Teacher pay rises needed to meet 6,500-teacher target

A teacher pay increase of nearly 10 per cent a year for three consecutive years would be needed to meet the government's plans to recruit 6,500 new teachers, if using pay as a sole incentive, analysis by NFER has found.

The analysis suggests that this would cost an additional £2.1 billion next year (2025/26), rising to £4.9 billion in 2026/27 and £7.7 billion from 2027/28 onwards.

The report highlights the potential for alternative lower cost options which either rely on cost-effective spending on targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, particularly bursaries and early career retention payments (ECRPs), or on non-financial measures such as reducing workload or improving Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

The 2024 Labour party manifesto pledged to ‘recruit 6,500 new expert teachers in key subjects’, but without setting out a detailed definition of how this supply target would be measured or delivered. The Education Secretary has since committed to deliver the recruitment target over the course of the five-year parliament.

The report, How to recruit 6,500 teachers? Modelling the potential routes to deliver Labour's teacher supply pledge, provides detailed analysis of some of the potential policy choices available to the Government, with estimated costs.

The analysis, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, explores the role of financial policy levers, such as pay, bursaries and ECRPs, and non-financial measures, such as workload reduction, in meeting the teacher supply target.

According to the research, targeted measures aimed at shortage subjects, such as physics, could include an expanded set of retention payments that are available to a wider set of teachers. For example, these payments could be made available to teachers of shortage subjects in all secondary schools and/or those with more than five years’ experience.

Achieving the supply target through pay increases alone would require a pay increase of 9.55 per cent per year in each of the three years from 2025/26 to 2027/28. By 2027/28, such a pay increase would restore the relative position of teachers’ pay within the country’s earnings distribution that it had in 2010.

However, the analysis estimates the pay increase would cost the Government £7.7 billion pounds per year from 2027/28 and beyond to finance. The research suggests the current tight financial environment makes it unlikely these measures will form a significant part of an overall strategy.

The research goes on to say the recruitment target is also unlikely to be met without new policy action and that many current policy measures would not be sufficient to meet the supply target in isolation.

Bursary increases alone would not be able to attract enough trainees to provide 6,500 additional teachers unless levels were raised above starting salaries. ECRPs and broader retention payments could be used, but increasing the value of targeted bursaries and ECRPs could create large disparities in pay between subjects.

The report recommends the Government publishes a comprehensive strategy for how it defines and plans to meet the target, and how it will be funded.

Jack Worth, School Workforce Lead at the NFER and co-author of the report, said:  “The Government faces a considerable challenge to meet its 6,500 teacher supply pledge and many choices about how to deliver it.

“Our analysis shows that substantially increasing teachers’ pay could possibly deliver the required number of teachers, but it comes at a very high cost that is unlikely to be feasible in the current fiscal environment.

“Achieving the supply target will require new policy measures.

“We wait with interest to get clarity from the Government on how the target will be defined and how it plans to deliver and fund it.”