Teaching and school leader unions have called on the Department for Education to immediately publish the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) report and to confirm the pay offer for teachers for 2024-25.

In a joint letter to Gillian Keegan, the general secretaries of the Association of School and College Leaders, the NAHT school leaders’ union, the NEU and the NASUWT teaching unions said there is “no good reason for you to delay publishing the STRB report and compelling reasons to publish it now”.

The letter states that the education secretary received the STRB report, which will set out recommendations for teacher and school leader pay rises, last week.

Union leaders pointed out in the letter that Ms Keegan said last summer she planned to align the timing of the STRB teacher pay setting process with the school budget cycle.

Union bosses have said that any delay in publishing pay recommendations and the government’s decision would undermine this.

The DfE published its evidence to the STRB in February, which recommended the teacher pay rise should return to “a more sustainable level”.

It did not recommend an explicit pay rise percentage in its evidence, unlike previous years.

Last year, the government accepted the STRB’s recommendation that teachers receive a 6.5 per cent pay rise from September 2023. The deal came after a long-running dispute over pay and months of strike action by members of the NEU.

A year earlier, for 2022-23, experienced teachers received a 5 per cent pay rise.

The union letter says: “As the STRB report sits on your desk, the already critical recruitment and retention problems are getting worse. Any delay in publication of the report will make those problems worse.”

The NASUWT previously accused the education secretary of “deliberately frustrating” the teacher pay process for next year for failing to issue a remit letter to the STRB in a “timely manner”.

The DfE has been contacted for comment.

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