Post‐war movements in teachers' salaries

Abstract

Public sector white collar employees are a large and important part of the labour force. It is interesting, therefore, to look at the forces determining the pay of such workers, given the highly administered nature of the markets for their services, and at the operation of their negotiating procedures which have remained highly centralized at a time when there has been a growing tendency to move away from national bargaining. This paper looks at some aspects of the pay of one group of public employees – school teachers. The examination deals mainly with global aspects of teachers' pay, comparatively little attention being given to structural aspects of the problem. The discussion is confined to the full‐time teaching force in England and Wales, though the growth in the number of part‐time teachers and para‐teaching personnel has been an important feature of the market in recent years.

How times change: Secondary teachers' job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in 1962 and 2007

“…(In comparison, class size in secondary schools was recently reported as 17.2 for secondary schools and 23.3 for primary schools [DCSF, 2007]). In the early 1960s, the teachers' salary scale ranged from £570 to £1170, with a mean salary of £1115 (Thomas, 1973). To provide a scale for comparison of income to expenses, the average price for a house in the UK in 1962 was approximately £2600 (Nationwide, 2007).…”