Junior doctors must stop their “awful” and “heartbreaking” strikes, the Education Secretary has said.

Gillian Keegan was speaking after the Government unveiled plans for junior doctors to receive a £1,000 salary rise on top of a wider six per cent increase, a proposal which has already been dismissed by the British Medical Association (BMA) as not “credible”.

Ms Keegan told Sky News: “What’s unfair – I think very unfair – is we know there’s a massive backlog in the NHS. We know that’s because of Covid. We really had to focus our resources on a global pandemic. We always anticipated this was going to be really tough, once we’d got rid of the pandemic...

“What I think is very frustrating for people is they’ve already waited a very long time during Covid and this means their planned operations or treatment has been postponed again.

“It’s heartbreaking for people because they are in pain, a lot of people, so it is awful, and we would urge them to come back to work and accept the independent pay review body.”

Ms Keegan also welcomed the decision of four education unions to immediately cancelled planned strikes to accept her plan to increase teachers’ pay by 6.5 per cent this year.