Imbalance caused by salary scales

The first meeting earlier this month ended in an impasse, largely because the management side insisted on linking pay with the outcome of the Millennium Review, set up to consider teachers' conditions of service.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has made it clear that the thrust of the Millennium Review's recommendations will focus on a need to reform a lop-sided promotion structure, particularly in secondary schools, and a determination to remove conservation of salaries, which is paying teachers for jobs they no longer do to the extent that they were done when they were first appointed to these posts.

The brouhaha provoked by Cosla's offer of 2.7% to teachers is a red herring to divert attention from these objectives.

At present, schools in Scotland are hierarchical institutions. Senior management teams are, generally speaking, divorced from the managed and teachers are regarded as individualistic and competitive. The current pay structure reflects this.

Most teachers are paid at the top of the basic salary scale. In secondary schools, two-thirds of teaching staffs have additional increments depending on responsibilities.

Such a structure is predicated on the assumption that providing cash for additional responsibilities on the part of certain members of staff will result in improved standards.

Rather than hierarchical, schools should be seen as co-operative institutions, where head teachers are viewed as staff leaders and where teachers work co-operatively in teams. In such a system the pay structure would be characterised as ''flat'', wherein the most experienced teachers would be paid the same salary.

Only where a genuine management role can be justified in the case of deputy heads and faculty heads, will this be reflected in an additional responsibility allowance to the main salary scale. Like head teachers, deputies and faculty heads must have proved themselves demonstrably good classroom practitioners before being considered for promotion.

Instead of attempting to force through changes which further encourage competition among teachers, under the pretence of improving quality and value for money, Cosla should look at replacing the structure with one which fosters staff co-operation.

Only by promoting this philosophy of co-operation will Cosla be able to achieve its avowed objectives of ''raising the level of salaries and the status of the unpromoted teacher to maintain recruitment and assure retention.''

If Cosla means to encourage the brightest graduates to consider teaching as a career and to make them wish to stay in classrooms carrying through the job they entered teaching to promote, it will have to put its money where its mouth is and ensure that most teachers are on a main profession grade, the salary levels of which should be able to provide them with an equitable reward throughout their working lives.

Any pay structure is doomed to failure unless it reflects the fact that teachers perform their difficult and exhausting tasks with commitment and skill.

It must also ensure the maximum of the MPG salary scale can be attained rather than aspired to by all classroom teachers. This MPG salary scale would consist of a number of increments and would encompass approximately 85% of all teachers.

The suggested MPG scale would be the bedrock of any Cosla proposals on structure and pay in our schools. It would sweep away responsibility elements, including conservation, and would allow teachers to progress to a salary level which fairly reflects the work they do. There is no doubt that the present system diminishes the importance which should be attached to the actual task of teaching and so does nothing to underline the central importance of the teacher at the chalkface.

Since most teachers would be on this main scale, a radical shift in attitudes, which years of hierarchical pay structures have fostered, would be required.

Teachers would have to accept that they shared a common responsibility for the organisation of the school and that no-one should or could decline to accept his or her share of that responsibility subject, of course, to the limits as laid down in SE40.

If such a radical shift in attitudes is to become a reality, there is no point in Cosla attempting to dismantle the current promotion structure without acknowledging that any reasonable and acceptable alternative will have considerable cost implications and could not be accommodated within the economic parameters set aside in this year's budgets.

Currently salary levels would have to be guaranteed. The MPG salary scale would have to rise to a level which included the average of responsibility elements paid to teachers in promoted or conserved posts below those of heads and depute heads. This would put everyone on a salary scale which recognises the worth of the classroom teacher. Where teachers are paid more than the average responsibility element, then cash differences would be conserved.

However, teachers in this category would receive no further pay rises until the salary of the substantive post caught up with the conserved salary, at which point the teacher would be placed on the substantive salary point and thereafter receive annual pay rises.

This kind of collegiate approach represents a radical, but coherent, departure from the hierarchical structure in schools which has done so much to damage teachers' morale.

Unless there is radical change, there will be little chance of recruiting able young graduates into an increasingly middle-aged profession or of providing those in the system with encouragement so that the standard of education expected by Cosla can be delivered.

In insisting on calling the tune, Cosla must pay the piper.

Tino Ferri is an executive member of the National

Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers