Teachers pay: the rationale for reform reform Marcus Bell - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Teachers’ pay: the rationale for reform reform

Marcus Bell Director, Teachers & Teaching Department for Education

Overview

• The old system
• What was wrong with it
• Ministers’ perspective
• The new system
• The new system
• Some myth-busting
• What does the future hold?

The old system

• National system of pay and conditions for all maintained schools
• Four regional pay bands; Inner London, Outer London, London Fringe, Rest of

England and Wales

• Four pay-scales or ranges for classroom teachers; main pay scale, upper pay

scale, advanced skills teacher pay range and excellent teacher pay range

• System of 10 allowances, the main ones being Teaching and Learning

Responsibility (TLR) payments and SEN allowances

• Near automatic annual progression on the main pay scale, national criteria for

access to the upper pay scale, biennial progression on the upper pay scale

• Salary attached to a teacher not a post, so a teacher moving schools has a

guarantee of the same base salary in their new school

What was wrong with it?

• 1. Little correlation between teachers’ pay and local

labour market conditions

• 2. Pay by seniority/length of service, not

performance performance

• 3. Not enough scope for schools to reward the

highest performing staff

• 4. Automatic progression a poor use of public

money in a time of austerity

National pay is unfair – teachers’ pay compared to private sector graduate pay

Pay by seniority? – Teachers’ pay by age

The only way is up – distribution of full-time qualified teachers on the main and upper pay scales

Ministers’ perspective

• Teacher quality matters more than anything else
• Schools should have more freedom
• Labour markets work in other sectors, why not in

teaching?

• What about academies?
• Whitehall climate around “local pay”
• Timing and the state of the economy

The new system

• Removal of all statutory spine points on the classroom teacher pay

scales

• Removal of automatic pay progression, all progression to be justified by

performance

• Removal of pay portability – schools no longer obligated when

appointing to match a teacher’s salary at their previous school

• Advanced Skills Teacher and Excellent Teacher pay-scales abolished,

replaced by Leading Practitioner pay scale with less specific criteria attached

• Simpler criteria for progression to the Upper Pay Scale

Some myth-busting

• New arrangements aren’t “payment by results”. Schools decide what

good performance is and how they want to reward it, not Government

• Schools decide how far and how fast they want to change their

approach to pay

• Deregulation doesn’t mean a “race to the bottom”. In Sweden,

teachers’ pay differentials narrowed

• You can’t cut teachers’ pay!

What does the future hold?

• Some schools will make radical changes to pay and reward but many

won’t - at least not this year

• Pace of change will be driven by:
• Local decisions
• Experiences of “early adopters”
• Headroom in school budgets
• Speed of recovery of graduate labour market
• Regional economic differences and how quickly they widen