A northern teacher's pound is currently worth more than £1.30 Irish, but that is only one of the issues that complicates a comparison of salaries North and South. To compare the standard of living teachers enjoy, we need to look at tax rates and living costs, which vary within and between the two jurisdictions.
There is no easy way of knowing whether a single teacher in Castlebar is better or worse off than one in Castlederg. If they have spouses and families, many other factors must added, including child benefits and allowances.
On top of that, we need to understand how the pay system works. Teachers in the North have a long scale with 33 points, rising by half points to 17. Point 1 brings a salary of £15,147, but good honours graduates start on point 2 (in practice, half points do not matter much) or £15,591. Salaries the n rise by around £1,200 per year right up
to £38,262. However, classroom teachers cannot rise automatically to the maximum salary because there is a bar at point 9 of the scale, a salary of £23,958. They can progress beyond that only by gaining promotion, e.g. as head of department, by teaching special-needs pupils or by gaining special points for shortage subjects or schools that have difficulty attracting or keeping staff.
Here too there is an important difference between North and South. In the former, most funding follows the pupil through the local management-of-schools system; budgets are based on the number of bums on seats, though there are some special budget allocations. In a growing school, funding will rise and more promotion points will be available. In a school with falling rolls, not only will teachers be made redundant, but the remaining staff can probably forget about getting anything beyond their normal pay rise of around 3 or 4 per cent. This year, an increase of 3.3 per cent was paid from April, though negotiations are continuing on a proposal to make £2,000 "threshold payments" to most teachers on point 9 of the scale.
Working conditions are easier to compare than salaries. Northern teachers work 195 days per year, a full three weeks more than their Southern counterparts. Five are specific training days, when pupils are absent, and this year there are two extra days of "exceptional closure" for training in information and communications technology. Under their contracts, teachers work 1,265 hours of "directed time" spread over 39 weeks of about 32.5 hours each, but this is not a maximum working week. A court case in Britain ruled that professionals should also be expected to mark homework and prepare lessons.
Surveys have suggested that very many teachers work more than 55 hours per week and some well over 60, according to Avril Hall, assistant general secretary of the Belfast-based Ulster Teachers Union (UTU). She said they typically work for two or three hours per night during the week and another 10 hours over the weekend marking and preparing work.
In practice, much depends on how reasonable the principal and governors are. Tom McKee, regional official of the large British-based National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) pointed out, for example, that some schools require teachers to prepare three reports each year on pupil progress, whereas others send out only one report annually. Teachers know when their head is trying to shelter them from the excesses of rapid change and bureaucracy; equally they tell of over-zealous principals who make the burden worse.
Another aspect of job satisfaction is the sense of being valued, both in the classroom and in the committee rooms where policy is decided. McKee says teachers and their unions are not appreciated and cites the examples of the proposed General Teaching Council, which has only two union representatives, and the review group on post-primary education created by education minister Martin McGuinness, which has no serving teachers.
"We used to have representation on education bodies, but Brian Mawhinney (former Conservative minister) changed that. It did not improve with Labour; there is no evidence of that at all. Martin McGuinness said he wanted unions to be involved but I had to put out a statement last week saying he had snubbed the profession," McKee says.
UTU's Avril Hall says there has been a better atmosphere under Labour and now under devolution. "Teachers are being valued more but we have to see how it goes. We are being consulted more by the Department and we get the impression that the political parties in the Assembly welcome our involvement. It is improving, but there was virtually no consultation under the Tories."
Earlier this year the only all-Ireland teacher union, the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO), criticised McGuinness for failing to put teachers on the Comhairle na Gaelscolaiochta and Frank Bunting, the northern secretary, agrees that it was a mistake not to have teachers on the post-primary review group. But he agrees that matters improved after Labour took over.
"A lot of the Thatcherite agenda was dismantled and we have more partnership in policy-making, including two places as of right on the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment," Bunting says. "In general, we have more teacher-friendly arrangements. We are now round the table together and, with the Good Friday Agreement, we have links with Assembly members, which puts us in a very different relationship with civil servants. Once we start using the new structures effectively, things will get better still."
Paul Mc Gill is a consultant and journalist specialising in education and social affairs. He can be contacted at pmcgill@iol.ie.
