Will some teachers receive a 15.9% pay rise?

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has claimed that "almost every newly experienced teacher and 40% of experienced teachers will actually get pay rises up to 15.9%".

But is she right?

Ms Keegan was asked on BBC Breakfast about teacher pay increases in England.

In July 2022, the government announced that it had accepted the School Teachers' Review Body's (STRB) recommendations on teacher pay.

The pay increases - which came into effect in September 2022 - varied with less experienced teachers getting larger percentage increases.

Teachers in England were offered an average pay rise of 6%.

Ms Keegan referred to "newly experienced teachers", but that's not an official category applied to staff.

The pay band for qualified teachers in England with the least experience is M1. They will see their pay go up 15.9% as they move up to the next band M2 in 2022-23 (outside London) which you would expect to happen to almost all of them after the first year.

This figure combines the STRB's pay rise and also pay progression components.

So she's right about this specific group of teachers who made up around 5% of teachers in England in 2022-23.

Teachers at this pay band working in London will see their pay go up by a bit less - about 14%.

But the education secretary went on to talk about experienced teachers.

She said 40% of them would be getting "up to 15.9%", but in fact none of them will be getting that much - they will be getting 9% or 10% if they move up a pay band this year.

We asked the Department for Education (DfE) about the evidence for her claim and were told that the less experienced teachers who could get 15.9% and the 40% of experienced teachers who could get 9% or 10% are indeed separate groups.

Mary Bousted - joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) - spoke on Radio 4 on 9 January about how much teachers' salaries had fallen after adjusting for rising prices, saying: "Teachers have lost 24% of their pay in real terms since 2010."

The union later told our colleagues at More or Less that she had mis-spoken and actually meant to say 23%.

But that figure is still considerably higher than the figure calculated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

It found that between 2010 and 2022, taking into account rising prices, the salaries for the most experienced and senior teachers had fallen 13%, for middle earners it was between 9% and 10% and that starting salaries have fallen 5%. The overall average was 11%.

More or Less found that there were two key differences between the calculations by the NEU and the IFS.

The first is that the NEU concentrated on experienced teachers because that is the largest group, while the IFS looked at all teachers.

But also, the IFS figure was based on CPIH, which is the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) headline figure for inflation. The NEU used RPI, which is generally higher. While the ONS calculates RPI, it said in 2018: "we do not think it is a good measure of inflation and discourage its use".

Nonetheless, it's clear that teachers' pay has fallen considerably since 2010 after adjusting for rising prices.