The best Independent schools generally take the highest qualified teachers?

[Hamishbear]

It might be obvious to many that the most academic schools insist that their teachers have an outstanding degree from one of the best universities but it wasn't to me.

For example if you want a job in Maths at Guildford High school allegedly you need a first in Maths from a well regarded university. You obviously need to be an outstanding teacher in the fullest sense too.

So do the elite schools usually have the best teachers? I suppose it stands to reason that there is more competition for jobs at schools that have a fantastic reputation?

inflation

I don't agree on houseprices. My daughter's pay at the same stage as mine is the same ratio just about to the first house I bought.

The sums are 1984 £40,000 (3 bed terraced house London zone 5) salary 7,500 x 2 (there were 2 of us on that) (5.5)
1986 salary 11,500 (3.5) (although I am not sure what the £40k house would go for 2 years later)
2010 £250k salary £40k (6)
2012 salary £60,000 (4)

Given interest rates are much lower now and then basic rate tax was 33% plus NI on top of that I don't think things are worse.

We could probably do the same comparison based on teacher pay too. The teacher pay above was £7500 in the 1984 caculation. What do heads of dept in London get nowadays?

Where in London do you get a 3 bed house for 250K these days? May be somewhere but certainly not typical. Average London price is around the 400K mark these days and I believe average size is 2 bed not 3 bed. If you specified area rather than just zone 5 that would make comparisons easier, as obviously prices within zone 5 vary hugely - eg Stanmore and Dagenham are both zone 5 but the former has the highest (or one of the highest?) number of million pound houses in London, I read somewhere recently.

I know that in 1980 the average salary nationally was 5K (from a rather lovely old newspaper from 1980 I found at my dh's grandmother's house!) - so by 1984, I'm guessing that 7.5K was not much above average. Whereas 60K now is over double average. So your figures don't add up.

Is it possible your daughter is rather better paid than you were, relatively? Don't know if she is in the same job, ut even if she is, relative salaries have altered over time - eg teachers used to be pretty well-paid. Now they're not. So need to look at average salaries rather than particular professions for a more balanced view.

You've remembered difference in interest rates but forgotten MIRAS, which removed a lot of the differential.

This is surely the most bizarre turn the thread has taken yet!

Xenia is referring to Magic Circle firms I think. For an Articled Clerk starting in 1986 the salary was £9000 rising by £500 every six months during the contract. Someone starting in 2012 starts on £38,000, again increasing through the two year Training Contract and then rising sharply to £60,000 on completion. It's standard between the firms.

But even when qualified on £60,000 a young person would find it impossible to find anywhere tolerable to buy in London without significant additional funds. You won't find a lender prepared to lend x 4 let alone x 6.

In 1984/ 86 those who did the best on the house buying front were those who had opted for Graduate Traineeships with merchant banks, who lent to their trainees at 3%.

Don't know how to just post graph so you'll have to scroll down to about a quarter way through this article - see the graph on UK house price to earnings ratio - clearly shows it was about 3.5 in 1984 and about 5.5 now. (Of course, much bigger than that in LOndon.) So no, Xenia, it really is muuch harder now for most people - although the difference in perspective for you may reflect the fact that top lawyers earn relatively much higher salaries now than then.

(Source is Nationwide.)

monevator.com/house-price-to-earnings-ratio-2012/

You didn't have to do a graduate traineeship with a merchant bank, Yellowtip and this did not only happen back in 1986 - friends who currently work for Natwest (retail) at a low level got specially discounted staff mortgages - one of the perks of the job. This was just a few years ago - would imagine this is probably still the case now.

I knew that the perk applied to all banks back then bread but I am surprised that it's still going for new employees. It's a major perk as perks go. I mentioned it in the context of the City back then, since Xenia often refers to sensible career choices and that 9% reduction in mortgage repayments was a significant add on to the salary. A friend who opted for that route has left his modest home in wet Wales and now has an immodest manor in Glos.

Mine will be renting for a long, long time, even the one who's hoping to make it through the two years to the £60,000. No chance of a deposit from me.

YT, they will lend. Amazing in this recession, really amazing how much they will lend. I was astonished. 90% loans. 5x earnings. Stil in 2012 so much easier to borrow so much more than in 1984.

On the zones one issue is people are just too fussy over where they will live.
eg I just searched Luton (where anyone can commute to into London every day) £189,000 http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/16160824?featured=1&utm_content=featured_listing

This is almost the road we bought in in 1984
The £7500 was teacher pay (and mine too - we had a year of earning the same).

I did not forget miras. It was on the wane, was capped at 30,000 and bwithered on the vine so it became a tiny part of your mortgage. (For those who do not know in effect when it started most of your mortgage could be set against tax. That went. I never remember it being much use at all by the time we had it). It was nothing like the difference between interest rates then and now. My daughter just emailed me a new 5 year rate at under 3% although that for those with 40% deposit.

I agree that of course these are differences in how much teachers, nurses and the like are paid over time but I still don't accept the differences in price are that much worse (unless people insiste they live somewhere like Chelsea or even the more expensive bits of many towns).

Zone 5 this is 2 beds www.findaproperty.com/for-sale/property-11264891
not the one I was looking for.

I found a few doors down from the one we first bought in 84 on nethouseprices.com which shows prices sold at not advertised at - key difference: £260,000

£270k 3 bed terraced London zone 5 www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/16705558

Comparing wages so £7500 was the teacher wage. If someone can tell me what head of dept now earns in private schools in London we can do the comparison too.

It would be interesting to see what nurses earned in 1984 compared with 2012 and also other jobs too.

5 x earnings! I'm amazed. Is that because of the type of sector she's in do you think?

Yes quite, we're a long way from teachers....

HoD in the private sector perhaps £49,000.

Though that's age/ experience related and I'm making the assumption that in 1984 your ex was quite young.

@yellow are you sure? I'm just thinking of the scandal at west exe and the salary comparisons which were published in the local press at the time......

Xenia asked for private though. And for a young HoD. What are they paying at West Exe then?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, the head was earning about £150k. I say earning. I mean, being paid. The deputy (his wife) was on >£90k If HODs only on

But it is a huge gap Metabilis. That also happens to be a very, very comfortable salary for a HT and a very, very comfortable salary for a DH. On the whole private schools pay a bit more, not less. But I don't think it's extreme. I don't know what the difference between London independents and other independents are, but there will be one, for sure, just as there's a London weighting in the state sector. The independent sector can be more flexible with salaries than the state sector (within the constraints of budget of course) though academies have more freedom than other maintained (within budget of course).

He is no longer in post. I'm surprised you missed the hoohah. The other HTs earn in the 90s (which seems low to me, for what they do). There just seems a massive gap between even that and a HOD on £50K if that's genuinely what they earn. Not a very well designed pay structure/pyramid - unlikely to result in happy staff (and of course that is the situation - teachers aren't happy, are they? And with good reason).

Xenia, whether or not can you can find an individual house or invidual job which would make the maths add up, the graph shows clearly that on average it is much, much harder - almost twice as hard - for people to buy now as in 1984.

As for good mortgage rates for those with a 40% deposit, I hardly think this is going to help many new graduates! unless they have rich and generous parents, preferably with few other children to help.

Your point about MIRAS is undermined by the fact that in 1984, the year we are discussing, the average house price was approx 30K. So all of the average person's mortgage was covered under MIRAS then. A big saving.

And Luton is hardly London zone 5 - the local economy is very poor, and commuting costs into London are astronomical.

I personalised this as it makes it much more interesting and they are real figures. So for us buying at £40k and more as the years went by Miras stopped being much use. Certainly even at its best and highest the interest relief was not more of a benefit than the lower rates now are.

AnywayI have this debate all the time and its' not really easy or fair to compare. I could say we didn't have central heating but chidlren these days expect it. I could talk about buying clothes second hand but that's not the reality most people are in . I could say my AAB A levels were better than my daughter's 6 or whatever years ago but what's the point? They have to deal with things as they are now. However my points remain good and interseting.

Yes, private sector school pay much as the very por state school Met poster wishes other wise is often higher. In addition we had at the start free accommodation - not many state schools throw a flat in and private schools give teachers access to swimming pools and often almost free child places at the school so if you add free housing and school fees that private seector teacher pay package is very high. We knew one couple she taught at one prep school where their 3 children went paying 15% of fees age 3 - 13 and the husband at the leading boarding school they went on to where they lived to age 18 and no rent, no mortgage, a lovely life if you pick the private sector but then the private sector does just about everything better than the state sector.

back to the details of the places.
I did not say Luton was zone 5. Many many people commute to London from there. I gave a link to a house in zone 5 almost in an adjacent road to where we bought our similar house in 1984 and it proves I am right.

So we have established that some professions are not priced out (in London that is). We have looked at teachers - it looks like the £7500 head of department 1984 might in a pruivate school be on 40 something so it's all very comparable and affordable.

Someone commented on the mlutiple offered - I was amazed to. We went through a mortgage broker but I doubt that makes much difference. I thought 90% mortgages did not exist and 3x salary like it used to be was the most you could borrow. I was wrong. I suppose someone on a job with no promotion prospects might find it harder.

One difference is childcare. The mortgage forms these days (and I know exactly what they say as I just filled one out) ask about out goings. They did not used to look at your spending. So my children don't have children so this isn't an issue but we did have a nanny who cost about 100% of one of our wages not too long after we moved in.

Anyway life has always been tough from when we lived in caves to down the mines to in the servants' hall to WWI and WWII and it remains pretty hard now. We occasionally get boom times but it perhaps it is always the vale of tears, the via dolorosa and we just have to make the best of it (unless you happen to pick a good career as a woman and earn a lot in which case mortgage rates,university fees and childcare costs need not trouble you unduly).

Of course individual anecdotes are lovely - but can be misleading.

As the graph shows, your examples are extremely atypical.

Even your examples don't really prove your point - to commute into London from Luton would cost £3600 per person - a couple would spend over £7000 just getting into London. Not of course including costs of tubes/buses etc once in London or getting to Luton station (parking?). So adding an enormous amount to monthly costs. Not far off the cost of the mortgage itself. And there are certainly not many well-paying jobs in Luton - you picked it I suspect precisely because it is one of the poorest and hence cheapest places in vague reach of London. Plus the number of private school teachers who are offered free accomodation is not exactly going to have a huge impact on the UK housing market as a whole, put it that way...

Have actually forgotten how we got onto housing in this totally unrelated thread...

Of course what your post comes down to, as does the thread, is your perception that private = good and public = bad. Which strangely has not been my experience. I think the private sector has a role to play, but as current events such as the banks' role in manipulating Libor and Glaxo's role in misselling drugs shows, the profit motive does not always, or possibly even usually, improve the quality of the operation. Because, fundamentally, not everyone is motivated primarily by money - and in fact financial rewards have been proven to actually cause people to perform worse than they would have done if working just for the intrinsic mmotivation of doing their job properly.

See:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028071.300-the-bonus-myth-how-paying-for-results-can-backfire.html

(You may have to sign in to see the whole thing - great article - I wrote a reading comp based on it so know it well...)