Some 200,000 teachers work in nearly 10,000 Australian schools teaching 3.1 million students. Proposals about teacher education and teacher pay have figured in almost all the 24 reports on education commissioned by the Federal Government since 1998.
Most people agree that teachers generally are underpaid, and also that very good teachers are significantly underpaid. A substantial pay increase that moved the profession into new territory would be prohibitive, and introducing a system that rewards "good" teachers becomes problematic as soon as one seeks to define the nature of such a system. Only the very rich schools can afford large above-award payments for all teachers, and the new Industrial Relations laws may well accelerate this gap.
Why the focus on teachers and pay? Every significant study of education, here and abroad, identifies the quality of teachers, together with the ethos of a school that teachers help shape, as being fundamental to the quality of education. Teachers are a school’s most valuable resource. Concerns have also been raised by the looming shortage of teachers in some areas, and by the perception that the profession has not been attracting enough quality new teachers (anecdotally, at Aloysius and our other Jesuit schools, the quality of students entering teaching in recent years has been excellent and seems to reflect a resurgent interest in teaching).
The problem with the present system of teachers' pay has been laid out clearly by Minister Bishop: unless a teacher goes into school administration "they can reach the top salary level within nine years of starting. That's, on average, at 30 years of age, whether they are any good or not, and then their salary is capped". She goes on to ask "so where's the incentive for the next, say, 20 or 30 years?"
I suspect many younger teachers, in particular, would agree with her identifying the challenge of keeping talented teachers in the classroom. How to reward those teachers who go the extra mile, and how to have a system of rewards that is not simply based on seniority that rewards equally those who might simply be serving time or those who, as there are in any profession, do the bare minimum.
The present "one size fits all" approach has a deadening hand. It imposes a civil service-style approach to a role that can be extraordinarily varied in its nature.
The problem with the performance pay proposals is the risk of overlaying another model onto