Teacher salary relativities : a benchmarking approach

New South Wales, like other states in Australia, is facing a crisis in education. The average age of secondary teachers in NSW has now reached 49 years. Some estimates suggest that up to 50 percent of the current teacher-workforce in the State will leave the teaching profession in the next five years and that the numbers of new teachers entering the profession will fall well short of that number (MCEETYA1 2003). The questions must be asked: what has contributed to the development of this situation and what can the Government do to rectify the problem? A major contributing factor relates to the current industrial relations system and the system of wage determination for teachers in NSW. One of the key issues is the rigidity of the NSW teacher wage system as reflected in OECD Indicators 2004. The OECD statistics for 28 of its member nations show that Australia was ranked eighth, for initial starting salaries for teachers. Teachers at the top of the scale in Austraiia, however, were only ranked fourteenth. In addition, in the period between 1996 and 2002, starting salaries for teachers in Australia increased by 27 percent in real terms, but for those teachers on the top of the scale the salary increased by only 3 percent in real terms. This has created a situation where starting salaries for teachers are quite attractive, but as teachers progress up the teaching salary scales the salaries lose their attractiveness and are no longer competitive to other comparative occupations.(1. MCEETYA is the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. 2. This was based an the salaries of lower secondary teachers with minimum training in equivalent US dollars converted using purchasing pcwer parities (PPP's).)