EDUCATION
A fair return for Mr Chips
RHODES BOYSON
This week's meeting of the-Burnham Com- mittee takes place in the knowledge that teacher militancy is steadily increasing. The Government looks like achieving what a year ago seemed impossible—the unity of the profession—by becoming the profession's common enemy. Like the lion and the lamb the National Uhion of Teachers and the National Association of Schoolmasters lie down together and their grammar school colleagues, the Assistant Masters and the Assistant Mistresses, move ever closer to them and consider strike action. The teach- ing profession will never be the same again.
Militancy pays. This is the message re- ceived by the teachers' unions not only from the factory floor but from their own recent experience. A £50 offer on annual salary made on 10 November was raised to be- tween £60 and £100 on 15 December and to between f80 and £100 on 5 January be- cause of strike pressure. It does not require much logic to conclude that further pressure will eventually bring the offer up to the claim of £135 a year from 1 April 1970.
The future of the teaching profession will however be determined not by the present interim award but by the long-term review of the whole salary structure pr,omised before 1 April 1971. The NUT does not want this referred to the Prices and Incomes Board but I doubt if the Burnham Committee is really a satisfactory instrument for the re- view since the end product would probably be another compromise of teacher pressure groups within a global sum set by the Gov- ernment and the local education authorities.
Present basic salaries for three-year- trained College of Education teachers rise from £860 to £1600 over fourteen years. A trained second class honours graduate's salary starts at £1,140 and rises to £1,880
over the same period. More than half of this country's 334,000 teachers draw allowances above scale rising from £132 to a maximum of £742 and there are separate heads' and deputy heads' scales. The heads' scale runs from £1,817 for the smallest school to £4,583 for the half dozen secondary schools with over 2,000 pupils.
The rate of pay for the transient woman
'Evening all. This is a party political broad- cast on behalf of the Conservative and Unionist party; teacher is probably higher than she would earn elsewhere, but the rate of pay for the long-serving, predominantly male teacher is too low, and this has been one of the reasons for the growing strength of the National Association of Schoolmasters. Some 60 per cent of teachers in maintained schools are women and since five out of six women leave teaching within six years of entering the profession it is doubtful whether the country receives value for a training cost of some £3,000 a student. The wastage of teachers, particularly women, is such that if every trained teacher in this country were still engaged in teaching then the average size of class would be between six and nine children!
The greatest shortage of teachers is of science and mathematics graduates and of infant and lower junior teachers. The mathe- matics and science graduates will only be recruited if graduate salaries are sub- stantially increased. A comparison abroad shows that our differential payment to graduates is well below that paid in other countries. Sufficient infant teachers would be recruited if their training were reduced to two years—which once seemed perfectly adequate. The existing salary scale could then be paid to such women, and after five years' training before and after marriage they could be sent on a further year's course which would justify them for promotion and a substantial salary rise. There is no reason why the same basic salary scale should be paid from infant school to sixth form: the demands of the work and the alternative em- ployment of the teachers are entirely different.
The rapid turnover of staff in state schools arises from allowance-chasing: there are six different grades of allowance below deputy head, and the allowance is paid for the post, not the teacher. It would seem preferable to change to the Australian method of grading teachers and not posts. By extra courses, study and recommendation a teacher could be raised one grade which would qualify him for a higher post in his own or another school. For the first three of the five grades the teacher could even be allowed to remain as an ordinary class teacher, which would raise the status of class teaching in comparison with the administrative responsibilities for which allowances are now paid.
Manual work offers high initial pay but poor prospects, while in the professions low initial salaries usually lead to high ultimate earnings. Teaching has the doubtful distinc- tion of having both low starting salaries and low prospects. Only three per cent of teachers, including heads, earn over £2,500 a year, and only a hundred in the entire country earn over £4,000. Yet the second class honours graduate on his £1,880 with no promotion and no extra responsibilities can comfortably earn more than half the salary of his head. Something will have to be done to make the large headships more attractive or the men most able to use to the full a capital plant worth a million pounds with a staff of a hundred teachers and 1,700 boys will move out to Colleges of Education, administration or university long before they are considered for headships.
One fact is beyond doubt: any increased salaries for all 334,000 teachers will be very costly to the taxpayer and ratepayer. The £27 million so far offered to the teachers as an interim award takes all but £6 million of the extra money allowed by the Govern- ment under the rate support grant to the local authorities for education next year, so each pound spent after the full salary review must be carefully chosen. Better prospects for large headships, the long-serving teacher and the 25 per cent of graduates in the pro- fession must have priority. Expenditure on four year training for all and continued
reduction of class size, as advocated by the NUT, will only be achieved at the expense of salary increases. Productivity bargaining is the word in industry and teachers must realise it has applicability to them if they ever want to be properly paid.
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