British Headteachers Are Among Highest-Paid in Europe. Why, Then, Are They Striking?
With salaries for headteachers in British state schools of up to £156,000 a year, only heads in Luxembourg earn more, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development. Starting salaries of £61,000 also trump all but a handful of nations. Which begs the question: Why have members of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) decided to join the three other teaching unions in calling for strikes? Do they want even more money? The Sunday Times has more. All four unions have rejected the government’s latest pay offer of a £1,000 one-off payment for 2022/23 on top of an earlier pay rise of 5.4% and an average 4.5% pay rise for staff in England in 2023/23. Teachers in Scotland and Wales have already accepted pay offers of up to 14.6%. Unions want their pay offers fully funded by new money from the Treasury, not taken from existing school budgets, which they say means there is less money to run the schools. They claim that just 0.5% of the pay deal they were offered is funded by additional money from the Treasury. So far strike action has shut or partially closed about half of all state schools, but if the three main teaching unions and head teachers walked out on the same day this would cause much wider ...
