Teaching for profit will attract and retain talent

The feel-good 2002 French movie Etre et Avoir ( To Be and To Have) portrayed an affectionate, dedicated teacher lovingly caring for a small group of children in a tiny rural school. The movie had no plot, minimal characterisation and moved at a pace suitable to cure an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder child of insomnia. It was nevertheless popular because it reinforced the ideal concept of how we would love our teachers to be: patient, thoughtful and, above all, child-centred.

This deeply held idea of the altruistic teacher helps us understand why there is such anathema to the words “education” and “profit” being used in the same sentence. The idea of a teacher motivated by financial gains, with one eye on the class and the other on his bank balance, is not a palatable one. We much prefer our teachers to be altruistic, teaching out of the goodness of their hearts and because of their love for children and the welfare of society.

But is this realistic? Of course, we want our teachers to have the welfare of their students at heart, and to love learning and teaching, but we must also acknowledge that teachers have to pay the mortgage, bring up families and get ahead materially like the rest of us. If we cling to the myth of the purely altruistic teacher, we will never address the most pressing problem facing education today – that of teacher quality. We must face the fact that education is in direct competition with other white-collar industries for skilled labour. At the moment, primary and secondary education is coming distant last in the race with the IT industry and the finance sector to attract talent.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia will soon experience a growing shortage of experienced, quality qualified teachers. As the baby boomers retire between 2011 and 2030, there will be a shortage of skilled labour throughout Australia but the education sector will be worse off than most. In 2003-04, the education industry employed the highest proportion of mature age workers, with 47 per cent of people employed in the industry aged 45 to 64.

The teaching profession faces other challenges. It is often viewed as an unglamorous profession and held in poor regard by many because it is poorly paid and candidates don’t need to be particularly gifted to get into the industry. The admission index in NSW (ENTER in Victoria) to get into teaching courses in university is commonly lower than all other degrees except perhaps nursing.

There is one way to meet this challenge but it will require a radical rethink of how primary and secondary education is managed. Simply put, we need schools that are run on a for-profit basis and that can thereby reward teachers financially for effective innovation and dedication to the task of teaching. Financial incentives need to be inserted into the education marketplace to attract, retain, extend and reward talented teachers.

At the moment, a teacher’s salary is set by the award and based entirely on the number of years they have been working in the system. If a teacher wants or needs to earn more they have two options. She can work at a second job such as writing text books or private tutoring outside school hours or she can move to another industry. If she chooses the first option, her energies are diverted from the classroom. In the second scenario, she is lost to the industry altogether. There is no mechanism through which she can do her job better and be rewarded financially for it. Imagine a system in which the teacher who needed to earn more went away and prepared his lesson better, marked his essay more diligently, studied each child in his class, analysed their needs and examined every possible avenue he could to help that child learn – and was then financially rewarded for their improved performance.

For-profit schools would be highly motivated to pay teachers on merit so they could stay ahead of the competition.

Australia is lagging in this area. Edupreneurial companies worldwide provide high-quality tertiary education, and are starting to explore the primary and secondary market. Education corporations represent 10 per cent of the $US740 billion ($A963 billion) education market in the US. In Sweden, 30 per cent of independent schools are run by corporations. In Brazil, the largest private sector education provider, Objetivo/UNIP, has 450 franchises and teaches about 500,000 students and has an annual turnover of about $US400 million. In Southern Africa, Education Investment Corporation Limited caters for more than 300,000 students and is about to be listed on the Nasdaq.

Since high-quality teachers are essential to a well-run school, for-profit schools will be highly motivated to devise merit-pay schemes to attract, retain and reward excellent teachers.

If Australia is to meet the challenge of staffing our schools with outstanding, teachers we need to realise that the profit motive and the ideal of the altruistic teacher are not incompatible.

Ross Farrelly is an educator and writer. This comment is based on his article “Welcome the Edupreneurs”, from the spring issue of Policy magazine.