Teacher numbers fall - organise for better pay!

By Luke Woodward

The DfE has recently reported that teacher numbers are shrinking in England’s state schools, but this should come as no surprise.

Within capitalism, we are assigned a role: we must labour in return for a wage, and this wage must be used to survive. Everyone probably has a sense of what is needed to survive: food, water, shelter and warmth figure pretty highly, and housing usually covers the last two. I work as a secondary school teacher in Bath & North East Somerset, and my salary enables me to make the rent, pay bills, maintain a car and go on holiday.

But how likely has it been that a teacher’s salary would help me buy a house over the last 60 years?

1970s

This was a fairly good decade for a teacher: they earned on average £2,500 per year and housing cost about £7,000: a ratio just under 3 times that of the annual salary.

1980s

Thatcher’s rate-shock briefly pushed mortgage rates past 15%, and annual repayments consumed more salary than any decade before. But house prices hadn’t detached from income, so the underlying debt wasn’t crazy. Hard, but manageable with commitment.

1990s

In the late 90s and early 2000s, mortgage rates fell towards 6-7%, and a teacher could briefly afford a home on a single salary.

2000s

As neoliberalism advances, the structural break begins: New Labour raised teacher pay, but house prices surged from around £84,600 in 2000 to £157,000 by 2005—a near doubling in 5 years.

2010s

Between 2010 and 2020, under Conservative austerity, teacher pay fell by 4% for those on the main pay scale. Ultra-low mortgage rates kept repayments manageable for those who already owned a house. For those who didn’t, a new barrier was introduced: deposits, which were themselves a multiple of the average annual salary.

2020s

The worst of all worlds. In 2023, average house prices sat at £250,000 to £300,000. A starting teacher on £30,000 faces a price-to-salary ratio exceeding 10:1, and an experienced teacher faces a ratio of roughly 7:1.

As capitalism has advanced over the last 60 years, property has been acting as a vehicle for capital accumulation: rising house prices are doing exactly what capitalism is supposed to do. But a teacher’s wage will no longer guarantee the security of a decent house, so why would anyone want to join it? 

Only a unified workers’ response has the power to arrest the logic of capitalism. We must fight in our unions for above-inflation pay rises, and we must fight to represent support staff, who do not benefit from press recognition but whose work in schools is vital and whose salaries are many times further than that of a teacher from being able to pay for decent housing. We must demand affordable housing for all. Once a teacher’s salary represents a good option for survival, then we will see more people joining the profession to educate young people in England.