Teachers need a flexible career structure

There is a popular view that keeping the best teachers in classrooms can be solved by simply paying all teachers more.

It is only natural that teachers want to be paid more.  But simply increasing overall salaries won't achieve what teachers want.

Archaic structures surrounding teacher employment get in the way of rewarding the best teachers in our schools.

My review of all government school enterprise bargaining agreements, reported in The Australian yesterday, shows that the key to maximising further investment in schools, and in teachers, lies in taking a more flexible approach to teaching career structures.

The EBAs agreed to between state departments of education and teacher unions are negotiated on the flawed premise that all teachers deserve the same pay at the same stage of their career.

Teachers are viewed as one category of interchangeable workers, without recognition of specialisation or subject expertise.  Salaries are rigidly and explicitly set, without regard for the demand for the skill set a teacher brings to their school, whether they are teaching in a topic area with a skills shortage or their impact on student achievement.

Lower-performing teachers benefit from this system, which also prevents high-performing teachers from being paid more.

At the entry level, there is no opportunity to recognise a teacher's specialist subject knowledge or experience.  A PhD scientist, for example, must start teaching on the same salary as a new university graduate.

Teachers who demonstrate high-quality teaching can pro­gress only through time-based increments.  Movement through the increments can be accelerated in some states but not skipped.  Teachers are unable to increase their earnings once the top of the salary band has been reached.

Some states are planning to shift from automatic, time-based progression to a standards-based approach, aligned with national teaching standards.  But this will not change the inherent problems of a fixed structure.  One set of ­career-staged salary bands simply will be replaced by another requiring highly bureaucratic and costly demonstrations of teacher ­practice.

In NSW, for example, the new structure to be introduced from 2016 has three salary bands of "graduate", "proficient" and "highly accomplished".  Highly ­accomplished teachers are rewarded with higher salaries.

But to access the higher salary band, teachers are required to produce documentary evidence of their teaching practice, annotated to demonstrate their achievement against each of the seven different standards of the national standards for teachers.  This evidence must be accompanied by a report of their supervising teacher and reports of external observations of their classes, before being submitted to an external agency for review and accreditation.

Instead of creating an incentive for teachers to continually work with principals and their colleagues to improve their teaching to best meet the needs of their students, teachers will be encouraged by this new system to simply meet the requirements of a bureaucratic process in order to increase their salary to the maximum level.  Higher salaries will be paid to teachers who hold this certification — not necessarily those offering higher quality teaching to students.

Teachers will be rewarded for adherence to process, not excellence in teaching.

Principals themselves acknowledge the existing structure of teacher employment arrangements are unsatisfactory.  Less than one-third of secondary school principals view the current arrangements as providing an effective way of attracting or retaining teachers to their schools.

The answer for teachers, and our schools, is a more flexible career structure, one that is accompanied by school funding models that allow principals to manage the cost of their staff.  This can be achieved only through a new, more flexible approach to negotiation between teacher unions and ­governments.

Restrictions on the maximum amount that classroom teachers can be paid should be removed.  Limitations that prevent the free progression of individual teacher careers must be axed.  And schools need to be allowed to negotiate ­arrangements to attract teachers to hard-to-staff areas.  Greater flexibility would allow deserving teachers to be paid more and schools to make better use of their salary purchasing power.