Teaching assistant pay - debate on e-petition 620264

On Monday 17 July 2023, there will be a debate on teaching assistant (TA) pay. The debate is in response to an e-petition on the subject. The petition attracted around 88,000 signatures. it called for better pay for TAs and highlighted high workload and responsibility levels. It also said that some TAs were leaving jobs for better paid work elsewhere.

The House of Commons Petitions Committee conducted a survey in advance of the debate, asking people about their experiences and views on pay for teaching assistants. A summary of the results is published online - discussed in more detail below.

Background on pay for non-teaching school staff

Teaching assistants and other non-teaching school staff in England are not all paid on nationally agreed pay scales or employed on nationally agreed terms and conditions. Many are paid according to nationally negotiated scales, and what are known as National Joint Council (NJC) ‘green book’ terms and conditions. Others are employed on local pay scales, terms and conditions, and many are employed on term-time-only contracts.

The Government has no direct role in negotiating pay even for direct local authority employees, as explained in response to the e-petition leading to the debate on the 17 July:

The government does not have a role in setting local government pay and there is no national pay body. Instead, most councils take part in collective negotiations. The Local Government Association (LGA) represents the employer, negotiating with the National Joint Council (UNISON, Unite and the GMB) which represent the employee.

Data on TA numbers and characteristics

The Department for Education (DfE) publishes annual data on the numbers of teaching assistants working in schools in England. The latest data is for November 2022:

• There has been a sustained upward trend in the number of teaching assistants since 2010/11; there are now around 281,000 full-time equivalent TAs
• TAs are overwhelmingly female - only 7% are male
• 8 in 10 work part-time
• two-thirds (66%) work in primary schools, and 16% in special schools or pupil referral units

Data on TA pay

There is no published official national data on pay for non-teaching staff. Of those responding to the Petitions Committee's survey in advance of the debate, 19% said their full-time equivalent salary was less than £13,000 per year, and only 1% said it was above £26,000 per year.

Salaries were often less than this in practice, because many were employed on term-time-only contracts - around half of the respondents to the Petitions Committee survey said they were employed full-time, but term-time-only.

Some respondents to the survey said they, or their teaching assistant colleagues, had taken on second and sometimes third jobs to increase their earnings - or had left the role for higher-paid work.

Local Government pay negotiations

There is ongoing union action on school support staff pay in 2023-24. Nationally, Unison is currently balloting school and council members on strike action. The GMB’s school members voted to reject the latest national employer side pay offer for 2023-24, and it says it will formally ballot members in the Autumn term over the “unfunded pay offer of £1,925 for those working a full time 52 week contract”, adding that “school support staff on a term time only contract would only receive a fraction of this amount!”. Unite is balloting local government workers in four waves.

Staffing costs - for teachers and non-teaching staff like TAs - generally consume the vast majority of schools' annual budgets. Unlike for TAs, there is a statutory pay body for school teachers, called the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB). On 13 July 2023, the Government and main teaching unions made a joint statement on teacher pay in 2023/24 academic year. This said the Government had accepted the STRB's recommendation of a 6.5% increase for teachers and school leaders. All parties agreed that the teacher pay uplift was "properly funded", and the unions said that they would put the offer to their membership with a recommendation to accept it.

Data on teaching assistant numbers and pay

There is no published national data on pay for non-teaching staff. Of those respondnig to the Petitions Committee's survey in advance of the debate, 19% said their full-time equivalent salary was less than £13,000 per year, and only 1% said it was above £26,000 per year.

Salaries were often less than this in practice, because many were employed on term-time-only contracts - around half of the respondents to the Petitions Committee survey said they were employed full-time, but term-time-only.

Some respondents to the survey said they, or their teaching assistant colleagues, had taken on second and sometimes third jobs to increase their earnings - or had left the role for higher-paid work elsewhere.

Recent press and other commentary on the issue of TA pay and conditions

• National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) news story, ‘Support staff pay award 2023-24’, 23 May 2023
• ‘School support staff to vote on striking over pay’, TES, 23 May 2023
• Local Government Association, ‘Employer circular - Local government pay 2023’, 8 March 2023
• ‘Low pay ‘forcing teaching assistants out of UK classrooms’’, the Observer, 14 May 2023
• ‘Recruiting and retaining our teaching assistants’, Sec Ed, 17 April 2023'
• 'Teaching assistants quitting schools for supermarkets because of ‘joke’ wages', the Observer, 9 October 2022'