This week, the Pope has repeated his call for teachers to be better paid, and for inequality in education to be eradicated. During a Vatican conference on education, he said that teachers were “among the worst-paid workers”. He called this an “injustice” and stated that “the educational alliance is broken. And this is our [Catholics’] job, to find new paths.” He called for better education for the poorest in society and an end to the focus on only educating “supermen”; intelligent people from affluent backgrounds.
And this certainly seems to be the case. Although the OECD report that teachers are paid £40 per hour in the UK (and £27 in Italy), this doesn’t factor in the hours teachers put in outside of school time – and there are a lot of them. The TUC found 57.5% of secondary school staff work unpaid overtime, an average of 12.5 hours per week. For primary schools, the situation is exacerbated further; 61.4% of staff work overtime for an average of 12.9 hours per week.
With this, and the fact that further progression in the profession becomes difficult with time, suddenly you’re looking at significantly less than £40 per hour. This effect on a figure the OECD already warns is significantly less than similarly qualified professionals in other fields, and it seems, for the UK at least, the Pope is exactly right. Furthermore, newly qualified UK teachers earn well under the OECD average.
Underpaid and overworked teachers can only be a bad thing for education. Andreas Schleicher, dubbed the “most important man in English education” by former Education Secretary Michael Gove, said that teaching must be kept “attractive” and that the “quality of education can never exceed the quality of teaching.” This will not be achieved by increasing workload whilst pay stays static.
The Pope also addressed the inequality in education. He described it as a “shameful global reality”, saying “it is a reality that leads us towards a human selectivity that, instead of bringing people together, it distances them; it distances the rich from the poor; it distances one culture from another”.
This, too, rings true for the UK. State school pupils are under-represented at top universities. For young people who don’t receive free school meals, 64% obtain at least five ‘good’ passes at GCSE, while for those who do the figure is 34%. Embarrassingly, the inequality starts even earlier; a 15-month vocabulary gap exists between five-year-olds from the richest and poorest families, and a year-long ‘school readiness gap’ in three-year-olds. This inequality is estimated to cost the UK £1.3 trillion annually.
So clearly, the Bishop of Rome is correct – underpaying teachers and perpetuating inequality in classrooms does nobody any favours. That’s why we here at NCFE recognise that the value that teachers impart to society is far beyond the sum of its parts. Not only do they teach young people English or maths or science, but they shape the next generation’s attitudes and outlook.
Although Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has generally done a good job in resisting the pressures to cut teachers’ pay further, we hope that the government heed the warnings of the OECD – and, indeed, the Pope himself - in tackling the comparatively low pay of those in education and the systematic inequality that runs throughout it.
Do you agree that teachers are underpaid? What would you like to see done to tackle inequality in education?
