Doubtful if teachers' unions can agree on pay offer

THE story is told of the teacher who, when promoted to a post of responsibility, was given the duty of ensuring that the school prefabs were properly locked up each day.

After a few years the prefabs were demolished, but the teacher went on collecting the allowance for this duty until his retirement 20 years later.

Another teacher was given the job of ringing the school bell, a post he held long after an electric bell was installed. In a third school a teacher spent five years looking after the broom cupboard after falling out with the principal.

The stories mix fact and fiction, but they illustrate, the sometimes dusty realities of the way schools are run. After all, this is the system in which highly paid principals in, some schools are still putting out the dustbins on a Monday morning.

A century of effective trade unionism has ensured that today's teachers are well paid and enjoy good working conditions. But this achievement has not been matched by a parallel development of the career structure in the profession.

The ambitious teacher has few places to turn to. Meaningful management posts as principals and vice principals are hard to come by, and changing to another school entails a drop in allowances.

Other teachers are finding it difficult to adapt to the new programmes being taught in schools, and to the increasing discipline problems in many classrooms. But they, likewise, have nowhere to turn to.

For all these reasons the Government's offer of an early retirement scheme, pay increases and new promotional opportunities seemed like a good proposition to the officials, union leaders and school managers who spent almost two years drawing it up.

The deal is regarded enviously by the nurses and other public sector workers currently pursuing their own claims with the Government. About 40,000 teachers are being offered £66.7 million, compared to the £35 million which is now the table for 26,000 nurses.

Economic commentators have called it "a crock of gold" and pointed out that teachers enjoy far better working conditions than nurses. Under the deal, all teachers would be able to retire at 55; most other workers have to wait until they are 65. Primary teachers work 183 days a year, and second level teachers 167 days, well short of hours put in by the nurses and most other groups of workers.

Starting pay for teachers is about £14,000 a year, but various allowances bring this up to at least £16,000 for most. The pay scale rises to more than £25,000 over 26 increments, before allowances are added.

In contrast, nurses start on £13,800 a year, and rise to a maximum of £17,500. The Government's latest pay offer to them proposes a lower starting salary of £12,800 (this was resisted successfully by the teacher unions) and a maximum of £20,000.

The reason so many teachers have rejected the Government's terms can be traced back to the politics of the staffroom. Schools generally are small organisations in which change is judged on its effect on the overall equilibrium of staff relations.

Thus, teachers have tended to oppose the deal not on ideological grounds but because they perceive that others will do better out of it than they will. Instead of "What's in it for me?", it's a case of "What am I not getting that someone else is?

Allied to this is a fear that the modest proposals for extra productivity contained in the deal represent the thin end of the wedge. Teachers look at the drastic reforms introduced by the Tories in Britain, and fear the same could eventually happen here.

In the UK, teachers have to devote five extra days, known as the Baker days, to non teaching activities in Italy, the requirement is for 120 additional hours a year. Yet the current offer asks teachers to commit themselves to only 15 hours a year.

There is also the concern, widely shared by the universities, that society's relentless drive towards increased competition, the use of performance indicators and merit based promotions will destroy the atmosphere in which teachers work.

Learning thrives in an atmosphere of co operation and collegiality, rather than competition, teachers maintain. Education cannot be treated like just another product in the marketplace.

These views will be liberally aired at the round of Easter conferences, where at least some of the union leaderships will come under attack for their role in negotiating the offer. The three unions will meet before then to work out a common strategy, though whether this is possible now is doubtful.

Primary teachers are likely to press for the implementation of the deal they approved by a two to one majority, regardless of what happens in other sectors. The other unions would be left to negotiate a partial implementation of the deal, or to threaten industrial action for improved conditions.

Even if improved terms were available, and the Government has said it can offer no extra cash, it is hard to see what improvement would make a difference to those teachers who rejected the deal.

Taking industrial action would only impair further the standing of teachers in the community; already the profession has come under sustained attack from right wing commentators, and any interference with this summer's exams would bring the full weight of public opinion down on teachers.

As one politician put it last week: "Teachers are going to find that, just as for their students, the real world starts outside the school gates".