A proposed pay rise for school support staff could be the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” and be unsustainable for budgets, school leaders have warned.
Local authorities have offered school support staff a flat pay rise of £1,925, which would mean a pay increase of 10.5 per cent for the lowest-paid support staff and a rise of just 4.04 per cent for the highest-paid employees.
The rise could result in an overall cost to schools of around £1 billion, as there are roughly half a million support staff working in schools.
If each received a rise of £1,925, this would roughly equate to £962 million, but not all will because, for example, some academies may deviate from the pay scales.
Schools will also face extra costs, such as increased pension contributions, as a result of the rise.
Some headteachers have warned that their schools face extra bills in the tens of thousands to meet the cost of the pay award.
The impact of support staff pay rises on school budgets
Writing on social media, Simon Smith, principal at East Whitby Academy, said that as a special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) “magnet school”, with a significant number of support staff, the pay rise cost would be £40,000 and his school “would have to make redundancies”.
Linking to a blog he wrote in 2020, calling the circumstances around SEND provision “woefully inadequate”, he added: “If you’re an inclusive school, the support-staff pay rise may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It was unsustainable a couple of years ago when I wrote this. Now multiply this by five.”
Rob McDonough, chief executive of the East Midlands Education Trust, said the trust had initially budgeted for 2 per cent pay rises for support staff, and that, including pension contributions and other costs - such as National Insurance increases - the proposed hike would require an additional £1.5 million across the budget for his 20 schools.
He added: “The only real way that schools can cut costs significantly is through staffing, as that’s the majority of the budget.
“Ultimately, it’s not sustainable and we need this rise, like the teacher pay rise, to be funded.”
Bev Matthews, chief executive of Minerva Learning Trust, added on Twitter: “Pay rises are needed and are deserved but we need additional funding to cover it. This poses a huge challenge, which will ultimately impact on the quality of what we can offer our young people.”
Vic Goddard, co-principal of Passmores Academy in Harlow, wrote that he had budgeted 3 per cent for the pay rises, in line with previous announcements.
He said that this week’s announcements mean the four-schools trust would need to find an additional £170,000 across its overall budget.
Julia Harnden, funding specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said that the impact on school budgets would “vary depending on factors such as what grades their staff are employed on” because the flat pay rise will produce a higher percentage increase for those on lower grades.
She said that it was “difficult” to say what the impact will be at school level, other than to point out that schools “cannot afford these costs on top of all the other financial pressures they face”.
According to Department for Education figures, schools will, on average, receive a 5.8 per cent increase in funding per pupil in 2022-23.
Ms Harnden added that owing to the teacher and support-staff pay rises, along with other spiralling costs, such as energy bills, “it seems very likely that extra costs will exceed the funding settlement and represent a real-terms cut. This is on top of the fact that schools have already suffered real-terms cuts over the past decade.”
She concluded: “We want to see improved pay for all staff - and believe that it should at the very least match inflation or otherwise it is effectively a cut.
“But, by the same token, schools must have the funding to be able to afford the costs of pay awards or otherwise there is an element of smoke and mirrors about the whole exercise.
“The reality is that with these cost pressures and without extra funding, schools will have to make cuts which are very likely to impact on educational provision in many cases.”
The budget pressure follows schools warning that last week’s teacher pay increase will push them into deficits unless they are presented with additional funding.
Last Tuesday, it was announced that experienced teachers would get a 5 per cent pay rise from September 2022, which is higher than the 3 per cent figure the department had originally proposed in its evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) in March.
But headteachers have warned that the announcement came after academy trust leaders had already set their budgets for next year - and with no additional funding attached to meet the extra costs involved.
Special-school leaders have also warned that the two pay rises combined will hit their budgets “disproportionately”, partly because they spend more on staffing.
Writing for Tes after the news of the teacher pay rise came out last week, education secretary James Cleverly said that he knows schools are “feeling the pinch” at the moment.
“This need to pitch the pay rise at a manageable level has been one of the key factors in our decision making. Thankfully, we fought for and secured a generous school funding settlement at last year’s Spending Review,” he wrote.
“The settlement is heavily front-loaded, with £4 billion extra going into schools this year and a total increase of £7 billion over the three years up to 2024-25.”
