Education research organisation SchoolDash has just published some great work they have done, funded by the Gatsby Foundation, looking at recruitment into the further education sector.
They have analysed – with permission – all the adverts on the Association of Colleges’ website. They used AI (yes, really – they use it to read the adverts) to see who is advertising for what, what they are paying, and whether the job needs to be readvertised before it is filled.
What little coverage there was of the findings sadly missed the most important point. It didn’t say that the average salary (and remember, this is typically for mid-career professionals with degrees and teaching qualifications) is just over £30,000.
Your chance of being a higher-rate taxpayer as an FE teacher is 0.3 per cent. Yup, three in 1000. I guess these things are not news to people in the profession, but they should be news to people in the country at large.
Let’s put that salary into perspective. If you get a job at Aldi, you will earn £13.35 an hour after your probationary period. Assuming a forty-hour week, that comes to £27,750 a year. For sure, you will have to work your share of Saturdays and Sundays, and there are early-morning and evening shifts as well. Supermarket workers work hard.
On the other hand, you can start at Aldi at 16, meaning that a supermarket worker will have five years of earnings before their friend in further education earns their first pay cheque. That head start means that the total pay of the further education teacher will only reach that of the supermarket worker when the two of them are 53 years old.
In fact it is worse than that, because the further education teacher loses a chunk of their pay in student loan repayments.
There is, of course, nothing moral about who earns more. We need people to work in Aldi, and we need people to work in further education. There is nothing intrinsically better about a society that pays one group more than another.
You can buck the market, but you shouldn’t try
Ultimately, people do not earn what they deserve; they earn what is needed to attract the people needed for the job. If Manchester United are to rebuild, they will have to pay through the nose to attract talent of a relevant calibre.
The problem with further education wages is not that they are low per se; it is that they are too low to attract enough talent. SchoolsDash find that four in 10 jobs get re-advertised, either because no-one applied or because the applicants fell below the standard of appointability.
That means low pay is a problem for the students as well as the staff.
I don’t know of any sector that can call itself sustainable when four in 10 job adverts do not get a single application of sufficient calibre to be appointed.
I would love to be able to say that this cannot last, that you cannot buck the market. But we can buck the market if society just doesn’t care about bad outcomes. We see this in social work, which has the same wicked problem of low salaries, vacancies and some very poor outcomes. And no one cares enough to change that either.
So my wish this Christmas is that we will remember not just the children, but the young people and adults studying in further education. That we will realise that if we want them to learn construction, engineering, healthcare, English and maths – the five shortage subjects – the solution is easy: we just need to pay those who teach them adequately.
Not generously, mind. But enough, say, that only one in 10 jobs has to be re-advertised.
All I want is a market wage, because although you can buck the market, you shouldn’t try. It bucks back, and the consequences are – as we can see in this case – bad news for society.
I’m not disputing that teachers are under paid, they are (and would also point out that non-teaching staff barely ever get mentioned in discourse mentioning pay and conditions).
However, any analysis and tool (including AI) are only as good as the information it draws on, coupled with the analysis methods applied (including AI prompting).
For instance, using AOC job vacancy data as the prime data source and finding that it hints to 40% of jobs being re-advertised… Surely that could also be an indication that the AOC jobs website is ineffective as an advertising medium, or perhaps it is highly effective and 20% more jobs would be have to be readvertised if posted elsewhere.
And that’s before we even take a step toward the philosophical bog of semantic entanglement that flows from applying LLM in the analysis of descriptive text. Opinion heaped on opinion, shrouded in transparency.
It isn’t just teaching staff who are underpaid in FE. So are the support and administrative staff. Are we in this together or not?