Few would argue that teachers are some of the hardest-worked civil servants. The days are challenging, demanding, unpredictable, and long. Expectations and benchmarks change constantly. There is constant scrutiny from the government and from parents. And, while it is hugely rewarding, some would argue that it is not particularly well paid.
It is well documented that teachers don’t choose the profession for the high earning potential. Teachers teach, to name but a few, because they want to change the world, empower students, work with individuals, rather than computers, or to experience the joy of sharing knowledge. Teachers provide a vital public, and personal, service upon which the foundations of our society are laid. But they are not necessarily well remunerated for this mammoth undertaking.
In inner London, where teaching posts are most difficult (for any number of reasons) and thus (relatively) handsomely rewarded, a teacher can earn up to £36,000 a year, with starting salaries of around £27,000. Considering the average graduate starting salary in London hovers around £22,000, this wouldn’t seem to be a bad deal for teachers. However, considering the extra training that teachers must undertake, as well as the importance of the role, £27,000 might begin to look a bit miserly.
When a longer career is taken into account, the disparities truly begin to arise. Without moving into a leadership position, the £36,000-a-year ceiling that teachers hit, despite experience, and without considering performance, seems low, even at the top end of the pay scale. Other graduates with commensurate levels of experience within their chosen industry can generally expect to earn more. When a recently published study, which suggests that primary school teachers work, on average, a 60-hour week, is taken into account, it would seem that many teachers in the state sector could expect to earn the equivalent of around £15 per hour, something that would be inappropriate for graduates in other fields or professions.
The low hourly rate may explain why many teachers, with all kinds of experience, are taking on privately tutored clients, for whom they can get paid upwards of £30 pounds an hour.
Performance-based pay, which is slowly being introduced in independent schools, free schools, and academies, is making some inroads into ensuring that those who do best by students are compensated in a manner which acknowledges their success. However, these moves are encountering fierce opposition from those who claim that variable pay would damage the esprit des corps amongst teachers within a school, or potentially create a perverse incentive for struggling teachers to resort to cheating to improve their students’ results. (This is despite evidence that suggests that systems wherein teachers are rewarded for strong performance, such as in Finland, have consistently strong academic performance in core subjects.)
There are, of course, other benefits to being a teacher other than salary, and public sector pension arrangements have, until recently, been relatively generous. This has led many to contend that though teachers may not be very well compensated during their working life, they are well looked-after once they retire. These pension arrangements, however, are changing, leading to less generous provisions on the back of tight budgets and inflated government debt.
In line with other government directives on the pay and remuneration of civil servants, teachers are seeing their salaries stagnate, their pensions grow more miserly, and their retirement age inch forward. Other government policies would seem to be affecting teacher pay in a less direct manner.
For instance, how are government policies like free schools affecting teacher pay? If the effects are anything like those seen in the United States, it may not be what you’d expect.
In the United States, teachers in private schools and charter schools (similar to free schools) do not necessarily earn more than their public sector counterparts. The improved teaching conditions in private and charter schools lead to teachers who are willing to accept lower salaries in exchange for what is perceived as an easier task. Likewise, the ‘better’ environments in these schools mean that the school need not necessarily hire teachers with years of experience managing an unruly classroom. They can choose to hire less experienced, or less qualified, teachers, with a corresponding increase in the supply of potential staff. As anyone with even a passing familiarity with economics will tell you, increased supply of labour leads to lower wages.
There is some suggestion that the experience here in the UK is similar. Shane Rae, a blogger on the Local Schools Network, detailed his experience of working in 3 British independent schools:
“I can say with authority that one of the things that parents of privately educated children will be aghast to find out is that generally teachers in the private sector are paid considerably LESS than their state counterparts. Many of the really talented, spirited teachers that I worked with either moved to another school for better pay or repatriated to the state sector for better pay. Indeed, when I left the private school where I was a Head of Department, I was making barely half of an identically skilled and experienced counterpart in the state sector.”
Free schools, with powers to set teacher pay as they see fit, are likely to be following a similar pattern, drafting in enthusiastic, but perhaps unqualified, young teachers, any paying them less than they would even get in a standard state school. The problem of low pay is not restricted to the state sector, prompting us to remind ourselves what exactly it is that our teachers, whether qualified or no, do.
In truth, low teacher pay seems to be in keeping with attitudes towards similar problems. When recent government proposals to increase the child-to-adult ratio for nurseries were announced, it was, in part, a response to the oft-heard complaint that childcare is too expensive, which makes being a working mother cost prohibitive. It seems as though we are placing pricing, and thus salary, expectations and limits on those who work with our children based on the salaries of those who are doing job that are much less demanding, and in fact, much less important. For, is there anything more important that the safety and education of our children?
It seems as though the teacher pay issue is not simply going to be solved by tacking higher salary numbers onto teaching positions. The problem is closely intertwined with the value that we place on education as a society. When we begin to value the work that our teachers do more than we value the work of oil companies, investment banks, or pharmaceutical giants, we will be able to have an honest and meaningful conversation about what a teacher deserves. At present, it seems as though we as a society are saying the right things, but not following up those words with purposeful action.