The government has recommended a 6.5 per cent pay increase for teachers split across three years.

In written evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), the Department for Education has said that a 6.5 per cent pay award over 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29 would be “appropriate”.

The 6.5 per cent deal would be weighted towards the latter part of that period, it wrote in its submission.

The announcement comes more than a week after the DfE was supposed to set out its pay plans, as Tes revealed on Monday.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson asked the pay review body to make teacher pay recommendations for the next three years, rather than just 2026-27, in order to give schools more certainty over their budgets.

As a result, the STRB is expected to make recommendations for the next two years by February, as well as giving an indicative recommendation for 2028-29.

The DfE will then make its final teacher pay decision. While the government does not have to follow the STRB’s advice, it has accepted its recommendations for the past two pay awards.

Teacher pay recommendations

According to the DfE’s submission, the 6.5 per cent pay award, combined with the increases from the past two pay rounds, would result in teacher pay rising by nearly 17 per cent across this parliament.

Average earnings growth across the country is forecast to slow to around 2 per cent in the three years to 2028-29, down from 3.7 per cent in 2025-26, the DfE said.

It added that the “worsening” of the graduate labour market was helping teacher retention, and this would likely continue in the short term.

But the recommendation has been attacked by teaching unions, which have issued a joint statement calling for the “urgent, significant and fully funded” movement towards a complete reversal of what they call a real-terms pay cut for teachers and school leaders since 2010.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said the pay award recommendation amounted to a “real-terms pay cut” for teachers.

“Instead of 6,500 more teachers, we have botched Ofsted reforms, declining school funding and now a pay recommendation that will continue to do nothing to address the continued crisis in retention,” he added.

Matt Wrack, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, shared Mr Kebede’s concerns. “This proposal fails to address the thousands of pounds in pay that teachers have lost over the past decade due to years of real-terms pay cuts,” he said.

The amount on offer was “likely to exacerbate the current recruitment and retention crisis in teaching and lead to further reductions to support, resources and provision for pupils in our schools”, he added.

Schools ‘will need to find savings’

The DfE’s submission said the proposals are affordable for schools and that weighting the award towards the latter part of the three-year period would give schools a “longer timeframe to plan for changes to their operations, provisions or staffing”.

But Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called the proposals “extremely disappointing”.

“The suggested pay award is inadequate and the DfE’s recognition that most schools would need to find savings from existing budgets to deliver even this meagre amount reflects the insufficiency of the government’s education funding plans,” he said.

The proposed pay award fails to address “historic pay erosion” and is “dangerously close to being a real-terms pay cut, as it relies on inflation being low across the period”, he added.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, acknowledged that recent pay awards have improved teachers’ salaries, but he said there remains “much to be done in order to make teaching a really attractive proposition for graduates, retain serving professionals and improve leadership aspiration”.

Teachers were given a 4 per cent pay rise for the 2025-26 academic year, but schools were expected to find the first 1 per cent of this rise from “efficiencies”.

Jack Worth, education workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research, said that the proposed pay award would “act to maintain pay competitiveness at its current level”.

However, he added that while it could help to contain the cost pressures on school budgets, it would be “very unlikely to contribute to improving teacher recruitment and retention”.

Referring to the government’s commitment to deliver 6,500 more teachers, Mr Worth added: “With significant cuts to some [teacher training] bursaries, it is vitally important that the government lays out exactly what measures it does plan to implement to meet its 6,500 teacher target.”

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