Why mid-career teachers are also poorly paid

• The 2022 edition of the annual OECD

  Education at a Glance

  report is published on Monday.

  It compares 33 education systems.

• The report shows that mid-career teachers are paid less in France than their OECD colleagues and that their salary progression is slow.

• Éric Charbonnier, education specialist at the OECD, sheds light on this situation, as the social partners start wage negotiations on Monday.

A study that will be particularly scrutinized.

While the Ministry of Education is starting its consultation with the teachers' unions on Monday on the subject of teacher increases, the OECD is releasing its study

.

This shows that the salaries of mid-career French teachers (with 15 years of experience) are lower than the average of their colleagues in OECD countries.

A situation that deciphers for

Éric Charbonnier, education specialist at the OECD.

Your study shows that French secondary school teachers in mid-career earn 16% less than their colleagues in other OECD countries.

How do you explain it?

France has chosen to have a slow career progression for its teachers, like Portugal.

In our country, it takes 35 years of experience for teachers to go from starting salary to the highest salary, compared to 26 years on average in OECD countries.

Conversely, in the United Kingdom, teachers' salaries are rising very quickly, but they also quickly reach the ceiling.

This is due in particular to the very administrative system of our civil service, where salaries evolve according to a scale of points, where salary evolutions are mechanical and where agents are poorly evaluated.

It should be remembered that teachers only have a total of three career interviews, whereas in other OECD countries they are evaluated each year.

You show, however, that previous governments have made some efforts to upgrade them...

There has been a desire to do better for two five-year terms, which has enabled the salaries of mid-career teachers to increase by 4% between 2015 and 2021. But knowing that the salaries of teachers had progressed little over the past 30 years, it hasn't really changed the situation: we live less well in France being a teacher today than thirty years ago.

Both at the beginning of the career and in the middle.

Why are elementary teachers with 15 years of experience even worse off?

In 2020-2021, they earned 19% less than the average of their OECD colleagues.

Their college and high school colleagues receive bonuses (in particular for being a head teacher, for ensuring homework sessions are done, etc.), which is not their case.

They also work less overtime than their high school peers.

Can this situation explain the increase in resignations in National Education in recent years?

On the one hand, yes, because the salaries are not very attractive and some teachers prefer to change jobs to earn a better living.

But the resignations are also due to the poor working conditions of some teachers.

A phenomenon that we also see in Germany, where some resign because they believe that the demands on them are too high.

Hence the importance also, for the French government, of working on teacher well-being.

Negotiations between the social partners start on Monday concerning the increases.

Are the unions right to believe that mid-career teachers will be the turkeys of the stuffing?

From the moment the ministry declares that no more teachers will start with less than 2,000 euros net in 2023, there is good reason to believe that the increase will be greater in percentage for new teachers than for those in mid-career. .

This is already a first step in restoring the attractiveness of the profession.

Mid-career teachers will also receive increases linked to new assignments.

But that does not mean that they will not be further increased during the five-year term.

We must value them and allow them career development.

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