Please sign this open letter to the Chancellor in support of our campaign for a fully funded, above-inflation pay rise -

We are writing as elected local councillors on behalf of the teachers and support staff we represent to urge you to provide the fully funded, above-inflation pay rise that all educators deserve.

There is currently a recruitment and retention crisis across education. We hear regularly from headteachers in our wards struggling to recruit new teachers, and from parents and grandparents whose children and grandchildren have ‘new’ teachers starting in the middle of the school year.

Your Government missed its target for recruitment of new secondary school teachers by a simply staggering 41 per cent this year. Overall, there has been a fall of 23 per cent in trainee teacher recruitment in 2022 compared with the year before.

Furthermore, teachers are leaving the profession in their droves. One in four teachers leave the profession within two years of qualification - a third within five. Nearly one third of the teachers who qualified in the last decade have already quit.

Lack of qualified teachers harms the education children and young people receive. One in eight maths lessons is taught by a teacher not qualified in the subject. In this country we have the highest primary class sizes in Europe and our secondary class sizes are the highest since records began more than 40 years ago.

Even Ofsted says the workforce crisis in schools is “compounding” barriers to education recovery, with children “bearing the brunt”, concluding that “it is vital that education providers are able to recruit, train and retain talented and capable people.”

Teachers are leaving the profession because of a toxic mix of excessive workload and poor pay. In this context it is clear that the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) is failing in its remit, with the profession becoming less attractive to work in. This must urgently be addressed if are children are to receive the best education possible.

The teachers who are striking today are the ones who have stayed the course in this noble profession. But they can stay silent no longer. They are striking to draw attention to the crisis in our schools – a crisis which will only get worse if nothing is done to pay teachers properly for the essential work they do.

There is enough money in the economy to afford the pay corrections we need for teachers, nurses and other public sector staff. It’s a question of priorities – what, as a society, we value; what we think is worth the money.

We urge you to listen to the demands of all teachers and support staff and provide them with the fully funded, inflation-plus pay rise that they deserve.

Yours sincerely,

The undersigned