In my last post I argued that people’s contributions can’t always be calculated and added up. That week there were two stories in the press – one about the value of migrants and the other about the value of housework that made me think that the attempts being made to put a figure on how much housework or migrants’ work contribute to an economy were inadequate. I felt that the incalculable worthiness of people too needs to be recognised.

I still hold by what I said there but the teachers' strike on April 24^th made me wonder when and what kinds of calculations might be important, even necessary.

And this is why.

Ed Balls, the schools secretary wrote in an article Why Britain has the best teachers ever on Tuesday October 23, 2007 :

The best teachers show children and young people a world they never knew existed. They open doors of opportunity and inspire a lifelong love of learning.

I hope everyone can look back on at least one teacher who really made a difference to them. We all want our children to be taught by people who not only help them to learn and progress, but also make a real difference to their lives and aspirations.

He offers a ringing endorsement to the teaching profession. He recounts, if you like, their incalculable worthiness.

However, at least according to the National Union of Teachers (NUT), this worthiness definitely remains uncalculated in the current pay offer that the government has made to teachers. At 2.45% it is well below the retail price index of 4.1%. The NUT therefore calculates that their wage increases are well below the inflation rate. They see this not only as a mark of Government failure to reward teachers with appropriate pay increases but also as signalling the wider worth given to teaching. Poor pay leads to a feeling of unworthiness among teachers and can result in falling standards amongst those who are drawn into the profession. In short, unless teachers are paid as if they are the best, the ‘best’ will shun teaching.

At the heart of this issue is an interesting paradox. Ed Balls clearly values teachers but he does not (at least according to the NUT) place an appropriate financial value on their contributions. The teachers ask for, what they consider, rightful financial remuneration – the incalculable worthiness recognised in Ed Balls’ speech seems to be inadequate. They want appropriate commensuration for their work.

Perhaps, it is worth stopping off here to explore a little what exactly we mean by commensuration. Commensuration is the process by which different qualities are made comparable by quantifying them. Of course, this process of quantification is inherently a way of ascribing value. It is not an end point but part of a system whereby you have some expectations about the contributions that might be made by teachers.

Commensuration as a practice always simplifies complex realities by eliminating heterogeneity and selecting comparable elements. It fixes, through the process of revelation, particular aspects of their existence as valuable, while obscuring others. For Plato, this process of simplification made it easier to navigate the world. It was a necessary part of rational living as it would remove passion and emotion from processes by which we value goods or people. It would stabilize our decision making by giving less room for subjective variations in what we value. His student, Aristotle, on the other hand, thought that too much was lost in this process of simplification. Difference and uniqueness and valuing things for their own sake, were, for him, the qualities that made us ethical humans.

Irrespective of whether we support Plato’s viewpoint or Aristotle’s, the value of a teacher’s labour it appears has already been calculated. The main pay scale varies across 6 bands while the upper pay scale has three bands. Progression in the main pay scale is related to years of work while progression in the upper pay scale is based on the discretion of the governing body. The value of the teacher will be assessed by school governing bodies, in line with local priorities. In addition teachers can also apply for Teaching and Learning Responsibility Allowance, if they take up a responsibility beyond that required by others. And then there are the Advanced Skills Teachers with their own 18 point pay spine; Excellent Teachers with their salary scheme; and the Leadership group which includes head teachers and other school leaders who have a 43 point pay scale. Teachers can also apply for Performance Related Pay and some teachers will be eligible for special allowances for teaching in London.

A teacher.
[Image ©: copyright photos.com]

By the time I waded through these ‘differences’ in how teachers’ pay is calculated and these marks of recognition of uniqueness, simplicity began to look decidedly appealing! Jokes apart, the recognition of what matters in a particular context is something to be lauded. Teachers may (in my mind rightly) object to the way in which they have been transferred from the old scale to the new, without pay protection, leading to a reduction of recognition of certain tasks that they do and an erasure of the value of others but the many different scales does suggest the difficulties in equating qualitatively different types of work undertaken under different conditions. So the calculation of value seems, in this case, to have been done with an eye on the diversity of conditions in which teachers work

However, what is at stake here is not just the recognition of differences between teachers but also that between teachers and other workers in the economy. Why do teachers, who are given charge of shaping a whole generation for a minimum of 12 years, get paid so much less than some other professionals? What does this tell students about respect and value? What is the metric being used to calculate value? And how does this compare with how other people’s work is valued and measured? This is where recalculation seems to be necessary and important, given the society in which we live. Perhaps Ed Balls needs to go back to school for some lessons on calculating and rewarding value!

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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Books by Giddens.
[Photo by Sue Hemmings,
© copyright Open University]

I first came across Anthony Giddens when I was an undergraduate at Bath, some time in what a six year old of my acquaintance insists were ‘the olden days’. It’s interesting the way in which we parcel up time – periodising both our personal biographies and societies as a whole. For me time and place stand for whole webs of social and cultural connections. The Bath years – when Ian Dury and the Blockheads were asserting that sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock and roll were all your brain and body needed and pleasant as they all were I found that actually studying for my degree also gave another kind of pleasure and freedom.

So I came to Giddens at some point in late, high or possibly reflexive modernity; mature capitalism, the zenith of the post-war settlement or the apogee and its collapse. Which is another way of saying that I was lucky as the first from a ‘respectable working class’ family which had maybe just clawed its way into the ‘lower middle class’ to benefit from a welfare sate which had educated me for free and was now sending me off to University with no thought of paying fees and with a grant which – topped up by £50 a term by my parents – was just enough with a little bit of waitressing and office temping through the holidays to get by.

My first Giddens was The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies and the second  Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: an analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. For my generation of sociologists these are the Big Three, the trinity of my discipline’s foundational myth. The short introductory account would go that Marx offers us the historical, determinist account, man (yes, I do mean man) as product of his social conditions, subject of and to a history not of our own making; Durkheim the proto –functionalist concerned not with subjective experience but with the thing-like quality of social facts enduring and predictable regardless of which individuals occupy them; Weber who in the early years of the century struggled with the concerns of structure and meaning whilst, we were told, locked in a debate with Marx’s ghost - but then in the mid 70s who wasn’t.

The books have moved from house to house with me but probably haven’t been used for over a decade. Looking today at books which proceed from Marx’s contribution is like visiting another time, a time before post-structuralism, post-modernism and the cultural turn. Equally striking though is the extent to which some very contemporary concerns figure - the narrative of sociology’s development as a modernist account of modernity, debates around structure and agency , the future of social democracy, structuration and the critique of totalising thought are all here.

Both books deal with the interpretation, reinterpretation, misunderstanding, appropriation and misappropriation of ideas from an earlier time. Reading them again today I am very aware of how books can change over time. On the one hand I am taken back to an original reading from a different time and place whilst on the other very aware of how differently I am viewing them through older eyes in the context of a changed social world.

Related links:

• Anthony Giddens gives the 2007 Pavis Lecture - you can listen online
• For a guide to Giddens' work, explore our brief biography

[Image: books by Giddens by Sue Hemmings. © copyright Open University]

About the author

Sue Hemmings is a Social Science Staff Tutor, based in the Cambridge office of the Open University. She spends a lot of time encouraging students to explore issues of social structure, social change, identity and globalisation.

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Blogging about

Indian School

A fast-paced documentary series looks at education in Pune, one of the world’s fastest growing cities: Indian School.

Summer in the city, the temperature’s 40 degrees, and as always in India the heat is on. The fever brought about by exams is nothing that can be sated by any ordinary medicine. The only thing that works is success and that success is hard-earned. The pressure generated by the exams, and all that they represent for the future, cuts across everyone. Parents are driven, children are burdened, and life is surreal while the fever rages.

The teachers, in fact, are a calming influence and generally enable the students through encouragement and counselling.

Success means the opportunity of even harder work in a prestigious college, and a life full of promise tantalisingly close, like an apparition on the horizon. Fail and there’s the promise of oblivion in a second-class non-competitive education system.

The children, with a healthy dose of pragmatism, accept this is their fate and that for 10 years they’ve been preparing for this life-changing pivotal moment. In the UK there are also similar pressures, but it seems like there are no second chances in India and the attitude of 'better luck next time' doesn’t even enter the thinking.

Four thousand Indian children commit suicide every year due to education pressure. Is this a price that’s worth paying? Or does the fear of economic hardship justify this hyper intense approach, because ’survival of the fittest’ will ensure the survival of the country? What do you think?

Find out more:

• School Standards: time for debate?
• Why is schooling failing in the 'new' India?
• The Changing Face of the Teaching Profession

About the author

Billy Khokhar is an assistant director with the Open University, and an expert on cultural awareness and diversity. Billy used to be a teacher, and is interested in how education in India compares and contrasts with the UK.

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