FEATURE: LEADERSHIP PA PAY 10
Leadership pay – the debate
Leadership Focus journalist NIC PATON chairs a roundtable debate on leadership pay. hen I became a head, my wife asked me to double-check I was being paid properly because I was only getting £20 extra in my wages. Her response was ‘we can’t even buy a Chinese on a Friday night with that’.” Clem Coady’s comments may be slightly historic, in that they relate to when he took up his role as head teacher of Stoneraise School in Carlisle in 2011. But they nevertheless illustrate all too starkly why pay (or more accurately the lack of it) – alongside workload, high-stakes accountability and funding – is so much at the heart
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of the profession’s continuing senior leadership recruitment and retention crisis. There has been much focus in recent years on the general teacher recruitment and retention crisis across the profession, and rightly so. Along with the other teaching unions, NAHT has been at the forefront of hammering home to government (and anyone else who’ll listen) the parlous state of recruitment and retention within the profession. For example, NAHT’s 2017 The Leaky Pipeline report concluded that school leaders were struggling to recruit in eight out of 10 vacancies; two-thirds
Opposite: Marijke Miles.
I am also intrigued by the massive demographic shift we have seen in leadership; I don’t think the DfE has taken that on board.
said they were waving goodbye to more and more colleagues well before retirement, and budget pressures were preventing a third of teaching roles from being filled even if candidates could be found. The government has, to an extent, responded to these escalating ‘crisis’ headlines. Two years ago, the Department for Education (DfE) finally broke down and scrapped its long-standing 1% pay cap. Starting salaries for new teachers are due to rise to £30,000 by 2022 in a bid to make the profession more attractive to graduates.
