Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of the public sector pay cap on the recruitment and retention of staff in schools in (a) England, b) London and (c) Lewisham Deptford constituency.

The public sector pay cap is no longer in place and we have adopted a more flexible approach to public sector pay. The Department's remit letter to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) states that the STRB should utilise this flexibility to target the next pay award to promote recruitment and retention.

The fundamental changes to teachers’ pay that have been introduced over the last four years, following the STRB’s recommendations, have given greater autonomy to schools to decide how to reward their staff. This increased flexibility helps schools to attract and retain the best teachers and to target any school-level recruitment and retention problems they may have, including addressing teacher shortages in specific subjects.