tion! Eventually, after some fast footgovernment, which has deliberately set out to cock a snook at traditional labour movement values, that even when claiming to remedy long-standing problems they do so by increasing inequality and cultivating elitism.
Last year came the daft, divisive . notion of the "super-nurse" and Wrong again - Dobson giving extra pay to a tiny handful from each profession, leaving their hard-working colleagues aggrieved and alienated. Now, with the unveiling of the Pay Review Body recommendations, ministers are floating another package of policies that will leave the majority of teachers and nursing staff fuming. The decision to award head teachers more than double the feeble increase allotted to classroom teachers will exacerbate the problems of recruiting new entrants to the profession, worseing the current 15,000 shortfall. The plan to offer an increase of more "than 11% to newly-qualified nurses will benefit just one in twenty of the nursing workforce. The remaining 95% of qualified nurses, who are already slogging their guts out for pitiful pay, are promised only a 4.5% pay in cresse The half-baked plan to entice young entrants to the profession runs alongside the much-vaunted £Sm advertising campaign which seeks to persuade trained nurses to return to the NHS and help fill the estimated 13,000 vacancies -but few if any of these will benefit from the 11% boost in pay.
The biggest losers are the nursing staff on the lowest grades -nursing assistants and health care assistants, many of whom earn less than £5 an hour, and for whom a 4.5% increase will barely buy a bag of peanuts.
Half a million other health workers are also likely to face a pitiful increase in response to their claim for 10% or £1,000.
To compound the misery i appears the under-funding of the pay awards will leave Trusts and education chiefs imposing cuts to balance the books.