to strike and crunch talks with government failed to find a resolution.

The union wants a “fully-funded, above-inflation pay rise” for teachers following years of real-term cuts to salaries.

But education secretary Gillian Keegan told Sky News government is focusing on halving inflation – currently at 10 per cent – as “we can’t bake in inflation which is what will happen if we start to get wages spiralling out of control”.

On union demands, she said: “The discussions we had on Monday were constructive discussions. I’m not going to go in and say ‘we will do inflation-plus’, whatever, it would be economically incoherent to do that, we can’t do that, we’ve made that very clear.

“But we will get inflation down so everybody will feel better.”

However, research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last year found only a minority of “wage-price spiral” episodes were “followed by sustained accelerating in wages and prices”.

“We conclude that an acceleration of nominal wages should not necessarily be seen as a sign that a wage-price spiral is taking hold.”

Keegan said they were looking at workload and flexible working options, as well as future pay. She said they missed Friday’s deadline for next year’s pay review body “to keep open to those discussions about future pay”.

Schools Week revealed last month that Keegan is “keen” to look at varying teacher pay by subject. On the BBC Radio 4, she confirmed this saying: “We’ll look at differential pay, if that makes sense”.

Keegan said they didn’t know how many schools were closed due to strikes, but were collecting the data ahead of it being published this afternoon.

A DfE survey and “ring around” schools showed the “majority” would be open, but some will have restrictions for different cohorts.