Scottish secondary teachers at the top of the pay scale are earning around £12,000 less than the average salary of their European counterparts, new figures show.
Statistics published today by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that Scottish teachers at the top of the pay scale earn the equivalent of $47,761 (about £36,300) - but on average teachers working in 23 European Union countries in lower secondary earn $64,199 (£48,800) at the top of the scale. The OECD average is $64,853 (£49,300).
The OECD report - called Education at a Glance 2020, which looks at the state of education systems across 37 nations with developed economies, plus nine other countries - also reveals that salaries “decreased slightly since 2005” in Scotland. Meanwhile, on average across OECD countries and economies between 2005 and 2019, salaries increased by 7 per cent at primary level, 7 per cent at lower-secondary level and 5 per cent at upper-secondary level.
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However, while in most countries and economies teachers’ salaries increase with the level of education they teach, Scottish teachers earn the same salary irrespective of whether they teach in nursery, primary or secondary.
The report also found that Scottish teachers still spend more time in front of classes than many of their peers in other countries.
At the lower-secondary level, OECD teachers spend 44 per cent of their working time on teaching on average, ranging from 35 per cent or less in Austria, Iceland, Korea, Poland and Turkey to 63 per cent in Scotland.
In Scotland, teachers at all levels of schooling, from pre-primary to upper-secondary, are expected to teach 855 hours per year, against the OECD averages of 778 hours for primary, 712 for lower secondary and 680 for upper secondary.
Last year at the Scottish Learning Festival one of the Scottish government’s panel of international experts, Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator now based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, told Tes Scotland: “You cannot seriously exercise teacher leadership or agency if teachers don’t have time for that. It can’t just happen - it has to be done - and it can only be done if there is the room and space and time for doing it.”
When it came to the UK generally the report found countries with smaller class sizes may find it easier to comply with social distancing restrictions amid Covid-19.
Primary schools in the UK have an average of 27 pupils whilst the average class size across OECD countries is 21 children, according to the report.
The report ranks the UK as having the fourth highest number of pupils per class.
Only Chile, Japan and Israel have more students on average in a primary school class than the UK.
The OECD report said: “Ensuring a minimum safety distance between pupils and staff will depend on many factors, such as classroom size, room availability, and the number of students per class.
“Countries with smaller class sizes may find it easier to comply with new restrictions on social distancing, provided they have the space to accommodate the number of students safely.”
