MINISTERS are showing “appalling contempt” for teachers over the government’s pay freeze, the annual conference of NASUWT will be told today.

Angela Butler, the teaching union’s new president, is also expected to say that workloads needs to be made more manageable.

In a speech to the conference in Birmingham, she is due to call for school staff to be protected from malicious allegations and abuse on social media.

In 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak paused pay increases for all public-sector workers except doctors and nurses.

In March this year, the government called for teachers’ starting salaries to rise by more than 16 per cent over the next two years, bringing them up to £30,000 by September 2023.

The Department for Education has said in its submission to the School Teacher Review Body (STRB) that it wants statutory starting pay to increase by 8.9 per cent this year and 7.1 per cent next year.

But the proposed rises for more experienced teachers are lower and the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said that, taking into account growing inflation, the proposals would leave them with a real-terms cut of 5 per cent between 2021 and 2023.

Ms Butler, 59, a chemistry and special educational needs and disability teacher from Powys, is expected to say: “We find that politicians and even many school leaders just don’t get it. 

“It is we teachers that put children first. It is why we they entered the profession.

“An exhausted, unhappy, disillusioned teacher is not an effective teacher. 

“And the price they pay for years of neglect is schools in crisis, battered and bruised by a pandemic and neglected and misunderstood by governments.”