Teachers hold out for more than 2% 'pay rise'

Wednesday 29 November 2017

Teachers won't be accepting a 2% pay rise, which is "nothing like the rate of inflation", the National General Secretary of the newly formed National Education Union has promised.

Kevin Courtney visited local teachers this week and met Education officials including the Chief Education Officer Justin Donovan to discuss pay and teachers’ workload.

The NEU was formed by the merger of the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in September and represents over 400 teachers in Jersey. Mr Courtney warned that there will be "discontent" among those members if the Education Department cannot offer more than 2%.

Earlier this month, the States revealed details on the first phase of their long-anticipated 'Workforce Modernisation Programme'. With an increase of 3.3% in pensionable pay in total by 2020 for a majority of States employees, unlikely to keep pace with inflation, it meant a real-terms pay drop for most.

Pictured: The Workforce Modernisation Programme, unveiled earlier this month, has so far seen a majority of public sector workers see their pensionable pay fall behind the cost of living.

The teachers want to avoid that and Mr Courtney assured that they will not accept 2%. He told Express: "We are still in negotiations about the pay rise which should have been paid in January this year. We have been offered 2% and we know that is nothing like the rate of inflation and members have had pay rises less than inflation for many years. We are seeking to get the States to increase teachers’pay. We haven’t put a figure on it but we are saying that it needs to match inflation and do something to put back the loss of pay across recent years."

The union secretary also warned that further steps might be taken to ensure results if their desired pay rise doesn't occur.

For Mr Courtney, the pay situation is part of a bigger problem which has led to a teacher shortage in England. He explained: "There is a phenomenon developing in Jersey that is quite advanced in the UK with a teacher shortage developing and a high turnover of teachers. We think that is mainly caused by the workload and a work that is not about teaching but about giving evidence of what you do. We also think it is caused by the pay.

"We are seeing many young people starting in the profession and leaving after only a few years. It is very hard to get and hold of good teachers."

Looking forward to meeting Jersey @NEUnion members tonight. 6:30pm at Radisson. Talking about pay, workload & their vision for education. pic.twitter.com/eJ4MqhEEUD

— Kevin Courtney (@cyclingkev) November 28, 2017

The workload was another hot topic which Mr Courtney, a former teacher, approached with local Education officials. He explained: "It’s not that the workload is too high and that teachers are preparing too many lessons. It’s that teachers are doing too high a degree of planning more than is useful, just to have evidence that they have done planning and they are doing marking to too great a degree of detail, which is not useful to people but to prove they are marking.

"We want to work together to make sure that that sort of workload doesn’t get to the stage where it is in England and that we can pull it back. We want to make sure that when teachers are working they are working for the children they are teaching, not to show somebody else the work they have done. It's a culture and we need to work together to stop it."