Headteacher warns teacher pay rise will leave schools out of pocket again

A headteacher has warned the new pay deal for teachers may end up meaning schools have to make further cuts as they try to balance budgets.

Liz Bartholomew, from Mayflower Primary in Dovercourt in Essex, said she was expecting to be around £10,000 out of pocket by funding the new 6.5% pay rise.

Teaching unions across the country called off strike action as they accepted the deal on Monday.

Mrs Bartholomew said she thought teachers deserved the money but feared some schools would be left making cutbacks to pay the extra cash to staff.

She said she had only budgeted for a pay rise of 3.5% on the advice of the local authority.

The government said it would fund the shortfall, but Mrs Bartholomew said their plan appeared to be calibrated on pupil numbers rather than actual staff - which would still leave her short.

"It will have an impact unfortunately," she told ITV News Anglia.

"It just means that any allocation we did in March, when schools set a budget for the following year [...] we will have to make those budgets smaller and scrape back as much as we can to cover the shortfall.

"For us in particular, it's about a £40,000 budget we are going to need. The government are going to give us £18,000. We've allocated as much as we could, the 3.5%, but are still a few thousand short.

"It really means we are going to have to take things away from allocations we have already made, which might be from curriculum resources, training opportunities, the sorts of things we really need in schools."

Earlier this summer Mrs Bartholomew told an ITV News Anglia investigation about the extreme pressures schools were facing to balance the books.

She said the IT teacher had resorted to entering competitions to win laptops because the school could no longer afford to replace the equipment.

She said windows were taped shut because they did not have the money to fix them and the library was a converted bus paid for by donations.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan claimed that the pay award would be fully funded by government.

She said: "We will be providing an additional £525m of funding in 2023-24, and £900m in 2024-25. That is equivalent to the full costs of the pay award over 3.5% which our evidence states is affordable to schools nationally, and in line with the evidence the government submitted to the School Teachers' Review Body."

Mrs Keegan welcomed the decision of teaching unions to accept the pay offer as “good news for teachers, good news for parents, and most of all, good news for children."

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