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?

Oh dear.

I'm an SEN teacher. I suppose I'll be at the bottom of the pay pile (despite my BA, PGCE, MA and PGDip) because I'm lucky if my 9 year olds can write a full sentence. How silly of me to expect decent and fair remuneration for my decades of experience, my qualifications and my constantly excellent performance management.

Stupid idea. How to make anyone not teaching STEM at A Level feel less than worthless.

As others have already said a high grade maths or physics degree does not necessarily make you a good teacher because what seems so obvious to the high level graduate may be difficult to break down for a struggling student .

I completely take your point as I have an English Lit degree, but at the same time, I know it's soooo much harder to find and keep maths and sciences teachers than English teachers.

And if we want children to have specialist teachers, higher pay for maths/science teachers should be considered.

Which are not hard to recruit for………. Sorry!!!

I worked at a secondary school once with an incredible bright young teacher who had a PHD in a science. Clearly a very intelligent bloke…think he was one of those who did GCSE and A levels years early.

He was a bloody awful teacher. Absolutely incapable of simplifying anything, or making anything interesting or accessible to the children. God awful
classroom management too. Don’t think he lasted long.

I think people often think they can just hop over to teaching If they have a skill in a subject..but teaching itself is a skill.

All teachers need to be paid more. I’d argue pay all teachers more and then You can get a better candidate pool and recruit the more desirable ones. The best teachers aren’t necessarily going to be those with the best qualifications in the subject they teach though. Being great at Math doesn’t mean you will be good at teaching maths. Like someone else said sometimes those people are actually the worst because they simply can’t dumb down to explain at a simplistic level.

I had a pgce student last year. I’m a maths teacher with a maths degree- she had a masters, so more qualified than me, and should be on more than me according to your logic. She was the worst student our school has ever had. Just would not listen to feedback, didn’t understand the curriculum and what she should be teaching- this was despite us telling her. She didn’t manage to forge any relationships with the students, even had some in tears 🙈 it was awful.
She hasn’t failed (not even sure if you can fail a PCGE anymore with teacher retention the way it is!) but she’s having to do another placement in sept as she didn’t pass with us.
Now I’m less qualified than her on paper, but get good results and great feedback- can I be paid more?!

It's not necessarily the explanations. Or sometimes even the behaviour management.

I'm a fantastic tutor, despite having found academic subjects easy from very early on. I can work out what my tutee is finding difficult and explain it in a way that makes sense to them. This works brilliantly on an individual level, and reasonably well in groups of 2, 3 or possibly (depending on how similar they are) 4 students.*

I'm an appalling teacher - even when standing in front of a group of adults who all want to be there and are in agreement that I'm better and more experienced at this than almost all of them.

Until that point I'd assumed that my PGCE failure was because I was too young, but no. Sometimes people just don't suit the set-up.

And I agree that the OP's comparison of teaching Primary and Further Education just highlights how very little she knows about teaching

*{we will gloss over the early (possibly formative?) experience of exclaiming "oh [bigsis] it's easy!" in the excitement of realising what she was having an issue with...}

There is a recruitment crisis across teaching and the salaries need to be significantly boosted- but the government have no interest in investing in state education any more than they have in the police or NHS

They are just busy rinsing us for tax and never investing in public services

What are all these £50k starting salary jobs in the private sector? There aren't many of them. A teacher starts on £30k which is actually quite good and similar for many private sector jobs. You also need to take into account the pension and benefits, including holidays, that teachers get. It's surely the salaries for experienced teachers that needs sorting out as that isn't equivalent to decent private sector jobs, there isn't much in it between newly qualified teachers and experienced ones and whilst private sector staff of the same years experience and degrees are on £50k- £60k, experienced teachers are on £40k.

Tbf, in terms of starting salaries, most maths/physics ECTs can negotiate starting on M2, if they want to- not in every school, but in a lot. Obviously they can't negotiate higher pay than UPS3, but for maths at least, there are also retention payments throughout their early career as well.

It doesn't seem to make much difference to whether they leave. Also, as others have said, schools now often struggle to recruit for everything from MFL to DT to Geography- so you'd just end up paying nearly everyone the higher rate. And what happens when people teach outside of specialism, as well?

Anecdotally, for physics teachers, the biggest issue isn't pay, but being asked to teach outside their subject area- especially biology. A lot of them hate it, more so than biology teachers being asked to cover physics. But it's often necessary at KS3 at least to make timetables work, now- and teachers of other sciences aren't so common that schools can afford to screw them with the timetabling- even if they theoretically could.

Another issue is the pressure of having to take on a lot of exam classes early career- often a physics ECT will be teaching multiple Y11 classes + Y12 and 13 from the start- and it's a lot to deal with in terms of both pressure and workload.

I think, in a lot of cases, you'd be better off giving science teachers more PPA to take into account the fact we're often planning and teaching 3 subjects, rather than necessarily more pay. I'm sure the pay is a factor in people not choosing teaching to start with, but workload is a much bigger factor in causing people to leave.

You could probably have said this without saying 'low qualified graduates' which is obviously going to get people's backs up.

You don’t really know what a teacher is, do you?

Ouch! I teach Drama, Dance and Musical Theatre to Years 3 - 8. I teach, do clubs and rehearse before school, in breaks, at lunchtimes, after school, on Saturdays and in holidays. I put on around 20 productions a year and get 90 children a year through national qualifications. And I have the same curriculum, reporting etc requirements as 'proper' subjects. My degree is a 2:1 from one of the highest ranked universities in the UK and I have 4 As at A2 level.

I do not believe that my subject is as important as maths and englush, no. But i resent the suggestion that I should be paid less than those colleagues, many of whom 'just' teach their 8:30 - 5:00 then go home with their marking. They're not stuck in school till midnight rehearsing then building sets, painting scenert programming lights and altering costumes. It might not be academic but it's long, hard hours.

There aren't loads of graduate jobs starting on 50k.

I can't believe that people are engaging with @Winterday1991 ... their username might as well be "@BoredAndGoady".

The best teachers imo are not necessarily the ones who know everything.

Of course it does, but they should be judged by the same standards as in the private sector. The teaching profession needs to be pulled up and make it a competitive option for the best graduates.

The 'best' graduates don't always make the best teachers though, subject knowledge is an important part of course, but so many other soft skills are what actually makes a decent teacher. I do agree that for some subjects especially computing etc the salary will never be competitive unless its out of step with other teachers (which wouldn't go down well) and it won't be an appealing career to many regardless. Not sure of the solution, maybe a flexible approach where SMEs come in and deliver lessons without all of the associated unnecessary crap teachers are expected to do? My DH works in tech, he'd enjoy teaching but not as a full time job.

@lula103 Most sensible response on this thread!

Absolutely agree that being brilliant at your subject does not make you a brilliant teacher: it’s harder to make something accessible to someone else if it’s effortless for you.

I went to Oxford and I teach chemistry, and one of the things that really bothers me is the reaction I get from people when they find out I went to Oxford: that I could have done so much better than teaching. That kind of attitude - that teaching is not a job you do if you have any kind of brains - is certainly not going to do much to help the recruitment/retention crisis.

I have an MSc in chemistry, and earn just over £30k with over a decade of experience. Looking at it, I could earn more teaching, long-term (& would have more holidays therefore save on childcare too). Not a chance I’d actually go into teaching though. Every teacher seems to say don’t do it, it’s awful for a hundred reasons. Pay is really not the main issue for attracting STEM teachers.

My best friend is a cover in a school. Never went to uni but kids get her and what she is trying to put over. She does all the long term cover in our local grammar. She can literally read a lesson and teach it.
She was head hunted from her last school. I have the utmost respect for her.

I, on the other hand, teach several subjects in a PRU and feel constantly five minutes from a breakdown and have loads of qualifications!

What standards are people held to in the private sector that teachers aren't held to, honestly?

I feel like as a teacher, there's far more accountability and having to prove I'm doing my job than when I worked in industry...

Indeed. And we're never going to catch up the Chinese in maths anyway.

I speak from experience having taught both primary and secondary. Teaching primary is fat more challenging and requires excessive working hours compared to secondary teaching. What makes you an expert to judge which is the most worthy job equating to a higher salary? Everyone thinks they have an opinion on teaching as we have all been to school but unless you have done the job, I suggest you train to be a teacher, live and bloody breathe the job before commenting.

Absolutely!