The government has confirmed a four percent pay award for teachers in English schools for the 2026/27 academic year, a settlement that falls below the private sector wage growth rate of around five percent and has generated mixed responses from the major teaching unions. Some unions accepted the award as the best achievable in a fiscally constrained environment, while others condemned it as inadequate to address what they described as a systemic crisis in teacher recruitment and retention.
The School Teachers' Review Body, which advises ministers on teacher pay, had indicated in its most recent report that the staffing pipeline into teaching was deteriorating in a range of subjects, with secondary school mathematics, physics and modern foreign languages facing the most acute shortages. The combination of below-market salaries, increasingly challenging working conditions — including exam pressure, workload and behaviour management demands — and the availability of alternative employment options was driving potential teachers to other careers and experienced teachers out of the profession.
The National Education Union, the largest teaching union, described the four percent award as an insult that would do nothing to address the underlying conditions driving the recruitment and retention emergency. The NASUWT was similarly critical. The National Association of Head Teachers took a more measured position, acknowledging the fiscal environment while calling for additional funding for school budgets to prevent the pay award being absorbed entirely by cost pressures rather than improving teachers' real-terms income.
The government indicated that the four percent would be funded through the schools block of the dedicated schools grant, meaning that per-pupil funding allocations would be adjusted to cover the pay increase. Headteachers' organisations questioned whether the increase in the grant would be sufficient to cover both the pay award and the additional National Insurance contribution costs that had been applied to employer payrolls from April 2025.
