Improved pay needed to reflect teachers’ role
Teachers need a pay rise. There’s very little dispute about that. The issue now is balancing increases with improvements in conditions, the two going hand-in-hand to the benefit of New Zealand’s students. We’ll all profit from that.
While teaching can be a rewarding career, nowadays the challenges are enormous, and building, and are not fairly reflected in pay rates.
As well as skill and knowledge, top classroom practice requires energy and enthusiasm and, all too often, today’s teachers find these qualities more difficult to muster on a daily basis.
I admire the brave teachers who wrote about their experiences to illustrate the kinds of issues they face daily. But they needed courage to speak out. The majority of online comments were negative. Commenters sneered that teachers should harden up.
Everyone works hard, they said; stop moaning and get on with it. And what about those holidays? Surely with 12 weeks off every year, teachers are on easy street. Maybe their pay should be even lower, opined one writer on the basis of some questionable calculations around pay rates, school holidays and numbers of hours they assumed a teacher worked. Sigh.
It’s tedious to enumerate the wide variety of work teachers do during their ‘holidays’ so I won’t.
It’s also variable, depending on factors like subject specialty and level taught, experience and involvement in co-curricular activities like sports, music or drama.
But what I will say, because I know it from my own experience as a former teacher, is that the hours worked during term time will rarely be compensated for by the supposedly ‘extra’ eight weeks teachers receive over and above the rest of the working population.
It is common for fulltime teachers in primary and secondary services to work 10-hour days, including a stint in the evening, and at least a halfday during the weekends during term time.
During the teaching day ‘breaks’ are usually filled with meetings, playground duty, co-curricular activities and the myriad of other tasks teaching routinely entails.
Another common theme in online comments was a plea to pay the best teachers higher salaries.
Whether New Zealand parents would want a lower paid, presumably less skilled professional teaching their children is a question these commenters seem not to have considered.
Many appear to believe there are a large number of less than competent teachers in our schools but actually that’s not the case.
Professional standards for New Zealand teachers are very high already and if a teacher can’t meet them, they don’t remain in the service for long.
Assessing teacher competence, mainly by student test results, and paying teachers accordingly is the practice of a number of USA states.
Improvements in student achievement there are underwhelming although there has been a small rise in teacher retention reported in some limited scenarios. This probably says more about the relatively high turnover of teachers in the US system than anything else.
In 2013, the UK government required schools to implement performance pay but left it to them to design how they would rate and pay teachers.
Follow this link: https://theconversation.com/
lessons-learned-from-imposing-performancerelated-pay-on-teachers-87657 for the ho-hum results of this policy.
It’s terribly expensive to assess the full range of teaching skills accurately and objectively for comparative purposes. Student results alone will never reveal the true worth of an experienced professional.
Many may not realise that some New Zealand teachers are already paid more than their colleagues when they take on extra duties or responsibilities, like leading a subject department in a secondary school. An extra time allowance often comes with the pay rise and teachers compete with each other for these positions.
Alongside worsening pay and conditions, and probably partly caused by them, is another aspect that affects recruitment and retention of teachers: a lack of trust in and respect for teachers and the commensurate falling status of the profession.
Since the 1980s, the dominance of the market economy has financially rewarded certain types of jobs and punished others such as the kind of careers where competitive behaviour is counter-productive.
Teaching, along with nursing, falls into the latter category and has suffered as a result.
A healthy, balanced society needs to reward both kinds of enterprise equally. I hope the powers that be will repair the current imbalance in upcoming wage settlements. Teachers need to be valued by more than lip-service in both improved conditions and increased salaries.
Professional standards for New Zealand teachers are very high already and if a teacher can’t meet them, they don’t remain in the service for long.
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