Recently pay has not acknowledged the increase in responsibility we have as heads... the increase in responsibility in the past five years has been astonishing. It is hard to say what is going to happen, but we are going to have make many more decisions about performance-related pay in particular."Head teachers deserve a reward. The pay deal will add anything from pounds 1,800 to pounds 2,700.Mrs Wainwright, who is responsible for 15 staff and 180 children at St John's Church of England Primary School in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, is pleased with the rise announced yesterday and hopes it will herald a decent pay rise for classroom staff."The increase is most welcome, and we have to see it hopefully as a first step towards increasing rewards for the whole profession. Direct action becomes more likely while the Government maintains its complacency towards teacher shortages and hostility towards teachers," Mr McAvoy said.However, David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, welcomed the announcement."Those who criticise the pay award to heads are disingenuous, because all concerned knew that head teachers were being dealt with separately this year," he said.The Primary HeadSheila WainwrightTwenty-two years' experience as a head teacher has brought Sheila Wainwright a salary of pounds 30,000 a year. "They are going to have to change the proposals or there's no agreement," he said.John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: "If we are introducing a major new system of appraisal for every teacher every year, that raises major questions about whether it is manageable and whether it will adversely affect the rest of schools' work."Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, insisted that "teachers want pay, not peerages" and called for a joint campaign to bring home to the Government the problems caused by shortages in classroom staff."That campaign could lead to direct action on class sizes, on cover for absences and on the increased workload teachers face. We step forward into the new millennium by harking back to a failed history."Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said he was "very disappointed" with the proposals.

The pay of a newly qualified graduate outside London will rise from pounds 15,012 to pounds 15,537 from April. From September the head teacher of a typical small primary school will receive pounds 33,552, up from pounds 30,651, and the head of a large secondary will earn pounds 57,570 compared with pounds 54,552 now.Secondary school head teachers will be able to earn up to pounds 70,000 but all head teachers' pay will be more closely linked to performance.The Liberal Democrat education spokesman, Don Foster, said: "This award will not help keep good teachers, let alone persuade keen young graduates to enter the profession."The Conservative education spokesman, David Willetts, added: "We welcome this settlement, but we need to be clear about how it is funded."David Blunkett [the Secretary of State for Education and Employment] goes around bragging about how much he puts into education, but not much of it is reaching local authorities and schools."Mr Blunkett said that the Green Paper on performance-related pay to be implemented next year would "make the teaching profession better paid and more attractive - with the opportunity of initial increases of up to 10 per cent based on performance and assessment".Union leaders attacked the pay deal, and said that the plans for performance- related pay would do nothing to improve recruitment in the profession.Peter Smith, leader of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "They will see this against the background of an inadequate pay award, which does precious little to address recruitment or retention of teachers apart from for heads of relatively small primary schools. There is another pounds 160m on top of that to reduce class sizes."The overall pay bill will go up by 3.6 per cent. The cost of this settlement is less than half that extra money. "We will be meeting ministers soon and pressing them to use some of the pounds 1bn which has been put aside for restructuring the whole of teachers' pay to avert a cash crisis for education authorities," he said.But senior government sources said: "Local authorities have been given pounds 1.1bn extra this year. CLASS SIZES will rise and teachers will be sacked unless the Government finds another pounds 70m for teachers' pay, local authority leaders said last night. Ministers retorted that this year's increase in the amount councils are allowed to spend - 5.7 per cent - would more than cover the bill. Graham Lane, chairman of the Local Government Association's education committee, said it was demanding a meeting with ministers to ask for the extra money.

In a speech last week, billed by Downing Street as praising the dedication of public-sector employees, he warned that the Government may need to slaughter some "sacred cows".He asked: "Do we need greater differentials within the public sector? Should we decentralise pay more? What are the lessons of performance pay and where else should we be using it?" Mr Blair already knows the answers, but whether the unions will accept them is quite another matter.. So Labour will need to offer plenty of sweeteners to persuade NHS workers to swallow it.But there is no doubt that Tony Blair intends to grasp the nettle. Moves towards performance- related pay for teachers, bitterly opposed by their trade unions, will be followed soon by similar proposals for the National Health Service.Ministers want to end the system of rigid pay structures based on length of service rather than performance.This will prove a bitter pill for health workers to swallow, and could even produce the most serious conflict between the trade unions and the Government in the lifetime of this parliament.It will not prove easy for ministers to "divide and rule", as shown by yesterday's criticism of the big differential between the pay rise for head teachers and classroom teachers.The Tories tried to "decentralise" NHS pay by introducing local bargaining but backed off in the face of strong opposition. After ending the recent tradition of reducing the public- sector wage bill by staging the awards, it will be very difficult for the Government to put the genie back in the bottle.When next year's public-pay settlement takes effect, we could be 12 months away from the next general election.Although Mr Brown is adept at conjuring up extra cash, the danger is that public-sector pay will soak up much of the money earmarked for improving frontline services.Ministers hope to square the circle by moving towards a radical overhaul of the way the public sector pays its staff.