TEACHERS’ salaries in Northern Ireland have declined by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010, according to the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO).
My first thought on hearing this was to wonder, only half-facetiously, if it explained why teachers appear to be doing less work.
Most schools in Northern Ireland now take two weeks off a year for half terms, a practice completely unknown in my youth.
Training days, never originally intended to interrupt term time, have become staff and school ‘development days’ occurring randomly throughout the year, often in close proximity to weekends and holidays.
Over the past few years there has been a sudden expansion of ‘phasing in’ at primary one and primary nursery units, involving greatly reduced teaching hours for much of September.
I am unaware of any public or political consultation regarding the growth of this practice.
Last Halloween (which was on a Saturday and is not a public holiday) one of my children’s schools took a full week off for half term, added the following Monday as a development day, then shut at lunchtime on the preceding Friday for no apparent reason.
I must admit this caused me little inconvenience as I am self-employed.
But observing that morning’s chaos in the car park, where of course we all have to arrive in a 10-minute window between two bells, it was clear that hundreds of working lives had been disrupted.
The usual response to complaints of this nature is that schools are not a baby-sitting service.
In fact, baby-sitting is an important function of the education system and a key reason why it has evolved as it has. Our regimented model of schooling is historically unusual.
It emerged during the industrial revolution to prepare children for employment while enabling their parents to go to work - mothers included, as the mills needed men and women.
The schools this produced went hand-in-hand with industrialisation and spread around the world with it but judged purely as a means to impart learning they are fantastically inefficient.
Most children can be home-schooled to the same level in under an hour a day. We accept the extra hours they spend in essentially Victorian institutions precisely because it is also a baby-sitting service - nothing so outdated and expensive would otherwise survive.
That service has only become more important with the rise of single-parent families and double-income households.
I would never downplay the challenge of keeping 30 children under control, even for a few hours. However, as a child-minding plus education task I consider it sufficiently rewarded.
Teachers in Northern Ireland start on £22,022 and progress in automatic annual increments up a six-point pay scale to £32,186.
After that they enter a three-point performance-related pay scale up to £37,495.
In addition, they are entitled to one of five special allowances for further responsibility, ranging from £1,884 to £12,150, not including special needs allowances of up to £4,033 and recruitment and retention bonuses for hard-to-fill subjects of up to £2,399.
That is before considering their promotion prospects as a principal or vice-principal, with a potential upper salary of £105,097, or their taxpayer-subsidised pensions.
Contrary to INTO’s claims of a pay freeze, the entire salary and allowance schedule has been lifted by one per cent a year for the past two years.
Add in progression and promotion and most teachers’ pay has been more than outpacing inflation. Lifting all this by a further 13 per cent would knock a huge chunk out of Stormont’s £1.1 billion schools budget.
What would we get in return? International experience shows that high salaries are important to securing the economic benefits of a good education system.
However, we do not need to prove this point any further. There are reportedly 80 applicants for every teaching post in Northern Ireland and the salary advantage is already enormous - a teacher with a decade’s service can easily bring home £40,000 a year, the highest gap over comparable private sector jobs in the UK, according to the Office of National Statistics.
If Stormont is going to roll over in the face of the latest teaching union demand - and it usually does - the economic benefits of a better baby-sitting service should be on the agenda. Longer days, shorter holidays and more flexible starting times would be every working parent’s demand.
We should not look kindly on a minister who gives our money away for less.
- An earlier version of this column incorrectly said the INTO was planning to strike next Friday. This is not the case and we regret any confusion
