The Teacher's Lot

By CHARLES BRAND T AM thirty-two, and I teach in a grammar ischool. Since I left school with a good higher certificate, I have spent two years in the RAF, five years at Oxford. reading for two degrees: a year at a continental university, a year knock- ing about, two years in another profession, a term in quite a good grammar school and nearly three years in an extremely good one. No one could say I had a narrow background.

1 now teach English. with a good deal of sixth- form work. The school is new, lively and very successful. The staff are all young, and the only one who looks at all like a 'teacher' is a woman who comes in twice a week to help with domestic science. There are no cliques, no feuds, no jealousies. Often the staff room is still full at 5.30 p.m., either because people have been tak- ing some of the 'out-of-school' activities which flourish abundantly or simply because people are talking—to the ultimate benefit of the children, I may say. A staff room like this would be as stimulating and invigorating a community as you could find : and a lively and un-'teacher'-ish staff is a bleising beyond calculation to the children. But there is something which, like a malignant disease, is eating away the enthusiasm, and successfully preventing all of us from doing anything like the work we are capable of.

I can best illustrate this with my own case, though it equally well applies to a large pro- portion of grammar school masters and mis- tresses.

Every month 1 receive a cheque for £56, after tax, superannuation and National Health con- tributions have been deducted. This is exactly £13 a week. I can look forward to an increase of eleven shillings a week, once a year, for the next thirteen years, when I shall reach my maximum, about £20 a week, at forty-four or forty-five— if I can stand it as long as that.

For what am I supposed to be doing, as a sixth-form master? The obvious answer is: 'educating adolescents.' But what do you mean by 'education'? Few people will find that one hard. Education is broadening the child's mind, increasing its sense of responsible choice, deep- ening its understanding, strengthening its moral values, and so on, as well as giving it a broad knowledge of essential facts in a variety of sub- jects, so that with a reasonable GCE result— in this case two, three or four 'A' levels—it can make the very most of the next opportunity, at university or elsewhere.

All this is enormously exciting, but it is also enormously exacting. Day after day after day, relentlessly round the academic year, you are giving out all of what you are : or you should be, to be any good. Your opinions, ideas, beliefs and experiences all come out. Even the most idiotic bore, meeting the same sixth-formers day after day, can't have missed that pull right down to the roots. Even the most adenoidal sixth, sunk in apparent torpor all through the winter, sud- denly pulls out a crackerjack of a question, and knocks you back on to the hard fact of your ignorance again.

In a good school this is happening all. the time. Arguments develop, you argue back, the thing catches fire. Everyone talks at once, and the bell goes far too soon. The idea is momen- tarily shelved : whether it will ever come out again for expansion and development depends on three things--time, energy and money.

Time, time, time--if only there were more time! 1 get home between five and six, have tea and settle down to an evening's work, like all the thousands of other grammar school masters in the country. This work is a mixture of marking. which can take half an hour to four hours per set of thirty books, and preparation for the next day, which can take the same amount. If anything suffers, it is the preparation, simply because it is easier to flannel through part of a lesson next day than to put off indefinitely that eternal question : "Ave yer marked our books yet, sir?' (Exasperated once beyond measure by this, I said : 'No, I've spent the whole day lolling in the staff room drinking brandy and smoking cigars,' and was, to my delight, believed.) Once a year, a master from a French school of equivalent standing brings a party of children to our school. He teaches in his own school in Paris for three full days : the rest of the time he spends in the Sorbonne. Not for him the hours spent doing this duty and that, or taking games, or running Lost Property.

, Energy. It is now the fashion to bewail the difficulty of one's job. The ice-cream man whose chimes roar outside my window six times a day went to Spain for his holidays, touring with his family in a large car, staying at expen- sive hotels. If only 1 could do that! As it is the months go by and slowly the available energy disappears. Whatever you do at the weekend never puts back the week's loss; by the end of term tempers are very short and even routine work is skimped. Simultaneously disciplining, interesting, educating and testing thirty- odd adolescents in forty-five-minute stretches is incredibly wearing; trotting about endlessly be- fore, between and after lessons, doing the thousand and one administrative jobs, now calmly expected of schoolmasters, is more wearing still. It adds considerably to the weight of every- thing from dinner-duty to looking for Smith J.'s socks, to know that you would teach far better if you hadn't to do it. Finally, money. Go back to that sixth-form lesson. During the day, you realise that you must put them on to other, related ideas if they are to benefit. This means reading up the subject. But the books you want are not in the library. You haven't got them yourself; what's more, you'll never have them—you simply can't afford them. On £13 a week you can't buy books. The public library will get them but this may mean waiting six weeks. By that time, of course, the whole thing has fizzled out.

Suppose you rob housekeeping, live on the cats' food for a week, and buy the books. You squeeze up the marking, skip some preparation, and spend two or three evenings on them. Next time you see the sixth, you report back. They take up some of the points. For a day or two, the thing blossoms and flourishes. By next week, they may have, lost interest : but they have been through a process of thought, felt it pulse under their fingers and now have behind them a wide and fairly sound grasp of the issues, whatever they are. In a way,• it hardly matters what the issues are. The excitement's the thing.

But that's not the end. The books start trains of thought in your own mind. Before you know where you are, you've sent for More.. For once you haven't compromised with your mind: you're academically alive. And what a difference it makes to your teaching! But then the cats, protest, you and your wife fall ill from under- nourishment, and you sneak another thumping overdraft at the bank.

Holidays come, those much-advertised weeks when 'schoolteachers,' having nothing at all to occupy them. can go out and take jobs. Jobs, indeed! By the time the holidays come, you are desperate for rest and a chance to stoke up again. So, having waved goodbye to' all your many acquaintances who are going for a month to the Costa Brava, you rob housekeeping again, to get the rail-fare to take you both to your wife's parents at Smethwick.

For not only can you not afford to stoke up your mind on ideas: you can't afford that vital mixture of refreshment and new experience in the holiday, which wilt communicate itself to the children next term. It's not a question of coming back with illustrated talks on 'My Holiday in Spain': it is a question of putting a new dimension into what you are talking about. Show adolescents, by a chance remark even, that England looks different when seen from a Spanish village, and you start Heaven knows what seeds of ideas floating about.

A person who is teaching the senior forms in a grammar school is communicating what he is. If he is cramped, bewildered, disappointed, anxious and frustrated in the very job he is sup- posed to be doing, Lord help the next genera- tion. If he were paid—not enough, no one ever thinks he is paid enough—but sufficient to buy the books that matter, and visit the places of his dreams, what revolutions would tie not work! The difference between an idea dropped for lack of time, energy and money, and an idea seized on, followed up and- brought to maturity, in the mind of even a single sixth-former, is not a diffeience that will catch the public imagina- tion.

In the last century, a visit to the East End, or the Gorbals, showed you at once what poverty meant. Mental poverty does not show, until we wonder why Britain is slipping back.

Yet catch any borough council in England voting for an increase in grammar school salaries! The ratepayers' association would be on them like a thunderclap for wasting money. Roads and lighting, yes : they show, and borough councils like to spend on things that show.

Attempts to increase your income by tutorial work or writing novels only make matters worse. Both al?sorb energies and time, and increase the almighty sense of frustration. Putting your wife out to work may be all right if you haven't a family : but why on earth should you have to do. this in order to make a success of your own job? What would you think of your bank manager if he told you that he couldn't do his work without his wife's income?—or your doctor? They are ex-grammar school, and doing very nicely, thank you. Only the poor old master who got them three 'A' levels or a university place and set them going in the first place is still paid a factory wage.

Dammit, we want books, and a chance to take opportunities as they come. A senior English master I know, living within thirty miles of London, coaches boys for Oxford and Cambridge entrance, and knows that one of the questions likely on the general paper will be something to the effect that 'modern drama has developed situation at the expense of plot: discuss in the light of all the recent plays you know.' Yet in the past four years he has been able to afford only three visits to London theatres, though see- ing Breght, Shaw, Ibsen and Pinter, Wesker, Simpson and Bolt is the very stuff of his teaching, not to speak of his coaching. His teaching suffers, his pupils suffer, and yet another batch of letters appears in the press about first-year under- graduates who know nothing but their own sub- ject, and that badly.

As a senior English master, he gets—or should get—an allowance. Other grammar school staff, especially if they teach sixth forMs, may get Special Responsibility allowances, of from £90 to £210 a year. But if you teach in a brand-new school, where above all high academic standards must be set froiri the beginning, you will not get an allowance because the school has not got enough points to qualify. Often the only way to get an allowance is to move to a school where one is offered. This is fine if you are be- ginning and want to get experience : but say that you are very happy, doing a useful job, and settling into the town where you are—why on earth should you move, simply to get £90, and spend it on the removal anyway?

The whole system is idiotic. The basic salary is £520. Compare : bank executive (not even manager): according to advertisement in today's paper, basic salary £1,400 at thirty. Engineer, in famous group: basic salary £1,000 at thirty. Factory hand : average weekly wage without overtime, in 1960—£14 a week. (And while we are on the subject, double that wage, and what do you get? A factory hand with a new car. Double a schoolmaster's basic salary, and what do you get? Thousands upon thousands of young men and women with more idea -of the good things the world contains.) And schoolmasters are losing ground. In 1939, a schoolmaster's bagic salary, on the Burnham Scale, was £234. At the same time, the average weekly wage without overtime in fac- tories and public services was 69s. In 1959, a schoolmaster's basic salary was £520—just over twice as much. At the same time, the average weekly wage without overtime was 263s.—four times as much.

So far, I have been concentrating on the plight of grammar school masters, because their plight is serious, and quite different from the plight of teachers in other schools. But here we run into trouble. Loud noises are made about 'parity of esteem,' especially by the mammoth National Union of Teachers, which insists on believing that all 'teachers' do exactly the same work, whether they work a strict nine-till-half-past- three-then-home-to-the-telly sort of life teaching infants, or are junior physics masters slogging it till all hours of the night.

Spiritually, of course, we are all doing the same thing: we are all opening the minds of children, and leading them on to better things: we are all thus equal in the sight of God. But God is not the Burnham Committee (though it often acts as if it thinks it is). Academically, we are poles apart. And academically, the needs are fantastically different. What difference does it make to most classes in infants, primary, junior and secondary moderri . schools (even there) whether you can afford thirty-five-shilling books regularly? None at all, except that you may try to show off. What difference does it make to my sixth that I shall never be able to teach, say, the Romantics properly, even though Byron, say, is a 'set book,' because I shall never have all the necessary books to hand just when I want them? A fantastic difference, as I said.

At this point, someone is going to mention that a lot of grammar school staff have cars, so they can't be so badly off as I make, out. Right, come with me to the school car-park. Here are twenty small saloons and one massive old Rolls- Royce (the latter, like its owner, being a middle- aged and fascinating object, with hidden re- sources). The rest? This one : bought with a legacy. This one: belongs to a single lady, head of a big department. Next : private means. Next: bachelor, lives cheap, head• of department. Next : two (second-hand) three-wheelers, always break- ing down. Next : bought for £20, gone three times this year. And so on. How would you like it if your dentist was seen each day pushing a defunct car down a small slope?

Yet this whole round of classes and marking and preparing and disciplining would be worth it if we could feel that at the end of term we could get away some other where, this time, than the wife's parents: or if we could feel free to get excited about X's ideas, and spend money on following them up. The maddening thing is that other people, younger than we, with far fewer qualifications, can do both these things, and indulge them as hobbies—as which, they are of use to one person only. A young acquaintance of mine is a very minor civil servant indeed, with, saving his presence, a potty little degree and a potty little job. Yet he gets £1,400 a year, rising by £100 every year, and happily trots about the countryside. Quite a large whack of his salary is because he is a graduate. The graduate part of my salary accounts for £165, and I am very lucky.

What is needed- is a completely new system' of assessing worth. A profession is worth the value of its top salary. In the case of a bank manager, £4,000 and over. In the case of a grammar school headmaster, £1,500-£2,000. In the case of me, up to £1,300 after thirteen more years, and that includes allowances I may not get. If, say, the basic salary for graduates in a grammar school were £1,000, with annual incre- ments of £100, and this was the end from which all teachers' pay was calculated, there would be a system of pay which matched the system of education.

But a realistic approach to the problem will simply never happen while the Burnham Com- mittee is constituted as it is. One side of , the Committee is the Authorities' Panel, represent- ing all the Education Authorities, and, ultimately, the Government. The other is the Teachers' Panel, in which teachers are represented by their unions. Leading the authorities' side is Sir W. P. Alexander (knighted in this year's New Year's Honours). He once said on television that since a great many teachers to his knowledge found time to take evening and holiday jobs, they had nothing to complain about. (Splendid fellow! He can have my timetable for a week and see how much time in seven days he has to break off and earn the extra money he will so desperately need.) Leading the unions' side is Sir Ronald Gould, of the National Union of Teachers. The NUT is extremely cagey about the relative numbers of members it draws from infants, primary, junior, secondary modern, further education and grammar schools. However, as there are (quite apart from the Headmasters' Association and the Headmistresses' Association) three other unions to which a very large number of grammar school staff belong (the Assistant Masters' Association, the Assistant Mistresses' Associa- tion and the National Association of School- masters), it is fair to guess that the grammar school representation on the NUT is swamped by the enormous crowd of infants, primary, junior, secondary modern and further education people—all of whose needs are quite different from the needs of grammar school staffs.

Right. Now, how is this for fairness? The NUT, we may guess, cannot pay heed to the peouliar needs of grammar schools; in any case, `Look—if we need any extra help we'll get in touch with you.' it is pledged to 'parity of esteem.' Yet the NUT holds sixteen out of the twenty-six places on the Burnham Committee Teachers' Panel. Six more ' places go to the Association of Teachers in Tech- nical Institutions, which has nothing whatever to do with grammar schools. That leaves four places for what is called the `Joint Four,' which is the clinging-together of , the Headmasters', Head- mistresses', Assistant Masters' and Assistant Mistresses' Associations. The huge majority of grammar school staffs are, obviously, not head- masters or headmistresses. (The National Asso- ciation of Schoolmasters, it must be said, has a membership of 23,000, many of whom are grammar school staff, and doesn't even get a single place on the Burnham Committee.) And as the NUT insists on a block vote on the Com- mittee—with idiotic results—the chance of a grammar school idea getting anywhere is pre- cisely nil. In other words, I can't afford books because a lot of people doing quite different jobs say they are equal to me and I must have whatever salary they say, and it must be the same as theirs.

This is absolute nonsense. But nothing at all will change it, short of a public outcry. As I see it, a public outcry is the last thing that is likely to happen, for the English have a peculiarly derisive attitude to what they call 'school- teachers.'

There are probably several reasons for this. In the first place, they were all dominated by teachers in their childhood, and have kept the mixture of fear and rebellion in their attitude. Then, they themselves have left school far behind, and tend to look down on creatures still v associated with it. And of course in this country anything academic is either 'snob,' or funny. If you don't believe this, compare the dramatic use made on television of the various profes- sions. The medical people get Emergency Ward 10: the police, Dixon of Dock Green. Teachers? —Whack-oh!

So much for the public outcry. Is there any- thing else? Well, we could strike. But dammit, if we struck, Jones B., Davies W., and Susan White would not get GCE: and that would really set them back. You're a schoolmaster partly because you care; if you care, you can't strike.

The only other thing is a strike of parents, and this seems to me to be an excellent idea. Don't let your daughter go to the grammar school next week, madam, until the staff who teach her are paid enough to do a proper job.

Keep your son at home, sir. When the Schools Attendance Officer calls get him to write to the Minister of Education, complaining the gram- mar school staff are prevented from doing their work by the Rt. Hon. gentleman himself. Other- wise, the only thing I can do is to raise a faint cheer for the new NUT campaign, asking for a minimum of £700 for all teachers, qualified or not, rising to £1,300 after sixteen years. It's a help, but it doesn't tackle the basic problem.

PS.—Table of comparative public expenditure on education, per head of the population: (UNESCO 1958 Report) (in dollars per head) USSR (1958) .. 104.8 France (1958) .. 35.0 USA (1955-6) .. 92.9 Sweden (1957-8) .. 34.9 Canada (1957-8) .. 58.3 Switzerland (1956) 33.9 Belgium (1956) .. 39.8 W. Germany (1955) 27.6 United Kingdom (1955) .. 26.6