Payment rates
Better teachers not smaller classes will fix schools, say top experts
BY ANDREW WHITAKER
Mer level increases to £4.75 and £7.13 for Advanced Higher. However, an education source told the Sunday Herald that it was possible to spend up to an hour marking just one pupil’s work, which would put the SQA rate at below £7.20 and £8.45.
The insider said: “If you work an hour, you should get the equivalent of the living wage.”
Dr Janet Brown, the chief executive of the SQA, is listed as earning between £125,000 and £129,999 a year. In October, it was claimed that the SQA had been paying thousands of exam invigilators less than the living wage. Invigilators complained they EMBERS of John Swinney’s panel of world-leading education experts have said cutting class sizes would make little difference to achievement in schools and would be hugely expensive.
Dr Avis Glaze, a member of the Scottish Government’s international council of education advisers, warned that “changes in class size are one of the most expensive changes possible” due to the need to build new classrooms and staffing costs.
The Canadian-based international expert on education insisted she was not speaking “as a member of the international advisory council” that Swinney, the education secretary, appointed her to but from a “personal and private perspective”.
However, Glaze suggested “teaching competence and leadership effectiveness” were a higher priority than reducing class sizes.
Dr Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor at Harvard University who is also a member of the government’s panel of 10 experts, suggested that “reducing class size has only a small [positive] impact” on delivering education improvement. The stark claims were The following rates apply to Computing, Design and Manufacture, Engineering Science and Graphic Communication
£3.56 per assignment
£4.75 per assignment
National 5: Higher: Advanced Higher:
£7.13 per assignment made as the Sunday Herald today looks at whether smaller class sizes change educational outcomes in our latest State of the Nation investigation.
Pupil-teacher ratio has been an issue the SNP government has been repeatedly challenged on since the party came to power in 2007 on a manifesto that included a pledge to “reduce class sizes in primary 1, 2 and were receiving £27.15 for a morning session that could last up to four hours or more, or £54.30 for a full day, which in some cases worked out at an effective hourly rate of £6 for the longest exam sessions. However, it was later reported that the quango would ensure invigilators received the living wage.
Labour MSP Daniel Johnson told the Sunday Herald: “The SQA has already this year been forced to change its approach to invigilators over fears they were not being paid appropriately.
“Teachers should not be expected to mark assignments out of working hours and students should not be penalised due to hundreds of millions of 3 to 18 pupils or less to give children more time with their teacher”. However, Glaze, who has served as education adviser to governments such as New Zealand and Ontario in Canada, said class size “does very badly in terms of ‘value for money’ comparison” and suggested the money would be better spent elsewhere.
She said: “The research is clear that small reductions in class size (e.g. from 25 students to 20 students) do not appear to have any effect on student outcomes, perhaps because teaching practices don’t change in those cases.
“Teachers, of course, have a strong preference for small classes, especially when they have to deal with children with many challenges that must be addressed in their classrooms, while they work valiantly to address the government mandates and high expectations. Large reductions in class size (e.g. to below 15) might, based on the evidence, make a significant difference in outcomes.”
She added: “Class size does very badly in terms of ‘value for money’ comparisons of various education interventions. It appears that you can get far more impact from a similar expenditure if it’s used for other things.
“In all of these debates we should not forget what the research says about two of the pounds of SNP cuts to education.” An SQA spokesman said: “For the current academic session, we have introduced an additional payment for teachers who mark internally assessed course components, such as projects or assignments, that contribute to a candidate’s final course award in four technical subjects.
“These internally assessed course components are an integral part of the final grade awarded to candidates and we fully recognise the important role teachers play in marking these internal assessments in their own time. “This is an interim arrangement with plans to introduce external marking of these assessments in future years. We are comfortable our rates for marking these internal assessments meet the minimum wage and living wage due to the volume of assessments being marked per hour.”
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “We expect all public service workers to be paid at least the Living Wage and have made this clear to the Scottish Qualifications Authority, who assure us that their pay scale complies with this, as a Living Wage employer.”
“Payment for the assessment of coursework is a matter for the SQA. They have introduced, for the current academic session, an additional payment for teachers who mark internally assessed course components that contribute to a candidate’s final course award in four technical subjects. External marking of these assessments will be introduced in future.” innovations that do have an impact: a focus on teaching competence and leadership effectiveness. Spending our rapidly depleting resources on capacity building in these two areas will make a difference.”
Meanwhile, Sahlberg, a Finnish education guru, said that smaller class sizes could potentially benefit younger school children.
He said: “Research from around the world has concluded that reducing class size has only a small (positive) impact on student achievement in school. There is also a good amount of research that suggests that smaller class sizes benefit much more children in primary school than in upper grades.”
However, Professor Christopher Chapman, chair in educational policy and practice at the University of Glasgow, suggested smaller class sizes could have some benefit if the policy was targeted at the less well-off.
He said: “It’s contested ground, but there’s some evidence that suggests class size does matter. It’s an expensive strategy. To reduce class sizes from 30 to the 20s is tinkering at the edges. There’s evidence that reducing class sizes to a figure below 18 and focusing on children from disadvantaged backgrounds could work.”