Pay teachers their real worth

It looks like we have another teacher supply crisis with record numbers of unfilled vacancies around the country because not enough people are willing to teach, and too many teachers are quitting, complaining about poor pay and heavy workload.

Teachers are asking for a 14.5 per cent pay rise to encourage people to take up teaching, as well as retain those already in the job. I think they are aiming far too low.

To explain why, I want to tell you about Kayla, a formidable year 10 student whom I once tried to teach Economics.

Before every lesson with Kayla, I was invariably reduced to a quivering mess. The problem was that she was not interested in economics but was actually very clever and witty, and very strategic.

I think we both planned each lesson we had together. Her job was to rile me and make me lose my cool, look silly, and best of all, send her out of the room. My job was to teach her something useful whilst maintaining some semblance of order in the classroom.

At the end of the year she bade me farewell with a twinkle in her eye and told me how much she had enjoyed our class time.

To this day, decades later, I am still unsure whether Kayla was just being nice to me, being deeply ironic, or she really meant what she said.

Teaching the likes of Kayla was tough in those days, but the job is far, far tougher today.

Nowadays teachers have to personalise their teaching for every individual in the class, assess them regularly, and keep meticulous records.

For primary teachers, this means every student in their class across all their learning areas, and for most secondary teachers it means every student studying their subject across five or six classes.

Think about that: teachers are required to meet the individual needs of every single one of the students in their class(es). Parents, principals and bureaucrats from Wellington may be right in expecting them to do this, but it is nevertheless, a sprawling, demanding task.

As if this was not enough, teachers also have to deal with increasing numbers of students who are almost uncontrollable, (far more challenging than Kayla), massive technological changes which seem to be crushing most of their creativity, chaotic societal change and increasingly, parents who are determined to ‘‘project manage’’ their children’s lives.

In my day, I just the taught the class, collected a few grades near report time, and told parents what I thought.

A teacher these days needs to be the conductor of an orchestra - the job is to ensure that every single one of the wonderful instruments in the room is finely tuned and working in harmony with the others.

This applies even when the children are hungry, abused, exhausted, depressed or on a high. To put it another way, the teacher must be the parent, the policeman, the psychologist, the confessor and the expert in everything.

Given all this, I agree with the teacher unions: the current $78,000 top of the scale salary of a teacher is scandalously low, but I believe it needs to rise by far more than 14.5 per cent.

I reckon a fair salary would be nearer $164,000, about what a current backbench MP earns (without allowances and perks).

Interestingly back in the 1970s experienced teachers and MPs were paid roughly the same salary. And $164,000 a year would attract and keep the very best people possible in this most demanding of jobs.

In return, though, I would like to see teachers being prepared to be more flexible over their terms and conditions and find ways to manage their workload.

Teachers should take five weeks leave over the Christmas/ New year period, and be expected to be in school for the rest of the year so that they can carry out some of their onerous administrative duties. Just because students are not at schools needn’t mean that teachers don’t have to be at work.

We need to make it easier for principals to remove incompetent and tired teachers from the profession. There are not very many, but they do life long damage to generations of students.

The best teachers need to be rewarded and encouraged to stay in the classroom rather than move into management positions. At the moment there are few mechanisms for teachers to do this.

We need to free up the recruitment of teachers so that people who have the highly tuned interpersonal skills required can work in a school and receive their further training from senior practising teachers, on the job. At the moment, to become a teacher is unnecessarily difficult.

Not a bad deal, surely? In my heart I know Kayla would agree.