Overview
- The Department for Education has proposed a 6.5% teacher pay rise spread across 2026/27 to 2028/29, weighted toward larger increases in the final two years to ease near-term budget pressure.
- The DfE argues that, combined with recent awards, the plan would lift teacher pay by nearly 17% across the parliament and deliver a real-terms improvement.
- Teaching unions including NEU, NASUWT, ASCL and NAHT have rejected the proposal as insufficient, warning it amounts to a real-terms cut and could worsen recruitment and retention without extra funding.
- The department says most schools will need to find efficiencies, pointing to reviews of leadership team structures, changes to support staff deployment, and new benchmarking of academy CEO pay.
- Officials flagged a forthcoming value-for-money programme to help schools save, while the STRB process continues following pay awards of 5.5% in 2024/25 and 4% in 2025/26.