Pay is not the only factor. One other is workload, with objective and subjective measurements involved. The most obvious objective factors are class sizes and scheduled hours. A class of 25 will involve less preparation and correction than a class of 30. A teaching load of 18 hours a week (the Victorian high school standard in the 1980s) will involve less work than one of 20 hours. A time allowance – deduction from class teaching - for English coordination of five periods will involve less overall work than one of three periods. A requirement to attend two meetings a week will be less demanding than one to attend three meetings a week. A class size maximum of 25 students has been the ideal since the 1970s, when it was enforced in union high schools, and since the 1980s throughout the state when it became the legally required standard. In technical schools, the maximum was 20. Maximum teaching loads have varied over the past 36 years, but the details do not need enumeration here. The nearest overall measurement of the objective factors is the pupil teacher ratio because class sizes and teaching loads set how many teachers are required for a set number of students.

The primary PTR was 20.3:1 in 1975 (Compilation of Statistics, Education Department of Victoria, 1978) and 15.7:1 in 2009 (DEECD, Summary Statistics 2010). That suggests a significant improvement in the workload of primary teachers over that period of time. In other words, we are employing far more of them now than then apparently to do the same work and cannot be expected to pay them the same relative pay now as we did then.

The secondary PTR was 13.3:1 in 1975 (Compilation of Statistics, Education Department of Victoria, 1978) and 11.9:1 in 2009 (DEECD, Summary Statistics 2010). That suggests some improvement in the workload of secondary teachers over that period of time, though nowhere near as significant as with primary teachers, though that improvement is not one in relation to 1981, when the secondary PTR was 10.9:1 or 1992 when it was 10.8:1.

However, the figures do not tell the whole story because today’s PTR contains teachers performing functions that schools did not perform decades ago. We now have careers teachers doing a job that once was not done in schools. We have student welfare coordinators doing a job that once was not done in schools. We have integration teachers doing a job that once was not done in mainstream schools. We have Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning coordinators doing a job that once was not done in schools. It is not possible to quantify these new positions, except to say that they are in the hundreds as they are typical in almost all secondary schools.

It could be argued that the significant increase in primary staffing and the small increase in secondary staffing have been paid for by a relative pay cut for both primary and secondary teachers, with the secondary teachers coming out of it all much worse off. But the top unpromoted primary teachers have had a 30 per cent relative pay cut for a 23 per cent cut to the PTR, while secondary teachers have had a 30 per cent relative pay cut for an 11 per cent cut to the PTR. In neither case does the pay cut match the PTR cut.

That’s not the end of the matter either. The statistics show an improvement in the PTR, which should mean a reduction on workload. However, teachers now do things that they did not have to do 36 years ago. Reports used to be a single sheet for all the subjects of one student. Now there is a page for every subject for every student. Performance reviews were non-existent. Now, hundreds of thousands for hours throughout the state goes into them, for both the teacher being reviewed and the teacher doing the reviewing. There is far more paperwork.

In fact the average teacher workload increased from 44.5 hours a week in 1984 to 50 hours in 1992 (VSTA News, May 6, 1993).

John, under the model of funding I would support, each student would have a fixed amount attached to them, regardless of whether they go to a public or private school. However, for that to work, there has to be the freedom such a voucher model brings with it, and which advocates like yourself and the author of this article likely oppose. Parents must be free to move there kids to any school they wish, and schools should be run as independent entities, who should not expect (nor receive) any funding from the government outside of this amount attached to each students. That way bad schools will lose students, and be forced to close, while good schools will prosper, expand, and take over the buildings of the old schools, bringing the new and different curricula and teaching philosophy that made them successful in the first place. The problem is that public school defenders want equal funding, regardless of success. That's stupid. Merit should be rewarded, but the current system is totally opposed to such merit based concepts. I've made a number of posts about this, maybe you can go back and read them, while I get to Chris.

Chris, your selective reply belies your claimed willingness to respond to the issues people are actually discussing here. Your posts are just coherent enough to merit a proper response however, and rather than start at the beginning, I'm going to start with what I consider to be the most dishonest parts of your reply.

Firstly, your use of statistics neatly underlines your intellectual dishonesty/ignorance. You claim the average % rank of those entering as teachers fell (from 74 to 61, in the arbitrarily chosen time frame of 1983 to 2003). Firstly, I doubt that is true, and welcome a reputable study to support it. A simple google search shows us that the entrance scores today to get into a B.Education which certifies you to teach in secondary schooling ranges from 80 (or higher) at Sydney (http://sydney.edu.au/education_social_work/future_students/careers/uai_cutoff.shtml), to more modest numbers like 70+. Even in extremely low ranked universities like the ACU, the entry scores for even a primary Bachelor of Education are no lower than 57.55 and 59, and that's only for the Canberra and Ballarat campus, where they don't expect to be able to attract students. In the others it's much higher (75-85). http://www.acu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/238399/05Course_cut-offs_for_09-10.pdf
It's just an obviously inaccurate claim. Even La Trobe tends to require a score well over 60. I'm not sure if you're basing this on some kind of study that includes pre-school teachers, primary school teachers, etc (though why would you, that's not what is being discussed here), but it's obvious you're wrong. The timeframe is also either dishonest or irrelevant (I wouldn't mind a reference to it btw), in choosing 1983 and 2003 as the point of comparison. Wouldn't a more helpful period be the 70's (the period you're using for your argument) and today? I'd also like to know if your study is for public school teachers only, which seems impossible since the entry scores are too high.

If the 61 average is true it would indicate that score drops for educational degrees occurred much earlier than (claimed) salary drops, which again shows your causation to be faulty. I've looked back through recent years, and it's clear that current scores would be dragging that 61 ATAR number up, not down, since most ATAR requirements for a bachelor of education are substantially higher than 61.

"There is one dominant employer of teachers in each state, the education department. It knows it can allow teacher pay to fall relative to the pay of other groups and still get teachers."
Yes, and that's why we should break this uncompetitive monopoly, a subject you continue to remain silent on. Private schooling is helping of course, but there needs to be a way to make public schools work to improve too, which every teacher (no doubt including yourself) seems opposed to.

While it's not really relevant to the matters under discussion, your bizarre attempt to us PTR to assert an improved workload by teachers is also disingenuous. An incompetent teacher with 32 students in their class will teach much the same as if they had 27 students in their class, the difference being an extra 5 minutes each night using a red pen to tick/cross the answers on a recycled worksheet from the Dept of Education. I am far more moved to look at failing test scores, or the exodus from public schools, than such specious causation (by that logic the coach of my local soccer team now works harder than he did 10 years ago, because ten years ago he only had 11 players in the team, and now he has 15... this is nonsense logic).

Like any union, the AEU is totally opposed to performance based measures, and to the extent they exist, they're done internally, and are meaningless. They oppose benchmarks to measure failure or success, and the Dept of Education limits severely the sorts of data that is available to the public about school performance.

"In fact the average teacher workload increased from 44.5 hours a week in 1984 to 50 hours in 1992 (VSTA News, May 6, 1993)"
This is another example of a meaningless and dubious statistic... why on earth is the base timeframe from 84-92, when that isn't the period your argument identifies as problematic? It's merely because it suits your argument... and anyway, considering the source I sneer at it, since working hours are basically the same. Do other professions not put in time after normal working hours when required? Of course they do.

But more than these problems, your overarching point is still dodging the real issues. You've basically elected to ignore longweekend rather than engage with the issues people here have talked about. You claim that you're arguing only for a "relative cut", but when that cut isn't real, only relative to something unrelated, it's not an intelligent analysis. It's like me saying NFL players salaries are lower than they were 40 years ago, compared to NBA players. That doesn't begin to answer the question of why the millions of dollars NFL players make is not adequate. If the only point you're making is that (using an arbitrary measurement, applied in an unscientific way that ignores normal economic measures) teacher salaries are lower, you're not making much of an argument. Why were those salaries at the correct level in the first place? You don't attempt to answer this and many other questions, so you don't get taken seriously.