Other say that education spending has doubled over the last 20 years (“Marking teachers”, The Sunday Age, 27/10/2013), but undoing that doubling shows how pointless that claim is.

We could do that by cutting teacher salaries by 50 per cent (i.e., to $46,779 for the top classroom level in Victoria and $30,667 for a beginning teacher) or by increasing the maximum class size by 100 per cent (i.e., to 50 students in a secondary school), or by increasing teaching loads by 100 per cent (i.e., to 45 hours a week in a primary school), or by some combination, and thus drive the best people out of teaching into better paid and less demanding jobs.

It ought to be obvious that spending has to increase to keep up with the increased number of students and to allow teachers to share in the rising prosperity that they have helped create. Otherwise, able people would leave teaching and the students’ achievement levels would not just plateau, but plummet.

A sub-division 14 teacher (the top unpromoted sub-division, automatically reached after seven years) was paid $11,400 ($75,136 in 2011 dollars) in 1975 (The Secondary Teacher, No. 4, May, 1981). A teacher with seven years’ experience was paid $69,946 in 2011. That was $5,190 (6.9 per cent) less then than 36 earlier. However, a teacher was paid an additional 21 per cent of salary into superannuation, giving a notional salary package of $90,915 in 1975. A teacher was paid an additional 9 per cent of salary into superannuation in 2011, giving a total salary package of $76,241 in 2011. That is $14,764 (16.1 per cent) less.