Getting paid as a teacher is a fairly complicated affair. There are up to 27 points on the pay scale and you start off on a different point of the payscale depending on different factors. To complicate things further, if you qualified after 2011, you are on a different payscale which is less than the ones who worked before 2011. After that you get extra pay if you have particular qualifications such as a Masters degree (unless you qualified after 2011 and you get nothing.)
If you have a promoted post, you also get another allowance. Then there’s weird random allowances:
| Teaching Through Irish Allowance* | €1,583 |
| Gaeltacht Allowance* | €3,063 |
| Island Allowance* | €1,842 |
| Long Service Allowance (for teachers who have been on the top point of the scale for 10 years) | €2,324 |
| Secure Unit Allowance/Disturbed Adolescent Allowance | €2,195 |
| Visit Teaching Allowance | €8,520 |
The asterisk means, yes you guessed it, if you qualified after 2011, you don’t get it.
My idea would be to simplify the pay scale. The most obvious first step is to ensure there isn’t two separate pay scales depending on when one qualifies. That’s the obvious one.
However, we also need to look at the pay scale of second level schools and ensure the pay scales are no different again.
I’d also suggest we need to simplify our pay scale. 25-27 points is too many. Surely it would be better to just average it out over a career and simply have a standard wage for being a teacher? Maybe there is merit in incentivising teachers to stay in the job in order to earn more money every year.
I also think we need to revisit the allowances for principals and deputy principals and include benchmarking in them and also ensure that they are the same as second level principals. One also has to as the question as to whether the principal/deputy principal should be an allowance or a job in itself?
