Today the Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson announced plans to raise teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000 by 2022-23.
Responding to the announcement, Jon Andrews, Deputy Head of Research at the Education Policy Institute, said:
‘This significant increase to teacher starting salaries is a welcome and much needed policy shift, particularly given the consistently missed recruitment targets and increasing drop out rates amongst new graduate teachers.
‘But schools will also be mindful that this creates an increased cost pressure on their budgets that will erode some of the increases the Prime Minister announced on Friday. Today’s announcement lacks the detail required to really understand the scale of that pressure and how it will be felt by schools, but as nearly 1 in 4 classroom teachers currently earns under £30,000 it is likely to be far from negligible.
‘In order to enable schools to manage their workforce and budgets efficiently, the government now needs to provide further details about how these increases will be implemented and how the additional funding will be allocated’.
Further details of the proposal will be set out by the Secretary of State in a letter to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB).
