Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced in the Summer Budget 2015 that public sector pay will be capped at a maximum 1% rise in each year until 2020. In the same budget, he announced a national “living wage” of £9 per hour by 2020, for over-25 year olds (as well as a 10% pay rise BACKDATED to May 2015 for MPs, but that’s by the by).

In real terms, that’s a 4% pay rise by 2020 for public sector workers such as teachers, and a 38.5% pay rise for everybody else.

The average teacher will spend 3-5 years at university before becoming qualified, depending on the length of their undergraduate degree and whether or not they require a PGCE or PCET to qualify them to teach.

For someone who is finishing their A-Levels this summer and wants to be, say, a secondary school Chemistry teacher, they will spend up to 4 years on an undergraduate Chemistry degree and then spend another year on a PGCE, making them a Newly Qualified Teacher by September 2020.

IF the public sector salary is increased to its MAXIMUM of 4% by then, that Newly Qualified Teacher faces an annual salary of £22,903 – and will have student debts (not including any personal debts, mortgages, loans, etc.) of potentially over £86,000.

Now let us compare this with your average retail worker, who has no formal qualifications, no student debt to pay back, and a relatively stress-free job – who will in 2020 face an annual salary of £17,550.

The difference between these annual incomes, when calculated down to an hourly wage, is just £2.33 per hour (assuming that teachers work the average 37.5 per week – which, of course, they DON’T). Does £2.33 more per hour justify all those years of A Levels, University courses, oh and that £86,000 debt?!

It doesn’t sound attractive to that 18 year old just finishing his A-Levels. So he decides to pursue a different career path, one where he can earn similar-to-more money, without the stresses of parents shouting at him on a daily basis, children behaving awfully, having to spend his evenings, weekends and “holidays” planning and marking…

And then we find ourselves with a teacher shortage.

3 out of 4 Local Education Authorities have reported that they are experiencing a teacher shortage (of reportedly “crisis levels”). Couple in with this the fact that around 100,000 primary school children find themselves in class sizes of over 30 (the legal limit allowed to one teacher) and you can see we really have a problem.

I am petitioning that the Government reconsider this “1% pay rise cap” on public sector workers such as teachers, so that we, as a country, can avoid further problems in recruitment and retention of high-quality, qualified teaching staff and provide our children with the education they deserve.