IT has come to my attention that a group of teachers currently face discrimination. Moreover, efforts to end this discrimination are being vigorously opposed. The group I am talking about is made up of non-late entrants to teaching. For years, non-late entrants to teaching - we could call them “young teachers” - have not been paid as much as their late entrant - or “old” - counterparts. Is this fair?
Wind the clock back. One of my best teaching buddies took voluntary redundancy from a steelworks and retrained as a chemistry teacher. The insight he has brought has been worth several salary points from day one. Yet for every late entrant like him there is another who arrives with a sack load of misconceptions and tries to run their classroom like a branch of the Northern Alliance Building Society.
Wind further back. A barely-out-of-short-trousers physicist is transferred to a new school. The heidie takes him aside and tells him he will be expected to “more than replace” his (late entrant) predecessor. This worries him, just a little. He makes his way to his new classroom. It is a bombsite. Science benches have huge chunks missing.
Graffiti expresses amusement at having received “200 lines today from the Blob”. All the anthropomorphic electrons on the transistor poster have been given willies. The kids tell him that the Blob used the walk-in cupboard at the back of the room to hide in for a fly smoke during lessons.
The new physicist smiles a tight-lipped smile and shakes his head. He knows that they are exaggerating, except that they aren’t: one day he finds the scorch marks on the shelves. Our youthful recruit discreetly covers the evidence with a pile of worksheets and returns to making an attempt to fill in the gaps left by the youthless fellow who went before him.
Something like that happened to me, though at the time I was too busy cultivating a moustache in a desperate attempt to look older to worry much about salary differentials. A good decade and a half later I was involved in interviewing prospective physics students. Some were as old as the geezers back in the staffroom who were yet again boring the pants off the fortysomethings with talk of early retirement.
Which age group actually needs an incentive to come into teaching? It’s all rather unfair - almost as unfair as telling people they are going to be paid less when they finish their training than they were led to believe.
Gregor Steele is now as old as the people who looked ancient when he began teaching.
