Teachers in England to get 3.5% pay rise

Teachers in England will get a 3.5% pay rise from September and 3% the following year, the government has said.

The Department for Education (DfE) announced £1.8bn in additional funding but said schools would have to fund the first 1% of each rise from existing budgets.

It also announced it was curbing pay of top leaders in academy trusts.

The National Education Union (NEU), the largest teaching union in England, said it was "considering all options" including a formal ballot on strike action.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the offer demonstrated the "immense value we place in our teachers".

She added that teachers should not be "seeing executive pay rise faster than their own" and "tighter controls will mean unjustifiable exec salaries become a thing of the past".

The changes mean that from September, trusts will need the government to approve any jobs advertised with salaries of more than £174,000, and executives will not be able to receive higher pay rises than classroom teachers.

The NEU said in May that it would hold a formal ballot for industrial action over pay in the autumn if the government's offer was "unacceptable".

Asked whether this would still go ahead, a spokesperson said: "We are considering all options."

The union's general secretary Daniel Kebede said the government had been "forced" to go beyond its original offer but it was "not the decisive shift needed to reverse real-terms pay cuts since 2010 or restore the competitiveness of teacher pay".

"A partially funded settlement still means cuts to education," he said, since schools will have to find money for it from existing budgets. "The NEU will never accept that."

He added that the curb on executive pay was "a start" but noted it would not be retrospective.

Jessica Featonby, who left her job as a primary school teacher to found an education technology company, said higher salaries would get more people into teaching but the "core problem" was "wellbeing".

Jessica Featonby founded Teacher Tonic, which offers training with a focus on addressing workload and retention issues

She said she worked early mornings, evenings, weekends, and during school holidays when she was teaching - well beyond the hours she was paid for.

"The demand within that time was huge, so realistically, you didn't get your work done in that time," she said.

"If I came at 8:30am [and] left at 3:30pm, there would be so much question around my commitment to the job."

Inflation in the UK was 2.8% in the year to May. That was lower than experts had forecast given the impact of the war in the