Minister's calls on public sector pay are disingenuous and a blatant attempt to mislead the public
Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, has written to Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, over public sector pay.
Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT-The Teachers’ Union, has written today to the Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening, calling for her to act as a matter of urgency to suspend any discretionary application of the School Teachers’ Review Body pay recommendations in the Report which has been submitted to her and to confirm immediately, alongside the publication of that Report, a new remit for the Review Body requiring them to produce, free from the constraints of the public sector pay cap and pressure from the Treasury, a further report on teachers’ pay before the end of the Autumn Term 2017.
Chris Keates said:
The call made by the Secretary of State for the Environment over the weekend for ministers to accept the recommendations of the public sector pay review bodies is disingenuous and a blatant attempt to mislead the public. All relevant government departments, including the DfE, are already in receipt of those reports. Ministers already know what they contain and have known for some time.
Those reports have been produced by the review bodies in a context where, since 2011, the Government has sought to compromise the independence of the review bodies, both in terms of the remit ministers have given to them and the correspondence the chairs of those bodies have received from the Treasury prior to starting their deliberations.
Despite this unacceptable pressure from government and the constraints imposed by the public sector pay cap, the School Teachers’ Review Body has been highly critical of the government’s stance on teachers’ pay and made clear that there is a case for exceeding the pay cap.
In its last report it stated that ‘there is a case for an uplift higher than 1% to the national pay framework to strengthen the competitive position of the teaching profession. It went on to say ‘If recruitment and retention pressures continue at their current levels, we expect that an uplift significantly higher than 1% will be required.’
If ministers are committed to lifting the pay cap, giving teachers the higher pay they deserve and addressing the crisis in recruitment and retention, then the Secretary of State must allow the School Teachers’ Review Body, as a matter of urgency, to produce a further report, free from not only the constraints of the pay cap, but also from pressure from ministers and the Treasury.
