Teachers offered £10,000 above pay scale as staff shortage sparks school bidding wars

Bidding wars between schools mean sought-after teachers are paid up to £10,000 extra, as headteachers compete to keep the best staff in the midst of a recruitment crisis.

Dr Robin Bevan, the headteacher at Southend High School for Boys in Essex, one of the top state schools in England, told a Westminster Education Forum conference in London that teachers of subjects where there is a shortage could be paid £10,000 more than the official pay scale.

Dr Bevan told The Independent that his heart sank every time a teacher came to his office to say they had been offered higher pay to join another school.

He said: “As a headteacher, you face the difficulty of looking to recruit when there are very few teachers coming in.

“We are forced to respond with at least some financial offer. It’s more like working in the commercial world. Salary negotiation has never been part of education.”

Teachers’ salaries used to set by national pay scales, but schools were given powers to set pay in September 2013.

Dr Bevan said: “The proportion of schools budgets that is being spent on teachers’ pay is rising faster than those budgets are rising.

He said recruitment was a continual headache. “It’s not unusual for a successful school [such as ours] to get only one or two applicants,” he said. “Maths is very difficult to recruit for. Two-thirds of our sixth-formers do maths A-level, so we need good teachers. Last year we had a shortage of two maths teachers for nearly six months.

“At the moment, because the supply of maths and physics teachers is poor, salary is used as the principal manipulator to move teachers from one school to another.”

Meanwhile, southern Europe’s brightest graduates are to be headhunted to become teachers in Suffolk and Norfolk as part of a recruitment drive to tackle the recruitment crisis.

The adverts in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal will encourage graduates from the countries’ top universities who have studied maths, physics, chemistry, computing and modern foreign languages to teach in East Anglia.

Suffolk and Norfolk Initial Teacher Training said the campaign, launched was intended to attract “untapped talent” to East Anglia. But the National Union of Teachers accused recruiters of attempting to “plunder” talent from countries that were “soft targets” because of their high unemployment rates.