Education Secretary Gillian Keegan urges BMA to ‘look at’ pay offer as union says proposed increase fails to address years of underpay

Education secretary Gillian Keegan also said this morning that the government would honour the 6.5% pay rise offered to teachers into the long term.

She told Times Radio that the process of ensuring the pay cost could be covered and paid for without affecting frontline budgets had been “tricky” and “hard”.

No, I think Rishi has shown great leadership.

It isn’t easy to do, and what you have to do is try and set expectations, to make sure people have reasonable expectations.

Their starting position is an unreasonable position. We all understand there’s been inflation and there’s been a huge spike in inflation. And that’s impacting all of us.

That’s why the main goal is to halve inflation. You can’t chase it. I would urge them to take the same approach as everybody else actually.

I would urge the BMA, the independent pay review bodies have done a very thorough analysis and they look at rates of recruitment, retention, they look at all the other sort of professions or similar professions so they do a very thorough job.