Schools Are Absorbing Teacher Pay Rises From Their Own Budgets — Here's What That Could Mean for Your Child

The story in one line

The government has confirmed a 4% pay rise for teachers in England from September 2025, but is only partly funding it — leaving schools to find roughly a quarter of the cost from budgets that were already stretched.

What the government has actually agreed

The Department for Education has accepted the School Teachers' Review Body recommendation of a 4 per cent rise for the 2025–26 academic year. Government has said schools will still have to fund around a quarter of the rise themselves – which equates to finding £400 million from their own budgets. This comes on top of savings they have already budgeted for.

To help cover the rest, ministers announced additional grant funding. As Schools Week reported in May 2025, this came to £615 million in extra money for schools. The Times Educational Supplement noted that schools and high-needs settings will get £567 million from a support grant, with an additional £15 million for schools with early years, and £32 million for post-16 provision in schools. The funding has come from existing DfE budgets rather than being new Treasury money.

That last detail matters. The top-up is a reallocation within the education budget, not fresh spending from the Treasury.

Why heads say the maths still doesn't work

Sector leaders were quick to flag the shortfall. According to the Association of School and College Leaders, "The funding allocated to schools does not fully cover the cost of this pay award – so this represents a further cut to school budgets which are already under a great deal of pressure."

The pressure isn't hypothetical. Schools Week's analysis of local authority accounts in July 2025 found that out of the 4,540 primary schools in the dataset, 710 were in deficit on their cumulative revenue budgets in 2024-25 – just under 16 per cent, and up from 645 in 2023-24 (14.2 per cent).

And the cuts had already begun before the pay award landed. A Sutton Trust poll in April 2025 found that 51% of secondary school senior leaders reported making cuts in teaching staff, up from 38% last year, while 50% reported cuts to teaching assistants, up from 41% last year.

Where the savings are most likely to come from

Schools have limited levers. Staffing accounts for roughly three-quarters of a typical school's budget, so any significant saving eventually touches people. Based on what heads and trust leaders have told the education press, the likely order of cuts is:

• Teaching assistants and support staff. These are usually the first to go because they sit outside statutory teacher pay protections. The Sutton Trust polling above showed cuts to TAs rising sharply year on year.
• Non-replacement of leaving teachers. Rather than making redundancies, many schools quietly raise class sizes by not filling vacancies.
• Curriculum breadth at Key Stage 4 and 5. Small A-level classes and low-uptake GCSE options (often languages, music, drama, design technology) are vulnerable when a school is looking for a subject to drop.
• Intervention and catch-up programmes. Small-group tuition, reading recovery and one-to-one support are often funded from discretionary pots that shrink first.
• Enrichment and trips. Sports fixtures, peripatetic music lessons and field trips can be scaled back or passed on to parents as voluntary contributions.
• Buildings and equipment. Deferred maintenance, older IT kit, fewer textbooks per pupil.

Sir Dan Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, was blunt in the TES: "It's inevitable, with these unfunded pay rises there will be redundancies."

What parents should actually look out for

Most schools will not send a letter announcing cuts. The changes tend to appear quietly. Signs worth noticing this academic year:

• Larger classes, especially in Years 7–9 where staffing is most flexible.
• Subject options shrinking at GCSE choices evening — a language dropped, a technology subject merged, an A-level only running with 6 pupils rather than 12.
• Teaching assistants no longer in the classroom for children who previously had in-class support, particularly those on SEN Support (the level below an EHCP).
• Fewer small-group interventions — reading groups, maths booster sessions, phonics catch-up.
• Increased parental contributions for trips, music tuition, sports kit and revision materials.
• Higher rates of cover lessons taught by non-specialists when a member of staff is absent and supply cover has been cut.

The single most useful question at parents' evening this year is a direct one: "Has my child's class size or in-class support changed since last year, and is it likely to change again in September?" Teachers will usually answer honestly.

Is a school under budget pressure a reason to think about tutoring?

Not automatically. A well-run school under financial strain can still deliver strong teaching, and paying for tutoring on top of the school day is a real cost that not every family can or should take on.

There are, though, a few situations where private tutoring genuinely fills a gap that a squeezed school cannot:

• Your child was receiving small-group intervention that has been withdrawn. This is common in Years 3–6 for reading and maths, and in Years 10–11 for GCSE English and maths borderline support. If the school has quietly stopped that provision, the gap is real.
• The A-level or GCSE option your child needs is being taught in a merged or oversized class. One-to-one specialist support in subjects like further maths, physics or MFL can be difficult to replace inside a stretched department.
• In-class SEN support has been reduced. For children with dyslexia, ADHD or processing difficulties who don't meet the threshold for an EHCP, targeted weekly tutoring from someone trained in that area often does more than a general TA ever did.

If none of those apply, the honest answer is that most children will be fine, and the money is better kept in reserve.

The wider picture

The 2025 pay award is not a one-off pinch. Schools will be expected to fund the first 1% of each pay award from existing budgets going forward, and the government has already asked the STRB to consider cost pressures for schools in its recommendations for future years — a signal that the same tension between pay awards and school budgets is likely to run through the rest of this parliament.

For parents, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Ask specific questions this year, don't assume the school will volunteer changes, and judge any decision about outside support on whether a specific gap has opened up for your specific child — not on the general mood music about school funding.