In demand teachers should be on a higher pay grade

[Winterday1991]

Teachers who have high level degrees from good quality universities and teach in demand subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry etc should be paid at a rate equivalent to what their peers would earn in the private sector. For example starting salaries of £50k.

As I understand it, the current teacher pay scale means that drama, music teachers and low quality graduates are paid the same as high quality teachers. As teaching has low barrier to entry for graduates, and there is a shortage of teachers for certain subjects surely salaries should be treated as they would be in the private sector and paid the market rate. Why does the government not implement this to get more high quality graduates into teaching?

Any old fucker can do maths.

Are you sure?

As an Indian I would rather not see Indian kids suffer from a lack of qualified teachers

Hmm. As a reasonable human being I don't want any kid to suffer from lack of qualified teachers.

😂 well I'm sure they'll be queueing out of the door to start the pgce next week. £27000 bursary.

Why don't they put that 80 year old on life support and try and keeping him alive eternally so that they can keep on sucking out as much knowledge and skill from him as possible! :D You see, this is the problem with the useless British engineers of today, they have no interest in training up the new crop of scientists and engineers. They just want instant results without taking a hit to their profits and consequently their own salaries. Which is why they either get students to do their work for free (or for cheap) in exchange for getting valuable "industrial experience" or they import the skilled people that they need from abroad who will work for cheap, don't require costly further training and start generating money for them from day 1, unlike fresh out of uni grads from Britain who require a bit more cash investment.

I have encountered so many of these sorts of British parasite engineers especially at the leftover steel works in Teesside at the Materials Processing Institute. I'm not going to name names, but two of the biggest vultures that I have encountered are the Chief Executive Officer and the Director of Operations of that place. Their only intention was to lure students into doing physics and engineering projects for them, get the students to sign confidentiality agreements so that the students can't talk about their work and contributions for the next 5 years, then they chuck the students out and parade the students work as their own to the government and say "here look at what at the magnificent work that we have done, now give us some funding". This kind of behaviour is now quite common in leftover British engineering companies that are struggling financially. These sorts of people can really demoralize you from pursing science and engineering and I try and warn my students of them and keep them away from these sorts of places.

I agree, but what can I do? Britain seems to have dug a hole for itself in all sorts of ways. The best I can do is to take care of my own. I mean, ask the white British folks who were the majority voters for Brexit. They will tell you the same. 60% of white British folks want lower levels of immigration and don't want British towns and cities flooded with black and brown faces.

Omg.

This thread is bloody bonkers!!! If you want to recruit and retain high quality teachers, then obviously you pay them ALL more, not just those with 'worthy degrees' (who even gets to decide what is better than another???).

I have a First in a BSc and a Distinction in an MSc (both from RG unis) in a healthcare related field, does this mean the NHS should be paying me more than my colleagues who went to a non-RG uni and didn't get a first? Or does this idiotic thinking only apply to Teaching?

Are you aware of the phrase 'jumped the shark', physicsgrad ?

In India it’s widely known that the best physicists / engineers / scientists / computer scientists don’t need to leave India to get a good job. It’s the ones from low quality universties who need to leave (or work for foreign companies) and these guys end up ruining the reputation of Indian STEM industies. This is why NASA despite using thousands of India based consultancies isn’t innovating in the same way as the more highly qualified engineers in the Indian space programmes.

@Physicsgrad1984 I think you have missed the point I was trying to make.

The reason the 80 year old is kept on is because the school curriculum does not include the electronics that this and other businesses desperately need. Most schools get little choice over what they teach, largely because they are "judged" by their exam results. Deviating away from the exam specification would be suicidal because there is barely enough time to cover that as it is, so added extras are at best patchy.

What this country needs is a curriculum that is relevant not only to the needs of today, but the skills that will transfer to the newer technologies of tomorrow. When a curriculum is designed by politicians and civil servants who have never done a day's work in any of those industries, we have a massive disconnect.

I still maintain that studying STEM in isolation is not always a good thing. You need creativity and the only way to get that is to give children the opportunities to be creative. Long ago, as a primary aged kid, we made up so many games with tennis balls, skipping ropes and an imagination. There is little enough time in a crowded curriculum for creativity as it is, but Art, Music, Drama, Dance and Creative Writing all allow for it. To squeeze these further and then advocate paying teachers of those subjects less is utterly stupid.

They have an axe to grind and nothing will stop them.

So long as it's not made by the poor-quality British Steel Industry.

Yeah. And?

Yeah Indian steel is way better. In fact nothing engineered and manufactured in Britain is any good anymore.

People entering the profession know the salary before they take the job. Why are they such special cases? It would be better if everyone was paid a decent salary but that’s never going to happen.

People in all types of jobs work just as hard. I have sympathy fatigue for teachers because it appears they’re never happy.

we want our kids to be well rounded adults - not everyone is interested in maths and science. Other subjects are just as important.

History and English teachers for eg. tend to be much better at teaching than science/ maths teacher. Generalising here obviously, but they tend to be better at communication.

What utter nonsense!

History and English teachers are definitely better at teaching History and English than me, but I suspect I am way better at teaching maths than them, regardless of their communication skills.

I suspect, @noblegiraffe, that you might be right about that!

Perhaps we should stay in our own specialisms...

Can we just be clear that the person saying physics teachers should be paid more is not a teacher. This is not an example of teachers not being happy. This is a non-teacher not being happy, so your sympathy or lack thereof for teachers isn't needed.

I think the vast majority of teachers have huge respect for all teachers, whatever the age, subject , level or type of teaching they do and firmly believe that salaries shouldn't be used by the government as a means to divide and set one against the other. We are ALL undervalued and underpaid😁

Dividing and setting one group of people against another is what this government is best at, perhaps indeed the only thing they are good at other than enriching those who have more money than they could possibly need.

No it isn't. Maths and physics teachers are harder to find therefore schools take what they can, whereas there's more competition for other posts. Obviously some teachers of maths like @nobnoblegiraffe are amazing but in plenty of schools I've been in whilst they may he good at their subject they're not necessarily the best at putting it across in a way that engages their pupils or make it easy ro understand.

To continue, and therefore do not need to be paid more which is what the OP suggests