Education Secretary: Teachers accepting deal is ‘great news’
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan says she is “delighted” that teachers have today voted to accept a “fair and reasonable offer” of a 6.5% pay deal from the government.
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Report by Rowlandi. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00 I do, I'm delighted actually. I think it's great news for teachers, it's great news for
00:04 headteachers and school leaders, it's great news for parents and it's also great news
00:08 most of all for children. It is a fair and reasonable offer and obviously the STRB when
00:12 they looked at it, they looked at what inflation is forecast to be as well. Clearly, you know,
00:18 we've had a huge spike in inflation and I understand that's made it very difficult for
00:21 everybody. However, we are focused on halving inflation by the end of the year and hopefully,
00:27 you know, during next year to see inflation come back to much more reasonable levels.
00:31 This pay increase is from September 23, so from this September through to next September,
00:36 so hopefully in that period we will get inflation below 6.5%. Within the school budgets, with
00:42 the £2 billion extra that we already got when I was very first in the job at the end
00:45 of October last year, there was a 3.5% that schools had budgeted for a pay increase for
00:51 teachers within that. Obviously, this STRB came back at 6.5%, so the extra 3% is being
00:58 funded by the Department for Education.