What are we to make of schools secretary Ed Balls’s announcement that teachers will receive a 2.45% pay rise this year?
The award is the first of the government’s hyped three-year pay deals, which we covered on the front page of this week’s Personnel Today magazine.
Teachers are to get 2.45% in September, followed by increases of 2.3% in 2009 and 2010. Balls accepted the recommendations of the School Teachers’ Review Body in deciding the rate.
The award is in sharp contrast with prime minister Gordon Brown’s insistence that all public sector pay deals would be pegged at 2%.
The government has incurred the wrath of police officers by not backdating their pay deal, and last year nurses and other NHS workers grudgingly accepted a staged pay rise.
So what does all this mean? That teachers are more valuable than police officers and nurses? That the government will now accept the recommendations from the various salary review bodies?
What it says to me is that the government is in a muddle. The rhetoric from ministers is not matching the reality of what is happening on the ground. All the government is doing is storing up big trouble for itself as it heads into the 2008 pay round.
Unison, the UK’s largest public sector union, has already announced it will be seeking a 6% pay rise this year for more than one million council workers, and that a three-year deal is not on the cards.
Plus there is the threat (again) of joint union action on public sector pay. I sense trouble with a very big ‘T’ in store for Brown and his cronies.
