Tuesday 1 December 2015

How many classroom #teachersmake 65K? DfE confirm 0.1%!

Well, well, well ... the DfE today decided to release statistics showing "the number of school teachers earning £65,000 or more in state funded schools in England". 

£65k? That's a strange figure to focus on - unless of course, you're coming under pressure over the misleading claim that '#teachersmake' "up to £65k as a great teacher" !


Do the DfE hope that these belated statistics will let them off the hook? Far from it! They only confirm what teachers complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority had stated in the first place - that only a tiny proportion of classroom teachers are paid over £65,000!

In fact, the DfE have simply provided the confirmation I was seeking at the end of October when I posted on this blog:
 "Now you would have thought by now that the DfE might realise that teachers can apply the skills we teach to our students about analysing sources and data. A quick look at Table 5 of the School Workforce Census suggests that there are 412,000 qualified classroom teachers in English schools. I'm open to correction but, if even as many as four ‘hundreds’ of them are earning £65k, isn't that just 0.1% of the total?"

The figures released by the DfE today
So, it turns out that my estimate was an accurate one. The  DfE are simply confirming that just 485 classroom teachers are earning over £65,000! So, yes that IS just 0.1% of classroom teachers.  

Perhaps it would be better for the DfE if they stop digging and withdraw their misleading claim ...


1 comment:

Jane said...

Taking figures from Edubase indicates why some cynical head teachers are so eager to convert their schools to academies.

For every 100 local authority schools, 38 will have staff above £65k on average.

Looking at academies, for every 100 academies, 100 staff will be above the £65k.

I wonder how many of those actually do any teaching but we can see what the financial bribe is. (allowing for the larger number of primaries which are not academies....yet!)