A Liverpool teacher warned "the system is at breaking point" in schools plagued by a "staffing crisis" and budget cuts.
Teachers could join the growing list of workers walking out on strike next month if members of three trade unions - the NEU, NASUWT and NAHT - vote in favour of industrial action when results of strike ballots are announced today. The message is familiar to those following disputes involving nurses and paramedics - "the workload is too big and the pay is too small", according to Graham Copsey, a chemistry teacher in Liverpool.
He joined the profession 35 years ago to "be inspiring and to help people". Seeing kids learn is his favourite part of the job, saying "being in a class with children is wonderful". But long hours and falling real terms pay are driving people out of teaching, leading to what Graham describes as a "staffing crisis".
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Graham, who is also a case worker and assistant secretary for the National Education Union's (NEU) Liverpool branch, believes "the system is at breaking point". He said: "[The dispute is] not just about teacher pay, it's about schools in crisis not being able to recruit teachers."
He added: "The stress and the workload of teaching is such that I wouldn't recommend going into teaching to young people nowadays. And that's sad because teaching should be the greatest job in the world. At the moment, it's not. We're not rewarded enough, and there's too much workload and too much pressure."
One former teacher who spoke to the ECHO last year said she left the job at the age of 23 due to stress. She'd spent less than two years working 12-hour days on as little as four hours of sleep, with few breaks during the day and constant contact from parents. She had colleagues bedbound with depression, and found career progression only made the pressure worse.
The average teacher works 47-hour weeks doing marking, lesson planning and administration as well as classroom teaching, according to research by the UCL Institute of Education. One in four work more than 60 hours a week. That heavy workload is the biggest factor behind 44% of teachers seeing themselves leaving the profession within five years, a survey by the National Education Union (NEU) found.
It's why the teaching union's joint general secretary, Kevin Courtney, described Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's plan to extend maths education up to age 18 as "baffling". He said "schools and colleges lack the teachers to deliver it", adding: "Low pay and the pressures of workload are creating a crisis of teacher retention."
Like most public sector workers, teachers were offered a pay rise worth roughly 5% last year. They rejected it because, like many, they've seen the real terms value of their income fall in the last 12 years since the Conservative Party came to power.
Graham earns roughly £43,000 - about £3,000 more than he would've done in the same role in 2010, a rise of less than 8%. Inflation - the rate at which prices are rising - stands at 10.7%, according to the Bank of England, the highest level in 40 years.
Housing is growing in cost too - Graham bought a house for four times his salary in 2000. Now it would cost him 10 times his salary. Graham said: "Our pay has been, consistently over the last 12 years, reduced and reduced and reduced in real terms. The cost of living is going up and our pay is going down compared to that cost of living."
The situation with pay and workload is so bad it's pushing teachers into the private sector because, as Graham put it: "You can get the same pay for a job that you can go home at night, forget about and look after your kids and be with your family."
The government did announce a 5.5% increase in the starting salary of new teachers in July 2020, with a goal to increase the starting salary to £30,000 by this year. At the time, then-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson described it as "the biggest pay rise the profession has seen" in 15 years.
But inflation "has already wiped out its value", according to the NEU. After a pay freeze for school staff earning more than £24,000 the following year, the government now expects teachers to accept a pay rise worth half the inflation rate.
Not only is it a real terms pay cut for teachers, it also eats into the budgets of schools because it's unfunded by central government. One school warned it could make the difference between returning £100,000 to its reserves, or making a loss of £140,000, Schools Week reports.
Graham said: "Schools are struggling to pay it, they're running out of money. In certain schools across the city, they'll be freezing other budgets, cutting departmental budgets, money being spent on children has been cut to cover the cost of the unfunded pay rise. That's on top of the massive increases in energy costs."
He feels state schools and teachers are unvalued by the government. He said: "I don't think state education teachers do feel as valued as they should. They clapped for key workers, including teachers, during covid, and then reward us with below-inflation pay rises.
"We got a pay freeze last year, a complete total pay freeze, 0% pay rise last year, straight after covid when we've been working very long hours doing online teaching, hybrid teaching, getting children into school, looking after key worker children or looking after vulnerable children, and we were clapped on a Thursday night along with the nurses, and we were then rewarded with no pay rise and a real terms pay cut. We don't feel valued."
Announcing the pay rise of between 5% and 8.9% in July, then-Education Secretary James Cleverly said: "Teachers are the fabric of our school system and it is their dedication and skill that ensures young people can leave school with the knowledge and opportunities they need to get on in life.
"We are delivering significant pay increases for all teachers despite the present economic challenges, pushing teacher starting salaries up towards the £30,000 milestone and giving experienced teachers the biggest pay rise in a generation. This will attract even more top-quality talent to inspire children and young people and reward teachers for their hard work."
The joint general secretaries of the NEU, Kevin Courtney and Dr Mary Bousted, said: "Teachers work amongst the largest number of hours of any profession, and according to the OECD those working in England work longer hours than teachers anywhere else in Europe.
"Pay, along with workload, lays at the root of a recruitment and retention crisis which should be of deep concern to the Government, but about which they have been completely ineffective. According to their own figures, one in eight teachers leave within their first year, a quarter within three years of qualifying and almost a third are gone within five years. 40% of teachers leave within ten years of qualifying. The Department for Education routinely misses its own trainee targets, year upon year."
They added: "Our members are reluctant to strike – they want to be in school teaching children – but they have been undervalued for too long. The Government's refusal to fully fund the meagre pay rise for 2022/23 is the final insult. We repeat our willingness to meet with Government to find a serious answer to more than a decade of declining pay."
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