Teachers offered 6.5% pay rise from September 2023

Yesterday, the Department For Education (DfE) accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) recommendation and announced a 6.5% pay rise across all pay scales for teachers and school leaders in England from September.

The DfE will provide additional funding to cover 3% of the rise and schools are expected to fund the remaining 3.5% from existing school budgets.

Unions are encouraging it’s members to accept this offer and are describing the deal as “fairly funded”.

In addition to this pay rise announcement the DfE also announced the creation of a Workforce Taskforce – with its aim to look how the DfE can further support Trusts and School leaders to minimize the workforce for both schools leaders and teachers. They plan on reducing working hours by five hours a week and to reinsert a revised list of administrative tasks that teachers should not be expected to do into the school teachers’ pay and conditions handbook.

Will this be enough to solve the Teacher Retention and Recruitment Crisis?

Although Teachers and School Leaders are most likely to accept this offer, a recent report published by NFER suggests that the 6.5% pay rise is unlikely to solve the teacher recruitment and retention crisis on it’s own and a longer term strategy is needed which should focus on well-targeted financial incentives and action to improve the non-financial attractiveness of teaching alongside improving the competitiveness of teacher pay.

Flourish Education have been building strong relationships with schools and top teaching talent since 2010; supplying teachers, teaching assistants and non-teaching staff into primary schools, secondary schools and academies across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands region.

We recognize that every school has their own unique culture, community and specific recruitment challenges and by understanding the needs of the schools that we work with and getting to know our candidates, we are able to match the right candidate to the right school.