Why we are set to be stuck in a grim cycle of teacher strikes over the next few months

Is there a way out of the impasse? Or are we stuck in a grim cycle of teacher strikes over the next few months?

Sad to say, it does rather look like the latter.

With the National Education Union’s membership resoundingly rejecting the government’s recent pay offer (4.5 per cent plus for next year and a one-off £1,000 payment for this year) over the weekend and electing for more action, there is no obvious way to resolve the stand-off.

Making a mutually acceptable solution even harder to envisage is that while most of the commentary and the angry words are about pay, the row is only partly about that.

In fact, this scrap is just as much about the issue of wider education funding as it is about salaries: while the government steadfastly refuse to promise substantial extra cash for schools to cover any potential pay rises, it’s hard to foresee teachers signing up to an offer.

There is a niche row now going on in policy circles about the extent that existing funding could stretch to include the current offer, but the plain truth is that current arrangements certainly wouldn't cover most of the rejected offer in a large number of schools. And – in a fair few – almost none of it.

Essentially, thousands and thousands of schools are being asked to cut their cloth – classroom resources, teaching assistants, even heating – to pay for teachers new improved wages.

This is the rub. By not promising a large extra cash injection for schools to go alongside a new pay settlement, ministers are basically asking hundreds of thousands of teachers to vote to take investment out of their own classroom and put it in their own bank accounts. I can’t see them ever backing that.

Worse for the government is that this situation ties headteachers to their teachers in this dispute. If the impasse really was just about pay, many school leaders would by now be calling on their staff to settle. But they’re not – most are fully behind the vote to reject.

What other choice do they have? Ministers are inadvertently asking heads to make cuts to other parts of their school budgets to pay their staff a reasonable wage. That’s just plain unfair.

It’s worth remembering that the National Association of Head Teachers came within a hair’s breadth of striking themselves. School leaders are not about to do ministers’ bidding on any of this. They are already very cross about the impact of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis on their ability to make ends meet.

The final death knell in the government’s (at best) partially funded offer to teachers is what it would mean for parent-teacher relations. Can you imagine a situation in which a school staff have to explain to mums and dads at the school gates that the roof in the PE hall is in danger of collapse because teachers have successfully diverted that cash into the wage bill? That’s not going to go down well.

The government will know that public support for teacher strikes is holding up – and that parents understand just how tight budgets are in schools.

And so the NEU must make a concerted effort to move the national conversation away from the details of the pay deal being offered, and onto the question of whether it is funded. Public support is likely to harden if they do.

And that would make life for the government really very challenging.

Ministers could of course come back with a new improved offer to teachers in the next few weeks; but unless it comes with a freshly minted cheque to pay for it, then it isn't going to fly with school staff, heads or parents.

Ed Dorrell is a director at Public First