Teachers Can Earn up to 65K — Watchdog rules advert not “Ridiculous”
“Nothing Wrong With “Ridiculous” Advert That Said Teachers Could Earn Up To £65k, Watchdog Rules”: brief thoughts from Helen Scott on teachers’ pay and it’s use as a marketing and recruitment strategy
This story got me thinking about the use of money as an incentive to encourage people to join the teaching profession. I agree with the NUT’s comments that “when only one in a thousand classroom teachers earn £65,000, it is obviously ridiculous for the DfE to give the impression that this is a likely salary” and that the Department could make the profession more attractive by dealing with issues that put people teaching off such as a heavy workload and constant changes to government policies. Also, I wonder if money is really the deal-breaker in whether a person would want to be a teacher or not?
A recent report by the National Audit office (Should I Stay or Should I Go? NFER Analysis of Teachers Joining and Leaving the Profession) made the point that when teachers leave the profession they rarely go on to better paid jobs. This might suggest that their skills and qualifications as teachers are not highly valued by other professions-but I suspect not. Most teachers I have worked with (even those who have left the profession) have amazing communication skills, a passion for learning themselves and for developing others, are highly organised, great “team players”, critical thinkers and want to make a difference in the world-qualities that would surely be rated by most employers. Because teachers have to develop such a range of skills, they should be paid well and it would be great if more than one in 1000 were. Marketing designed to attract new teachers should focus on the positive aspects of teaching, not pay alone-but this should also happen alongside a genuine commitment to keep people in the profession and this can only be done by a further commitment-to decrease the sheer volume and nature of what all teachers are expected to do, day in day out, however much they are paid.
