The Territory’s teachers have voted in favour of the Fyles Government’s latest pay rise offer, ending industrial action that has gone on for months and effectively bringing in a new enterprise bargaining agreement that the union says was not “brilliant”, but necessary to “stave off a crisis”.

The agreement was accepted with 68 per cent of roughly 1380 teachers voting in favour of the deal out of an estimated 2700 teachers Territory-wide, the union said.

Teachers will now receive a three per cent annual pay increase, backdated to October 2021 when the last EBA expired.

Australian Education Union NT president Michelle Ayres said the union was hoping for a better deal but would settle for the three per cent offer.

“We had a really split membership, nobody thought this was a really brilliant offer and three per cent is well below CPI and the current pressures on cost of living … we would have liked to see some kind of cost of living bonus or something to help alleviate some of that,” she told ABC Radio.

“But at the same time, we had a large contingent of our membership who were saying that they were in desperate need of a pay rise and they were willing to accept something and that three per cent didn’t sound bad.”

The government had ended its pay freeze offer in August and put forward an initial two per cent pay rise offer which was rejected by teachers.

The new EBA will make the NT’s teachers the highest paid in the country, Ms Ayres said, based on annual salary.

But Ms Ayres added that attracting teachers to the NT was always a challenge.

“We’re competing across Australia for teachers, and it’s always been difficult to attract them to the Northern Territory and now we’re in the [teacher] shortage it’s more difficult than ever,” she said.

“In order to see staff in classrooms next year, we need to see strong salary rates and we were really staring down a potential crisis if we didn’t see this agreement come through.

“I think that maybe we have staved off that crisis for now, but I don’t know for how long.”

The EBA will see the backdated increase to October 2021, another three per cent rise backdated to October 2022 and another set for October 2023.

Employment Minister Paul Kirby said the government recognised the hard work teachers do and was “pleased” the offer had been accepted.

Police, firefighters, corrections officers, Power and Water staff and nurses are still without an EBA as their industrial action continues.