‘Intolerable pressure’ brings teachers to brink of walkout

Strikes ‘an option for people to consider’, warn union bosses

- MILLIE COOKE DAVID MADDOX

Teachers could follow resident doctors and strike next year unless Labour hikes pay and plugs school funding gaps, the bosses of two major teaching unions have warned.

Matt Wrack, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), told The Independent that talks of strikes were “inevitable” at the union’s conference next April unless there were improvements in pay and conditions. He argued cash-strapped schools were caught in a “vicious cycle” because teacher pay rises had to come out of existing school budgets, which were already stretched.

Mr Wrack warned members “expected change” after Labour won the general election, but they are “not convinced that change is being delivered, either adequately enough or quickly enough”.

Meanwhile, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), warned there is a “real possibility of industrial difficulties” next year, arguing that teachers may no longer tolerate the “burden of pressure” being placed on them.

The latest School Workforce Census revealed that there were almost 3,000 fewer state primary and nursery school teachers in England in 2024, with one in five (19.4 per cent) teachers in primary and secondary schools leaving the profession within two years of qualifying. That figure rises to more than one in four (26.7 per cent) after three years.

In May, the government accepted the independent School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) recommendation of a 4 per cent pay rise for the 2025-26 academic year - a recommendation Mr Wrack described as being “unhelpful” when teachers’ real earnings “have fallen over the past 15 years”.

“There’s been changes to pensions which have worsened pensions. So the package that teachers get is not what it was 15 years ago.