Young teachers earn more in Portugal and Korea than here

Analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that England and Scotland fall behind other countries such as Portugal, Ireland and Korea, and are below the OECD average for starting pay.

OECD director of education and skills Andreas Schleicher said that overall, teachers’ salaries are “going backwards in real terms” in Scotland and England.

“Pretty much for the first time in history, the last 10 years have not been so great for teachers in terms of getting more pay,” he said.

“Both Scotland and England are actually going backwards in real terms when you look at the salary between 2005 and 2013.”

This was not the case for most countries, where salaries have gone up in real terms.

Addressing reporters in central London, Mr Schleicher said: “What the UK does well in our judgment, it does have quite flexible pay scales and it does have a lot of incentives.

“If you add all that up, actually teachers are quite wealthy - relative to their colleagues (in other countries) but not relative to workers with similar qualifications.

“You want to attract the best and brightest into the profession and that, I think, is really the challenge.”

The report found the salaries of teachers in England and Scotland are comparatively low at both the start and end of their careers, but when bonuses and allowances are included, they are better remunerated than in most other OECD countries.

After around 10 years of experience, salaries “increase considerably”, but this then slows down again so that with the exception of pre-primary teachers in England, salaries at the top of the scale at all levels of education in England and Scotland are below the OECD average.

While the starting salary for a primary school teacher was given as £27,768 in England and £27,576 in Scotland, the OECD average was £29,807.

The figures were the same in England and Scotland for a teacher starting secondary school while the OECD average was £31,013.

The report also found that the UK has some of the largest class sizes of all the countries analysed.

While the OECD average for primary schools was 21, it was 27 in the UK, behind only China (37), Chile (29) and Israel (28).

But in secondary schools the UK, at 20 pupils per teacher, was below the OECD average of 24.

Mr Schleicher said an “unusual” finding was that while primary school class sizes are very big, teachers have very little time for doing things other than teaching, such as lesson preparation or professional development.

“Most countries it goes the other way round,” he said. “Japan, Korea, China, have large classes but they use that resource to give teachers more time for other things than teaching.

“There’s a lot of effort in many countries to make the choice - give teachers more kids to teach but we use those resources to create a work environment where teachers have more room to sort of foster their profession as a whole, and that is where the UK is an exception, according to this data.”

Mr Schleicher said personal learning is “usually a big priority for teachers but not so much in England”.