Today (7 October) the general secretary of the National Education Union has written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer calling for him to halt plans to claw back savings from reduced employer contributions to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) and keep the money in school budgets.
Following the 2024 TPS valuation, employer contributions will fall from 28.6 per cent to 17.6 per cent from April 2027 — a saving estimated at around £3.3 billion a year. This is money desperately needed within schools, with latest figures from the School Cuts campaign showing that schools have faced £4.5bn in real term cuts since 2010.
The NEU has also welcomed the Government’s decision to keep savings from reduced employer contributions to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) in education, helping schools meet staff pay costs and protect jobs.
The full text of the letter is as follows:
Dear Chancellor,
I am writing to you ahead of the upcoming Budget to ask you to halt plans to claw back savings from employer contributions to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) and instead keep this money in school budgets.
We were pleased to see the recent announcement from your government that savings from reduced employer contributions to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) will remain in education. Where individual schools have seen reductions in their LGPS employer contributions this will support the funding of staff pay awards without any impact on the pensions that support staff will receive.
This was very welcome in ensuring that schools would not have to face further cuts to their budgets for this year and helping to protect over 8,000 jobs that our analysis showed were at risk due to funding cuts.
Despite this, the picture for school funding has been bleak. 74 per cent of schools have faced cuts since 2010 and the Core Schools Budget is currently £4.5 billion lower than it was in 2010 in real terms. Repeated cuts to school budgets have had devastating impacts on schools. Our class sizes in the UK are among the highest in Europe. School staff are being driven to burnout by relentless stress and sky-high workloads.
As a result of the TPS valuation 2024, the employer contribution rate is reducing from 28.6 per cent to 17.6 per cent from April 2027. It is estimated this will save approximately £3.3bn per year, money HM Treasury is currently planning to recoup. This is funding that is urgently needed to begin to restore school funding back to 2010 levels.
Due to this planned clawback of savings from the TPS, the Core Schools Budget totals outlined during the 2025 spending review will now be lower in a consistent basis. This is likely to significantly affect any planned increases in school funding in coming years. By keeping this money in schools the government can maintain these totals and allow individual schools to enjoy these savings.
This would reassure educators that school funding will increase in real terms in the near future and help mitigate potential job losses, restructures and redundancies as schools continue to struggle with falling rolls.
I was very pleased to see that this administration has recognised the crisis in our schools – now is the time for decisive action to arrest this decline in funding. A generation of students has known nothing but funding cuts. We cannot afford to fail another generation of children.
I would be delighted to meet with you to discuss this further.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Kebede
General Secretary
National Education Union