Anne Tolley Interview Analysis – Part I: Pay

Anne Tolley appeared on Q+A yesterday in this interview.

The interview starts with the most visible issue, that of pay. Tolley argues adjusting for New Zealand’s GDP, the “average” pay for a teacher is about $70,000. This seems a bit of an generous assessment. Espiner responds to that by asking is that nearer the higher end. Tolley in return states her assumption to get to that figure. A lot seems to hinge on what you mean by “average”, often it’s the choice in choosing the arithmetic mean, or the median.

Update: The ministry explains the calculations in a press release. The figure was based on the calculation of a mean salary. I have also made a further post about Kate Gainsford’s response to Tolley’s claim.

Neither Tolley nor Espiner seem to give much detail behind this exchange. Those involved in education will get it, but it would be lost on others, especially the more political ones. I will try to flesh out their exchange in detail.

Espiner means to say to get paid that much, according to the STCA salary scale, one would have to be near the top of the scale (top scale is step 14), have teaching qualifications (usually a subject based degree plus teaching diploma, which gets a teacher to start on step 7) with 6 or 7 year’s experience and have at least one unit.

Units are pay for extra responsibilities, like management units for a HOD or deputy principal duties or for particular projects a school runs. Which means a teacher with these units is probably teaching fewer classes than a teacher who does not, all other things being equal. This is part of what I mean when I have written in the past that the only career progression available to teachers is to teach less. Tolley refers to this when she talks about the “structure” of a teaching career.

Tolley responds that she has based her figure on a teacher in the “middle” of their career. So she’s saying that the average length of a teaching career is at least 12 years, by then a teacher would be near the top of the scale halfway through that. I do not know how she arrived at that figure. [Since this post has been updated, I now know otherwise.]

According to the statistics on this page, in 2008 the median age of a secondary teacher was about 40. I haven’t been able to find figures on the length of teaching service, but if you assume a teacher starts their career at 22 say, they would have 18 years of service to get to the median age of 40. There would be some adjustment for the fact that some teachers are career changers – but some of those years in other careers may count as steps up the payscale, so it may even out in the end.

So Tolley’s claim of the “average” career length seems credible. It seems that Tolley has arrived at her figure as the wage of a teacher with a median length of service. Espiner then compares it to the starting salary, in the mid 30 range. I don’t know how many secondary teachers actually start there. A teacher would start on step 7 with a 3 year degree plus a diploma, which would be $45,653 per annum.

The comment teachers are “disconnected” from the real world is then addressed by Tolley. She argues that teachers are “unrealistic” because they want bigger raises than what police, nurses and others settled for and point to 4% raises they got each year under the previous government. She also points out that many people have done without pay rises and Irish teachers went with a pay decrease. She has set the scene for the PPTA having to show that they deserve special treatment to get the pay increases they are asking for.

Tolley tries to dismiss the PPTA negotiations as if they are a loud minority, but doesn’t get far with it. Espiner catches her out with the PPTA having a huge membership of about 95%, but pulls his punch with this one too, with nearly all the members voting to strike as well. However, she does do well to dodge the performance based bullet. She asserts outright it’s not on the agenda and explicitly acknowledges that it won’t go down well with teachers; Essentially she’s saying she’s not going to go there, because it’s just not worth it. She is skilfully diplomatic in saying teacher expectations are “unrealistic”, denying the use of “greedy” by Espiner.

The Issues Behind the PPTA Strike Headlines

True to their word, the PPTA went on strike today. Various media have reported on the strike. One NZ Herald story is linked here.

So what’s not in the media? A lot. Most reports have been focussed on pay.

Teachers have not only been dissatisfied with pay, but with the government wanting to claw back conditions granted in previous times.

One of those issues is class sizes. There has been plenty of debate about it. Having smaller class sizes is better for the teacher, but obviously it costs more. What about the impact on achievement? Hattie’s Visible Learning, says it depends on what the teacher actually does with opportunity it provides. He found that teachers who already have a large class, when given a smaller class, do not perform much better on average. His conclusion was that smaller class sizes do not automatically increase student achievement. Of course, this is quoted in the media as “class size doesn’t matter” because it makes a nice little soundbite for the news.

Workload is quite an issue for teachers. Despite general support for the NCEA system from teachers, one bone of contention is the increased assessment workload it requires of them. What is not generally known is now that the curriculum has been changed (latest curriculum document published 2007), the NCEA standards have to be altered to reflect those changes.

Starting in 2011, new level 1 standards will kick in, followed by level 2 in 2012 and level 3 in 2013. Each school is charged with how they are going assess these new standards and alter their unit plans, assessment plans and get them sent off to NZQA to be checked. Most schools do this themselves, but some outsource this work to private companies. This amount of work was not needed prior to NCEA, as nearly all assessment was done by NZQA by setting and marking exams.

The PPTA has also called the government to address issues with teacher recruitment and retainment. From this story in the Herald:

Ms Gainsford said the ministry’s method of calculating vacancies – by counting job ads in the Education Gazette – was deeply flawed.

“If you talked to lots of principals and told them there was no teacher recruitment problem, they would laugh.”

The method reported fits in with an OIA request I made last year regarding what the Ministry defined as a teacher shortage. I wrote:

One reason the definition is blunt is that it doesn’t account for the actual number of apparently qualified candidates. Mathematics teachers are deemed in many places to be in short supply. But I asked one principal of an urban Auckland decile 3 school how many candidates would apply for a Mathematics vacancy. The principal told me that about 160 would apply.

That principal told me that most of these applicants were not suitable. And a lot of these were teachers from overseas who are not native English speakers or not familiar with the New Zealand system. A school would often have to toss up between just filling the vacancy or doing without until readvertising again. I think this is what Gainsford is referring to.

Secondary Teachers Contract Bargaining

The NZ Herald recently reported that a strike over pay and conditions is possible course of action. The government clearly has not impressed the PPTA with small offers of 1 and 1.5 percent increases on the bargaining table. I have heard that the government also wishes to claw back benefits like guaranteed non-contact time in a bid to save money. Faced with a strike (which looks likely in the current climate) I think the government will make a more realistic offer. It would seem that the government is quite intent on wearing down the resolve of the union and to drag things out for as long as possible. Why this is so I am unsure.

Nearly all sectors of government spending have been cut due to the recession, and there’s always the mentality “we agree that budget cuts are necessary, but not our sector…” which can easily take hold. Along with the likes of Health, Education is something a government is never allowed to spend less money on. Perhaps National are wary of the fact that PPTA can hold the government to ransom if they have to, with 95% plus of secondary teachers belonging to it. Even though they know they would come out poorly in a head to head confrontation they are dragging things out for as long as possible to attempt to portray themselves, not teachers as setting the agenda on education policy. It is not a good look for a government to have to beg teachers to carry out their policy, particularly election winning ones. Perhaps they are dragging things out for as long as possible so that the government can say “look, we tried to find a solution, but we couldn’t so sacking many teachers (or something else quite extreme) was inevitable” with some credibility. Maybe it’s a distraction that the government is willing to bear to take attention away from the opposition to National Standards in the primary sector.

Pay is always one of the more visible issues when it comes to teacher recruitment and retention. However, as far as pay and career progression goes, once you hit the top of the standard payscale, the only way to get more money is to do less teaching. The current secondary scale has 14 steps and most new teachers with a Bachelor’s degree and a teaching diploma would start on step 7 (current starting salary $45653 pa), and go up one step a year. Once the top is reached ($68980 pa) one can only get paid more by getting management units, as a department/faculty head, deputy principal duties, et cetera which entails more paperwork and less teaching.

One may think that it’s a fairly good salary considering that there are two week school holidays between terms and a fairly long summer break. The reality is though – teaching is a stressful job. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve tried to do in my entire life. Teachers get stressed, and also get ill quite easily from hanging around so many young people every day with all sorts of ailments. The hours are more than just during the 9am-3pm ish teaching day – many hours of preparation, marking, taking the rugby or debating team are a few of the many commitments teachers are expected to make. The skills teachers have often are better renumerated elsewhere, especially say those have skills in Mathematics.