Anth, from what I understand of the current Victorian system at any rate, that sort of system is already happening (with the extra contracts like my Mum had as 'over and aboves', although as far as I know, there are only four 'grades'. I'm not sure if creating more will help necessarily, at least, not without significantly higher budgets allocated to education. But thats not to say its a bad idea! I think it has potential, but getting more $$ into education "for those damn teachers and their bloody unions" is unlikely to be politically palatable, I would think?

For what its worth, I think that to some extent, the fact that many people actively choose teaching over other courses they could do shows that the right people are choosing the job. Sure, there are some who throught it would be a "good fallback" job, or "eh, at least the holidays are good" position, but most of the teachers who taught me (not so long ago), and who I'm familiar with through my family have been very dedicated, and have kept with the profession due to a genuine passion for it, rather than the conditions, good or bad

Other avenues might differ, but I'm not sure the Dip. Ed. necessarily attracts people who lack aptitude since they all had to get into harder courses (including higher degrees) before the Dip. Ed.

I think it's also a little misleading to talk about cut off scores for courses anyway. My understanding of them is that they're largely to do with supply and demand, ie. that there are limited places that are allocated to the highest ranked people who apply for them. If this is correct, then it is essentially a popularity contest between courses, based on beliefs (prestige, earning capacity, etc.) held by the applicants. In this respect, certain courses attracting the apt may become a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the difficulty of the courses or the requirement of apt applicants.

Anyhow, my own experiences within education have led me to the following observations:

1) Primary school teachers are not necessarily very good at mathematics,
2) Most high school teachers are good at their own areas, but not in others,
3) A lot of the job is learnt on the job,
4) Below the last couple of years of school, it's probably reasonably easy for any intelligent person to teach almost any subject,
5) A lot of the classroom process is less about teaching and more about baby-sitting and dealing with bad behaviour.

I'm ambivalent about the profession. I have a rapport with many of my students and a lot of them do learn, which is really fulfilling. On the other hand, my friend works night shift in a supermarket, doesn't put up with rudeness, doesn't have to pretend he's something else (ie. not a baby-sitter/crowd controller), and earns the same as I do. I know now what teaching is and isn't, and at the end of this year, it won't be for me. Maybe the profession will have lost something, maybe it won't have.

I read the article with a lot of interest - I have a law degree (first class hons - no less) and have been thinking of entering teaching. Teachers play such a significant role in our children's lives. My own life was turned around by a very excellent teacher in highschool.

So I made enquiries about being a teacher. In WA, you are required to do a rural posting as a first year teacher in order to qualify for permanency. With a young family, a high mortgage, etc relocation to the bush is not an option for me. I was very disheartened to be told that there was no way around this.

It made me wonder whether this inflexible requirement puts off other post-grad aspirant teachers.

Many teachers cannot spell, communicate clearly or think for themselves. They conform to the latest fads. It is obvious that fewer people of high ability and integrity join the profession.

I have 28 years experience of school leadership positions in Victoria (including two periods as an acting vice principal). I started teaching in 1974 with higher pay than beginning teachers get in today's much wealthier society, when school principals respected the professional judgement of their staffs, when we had the freedom to exercise our skill in the interest of actual teaching, when the whole concept of performance pay would have been rightly laughed at, when we were not bogged down in jargonistic madness.

Teachers have suffered a dramatic drop in pay over the last thirty years while helping to create the prosperity that the whole nation enjoys. In 1975, a beginning teacher was paid 118.8 percent of male average ordinary time earnings. That equates to $65,379 as of January this year. A beginning teacher is now paid $44,783 - a relative cut of $20,596!

After seven years a teacher reached the top of the scale and was paid 166.6 per cent of the average. That would be $91,684 today, compared with an actual rate of $56,072 - a relative cut of $35,612. The new top level, which takes eleven years to reach, is only $63,202 - a relative cut of $28,482. A Senior Teacher in 1975 was paid 189.8 per cent of the average. That would be $104,452 for the equivalent Leading Teacher today, who actually gets $76,383 - a relative cut of $28,069.

Teachers' unions have been ineffective in protecting their members because too many teachers are unwilling to act with solidarity with their colleagues in the profession. When the committed teachers take industrial action to support their profession and the children they teach, there a plenty of others sitting back in schools ready to take the benefits at no cost to themselves. Thus the conditions which used to protect us have gone, and the resultant exploitation certainly discourages independent-minded people from remaining in teaching.

Pay rates are not the only factor in discouraging people of ability from joining the teaching profession. Political attacks have played their part too. Until the Liberals won power in 1992, progression through the ordinary pay scale was efficiently automatic, though promotion required demonstration of merit (in different ways at different times).

Once the Liberals ruled the state, however, they devised laughably inefficient so-called performance-based procedures as command and control devices to put teachers under the thumb and advance conformists and careerists. These included more power for compliant principals, phoney career restructures, annual reviews, performance plans, performance bonuses, limited tenure promotion and short-term contracts. Education moved beyond satire.

Teachers were also subject to a factless campaign of abuse in the press and on talkback radio. Anyone with ability aspiring to be a teacher would have been discouraged by the toxic environment created by the government of the time and its cheerleaders.

Getting rid of the Liberals in 1999 allowed the Labor government to stop the rot in lots of ways: e.g., classes of 21 in prep to grade 2, the return of history after the Liberals' abomination of SOSE, a reporting system which dropped vague terms like 'beginning', 'consolidating' and 'established' and which now explicitly states the level a child is achieving (a year 8 student achieving grade 6 standard will have that clearly reported to parents).

But we are still waiting for the decent conditions of the 1980s to return to secondary schools; i.e., a maximum teaching load of 18 hours, a maximum of 25 students in a class, a minimum time allowance pool for organisational duties of an hour and a half per teacher. We are also still waiting for the secondary pupil-teacher ratio of 10.9:1 provided by the Thompson Liberal government in 1981 to come back. (That was before the Liberals became complete teacher-bashers.)

When decent conditions return, more able people will be willing to commit themselves to the profession of teaching.