01 Feb Government ‘not close’ to a deal with teachers, says Education Secretary
THE Government cannot award teachers an inflation-busting pay rise, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has said.
Speaking on the day many children were off school , Ms Keegan told GB News: “I wouldn’t say we were close to a deal, but I wouldn’t say talks broke down either. They were constructive.
“We were together for an hour and ten minutes. It’s the third meeting I’ve had with them in January. And then there’s been longer and other meetings with officials as well.
“They didn’t break down, but they basically said very clearly, look, we can’t do anything to stop this strike.”
Ms Keegan said: “But we do have 28 days between this and the next strike. So, we will continue those discussions.
“What we can’t do is offer inflation busting pay rises, because we’re really focused on getting inflation down, so we all feel better and have more money in our pockets.”
Asked why the Government refuses to budge, she said: “The next round of the independent pay review body has already started and we were due to complete our submission or give our submission in on Friday.
“We didn’t do that because I wanted to give more space for the discussions instead of putting out expectations, but we’ve said we’ll talk about future pay in light of recruitment and retention challenges.”
She added: “We’ll talk about workload. We’ll talk about how to better support Special Educational Needs in our schools.
“We’ll talk about flexible working. Some people want to look at how they can job share. We’ll talk about all of that.
“I’m here to make sure that our children get a world class education to do that.
“We need fantastic teachers, and we need to recruit the best as well and I think we have a common objective.”
On funding, she said: “As of next year, we’ll be spending £58.8 billion on our education system. It’s always compared to 2010, which was the highest year ever in spending, that was £35 billion.
“So, no matter which way you look at it in real terms, in cash, we’re spending more and of course the £2 billion that the union’s demanded to make sure that our schools were well-funded.
“That was the very first thing I dealt with in my role. That was the first letter I got from them, on 25 October. The economic times were really challenging.
“The Prime Minister did agree to that. Also, this has not been taken into account with a lot of the discussions about our funding.”
