Teachers have been offered a 5.5% pay rise backdated to the start of the 2024/25 academic year, which could cost the NI Executive nearly £50 million if accepted.
Unions had called off planned industrial action short of strike at the start of January to allow a four week window for negotiations.
Minister Paul Givan had promised to bring an offer to the table by the first week of February and unions will now take the offer to members who will vote on whether to accept.
At the end of last year unions called for a 13.5% pay rise, something which the Minister said was ‘unaffordable’.
The offer is in line with what was accepted by teachers in England last year, and will also include new agreements on teacher workloads.
Although no union has yet confirmed, they are expected to recommend that members accept the new offer on the table, but it will also include a commitment that in future “industrial action should only be taken as a last resort in any dispute”.
Any pay deal offer will now have to be voted on by union members.
Earlier in January, Minister Paul Givan had warned that negotiations were proving ‘difficult’ considering the financial constraints on his department, stressing that “the pay claim was substantially higher that what was recommended by the UK government and accepted by teachers in England.”
The Minister added: “In line with the requirements of public sector pay policy any proposals for a teacher’s pay award must be affordable and this is proving difficult to resolve given the pressures that already face the education budget.”
In addition to the expected pay offer, pressure group think1265 had also urged the Minister to ensure commitments to easing the workloads experienced by teachers are met.
The group had written to the Minister outlining a lack of implementation in schools of the current teacher workload agreement, which was part of the previous pay deal in April 2024.
It said any pay offer must include a significant workload element if teachers are to vote in favour of accepting any proposed deal.
Brian Banks, co-founder of think1265 – the name taken from the maximum number of hours teachers are contracted to work in an academic year – said far too many teachers have come forward to say previous commitments have not yet been met.
“Last August’s workload agreement had the potential to transform teachers’ workload and work-life balance, but thousands of teachers have told us that it’s not being implemented in their schools,” he said.
“Currently the only mechanism for ensuring that schools meet teachers’ rights on workload lies with teachers taking out grievances against their own bosses.”
Helen Doogan, co-founder of the think1265 campaign added: “We’ve studied teachers’ workload for almost a year now, and because every school is different it follows that workload solutions need to be developed on a school by school basis.
“We’ve written to the Minister to explain how the current workload agreement can achieve that, but there has to be a more robust mechanism in place to ensure that schools are doing what they are supposed to be doing under that agreement.”
The campaigners say that the onus should be on the Department of Education to ensure that school leaders are correctly implementing teachers’ workload rights in their school.
Mr Banks continued: “The most valuable resource in our education system is teacher time. We think it’s high time the Minister’s department took responsibility for ensuring this limited resource is deployed according to the workload rules agreed by teachers, employers and the Department itself.
“We are campaigning for something that has already been agreed,” he added.