By Gavin Mackintosh-
Female headteachers across all ages suffer a gender pay gap than their male teaching counterparts, according to a report.
The analysis revealed that male teachers earned 2.4 % more on average than women, whereas male headteachers earn 11.3 % more than women in the same roles.
The gender pay gap for full-time employees nationally is 7.9 per cent as of this April, but 11 percentamong the over-60s.
Gender pay gaps have long been an issue that has led to cries of inequitable treatment against women.
Due to the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, gender pay gap reporting regulations have been suspended for the 2020/2021 reporting period, but some organisations have volunteered to report their gender pay gaps.
The BBC’s median gender pay gap is 6.2%, as at April 2020. On average, women earn 94p compared to every £1 their male counterparts earn.
Over the reporting period, 12.2% of female employees and 10.2% of male employees received bonus payments. Just under half (40%) of employees in the highest pay quartile at the BBC are female, compared to 41% in the second quartile, 46% in the third quartile and 55% in the lowest pay quartile.
Vivienne Porritt, co-founder and global strategic leader of WomenEd, said her organisation had heard “many examples where women are paid less than men for the same role and with the same or greater experience”.
“This report shows that such inequality is more significant than women realise.”
The report also found that the gap depended on the school, with female heads of special and alternative provision academies earning on average £4,165 less than men, but in secondary academies, male heads earned £3,399 more than their female counterparts.
According to the analysis, there are several contributing factors to the pay gap across the sector. Women are more likely to manage caring responsibilities, and career breaks “can have a negative impact on pay and career progression which can be a particular issue for female teachers on maternity leave”.
Other factors include individuals being appointed at different points on pay scales, different job and grade titles for “virtually the same jobs” and performance-related pay being “unfairly awarded”.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, said the figures in the analysis “should be sobering to anyone that reads them”.
“We’ve seen school leadership pay eroded over the last decade and for our female school leaders there is almost a ‘double hit’ by the inequalities in the system.”
Geoff Barton, from ASCL, said the report had exposed “stark differences in education salaries which we simply must do more to address”.
The report recommends that the government improves national level analysis of pay gap trends, including a change so that it includes executive heads and trust chief executives.
Government should also act on calls from the School Teachers’ Review Body and the sector for a “comprehensive review” of the pay framework for teachers and leaders, and provide greater support to help mitigate “some of the systemic barriers” to flexible working.
Schools and trusts should seek to understand the situations in their organisations, the report said. Those not legally required to undertake pay gap collections should still collect and analyse data “for internal purposes”.
Where gaps are found, schools and trusts should create a plan to reduce it. They can also help by removing requests for current salaries from recruitment materials and requests for references.
The report also urges governors to review recruitment policies, hold regular reviews of pay policies and setting procedures and review the diversity of their governance teams.
Emma Knights, chief executive of the NGA, said schools needed to “encourage and reward all the talent within schools and trusts”.