Competition for private and state school teachers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Executive Summary Private schools have historically played an important role in the reproduction of the ruling classes in Britain. They continue to do so, but there is surprisingly little modern research as to how these schools impinge on the economy. In this paper we analyse the role of independent schools in the teachers’ labour market. Teacher shortages in maintained schools are a recurring problem. A potentially relevant factor that has arisen in recent years is rising competition in the teachers’ labour market from independent schools. There has been a huge increase in the demand for education and in particular a rising willingness of the better-off to pay for academic credentials. The fees that better-off parents are prepared to pay for private educational advantage have more than doubled in real terms over the last twenty years, and the average cost of a full private education for a child in day school now reaches six figures, and approximately a quarter of a million pounds for a boarder. The nominal fees have risen by 6% or more every year since 2000. These incomes have given independent schools the means to deploy ever more teaching staff per pupil. We examine the changing quantity and quality of teaching staff in the independent sector, relative to that in the state sector, over the past two decades of rising demand for education. We find that independent schools are employing a disproportionate share of teachers in Britain, relative to the number of pupils they educate, and that the gap between the independent and state sector has been increasing. Independent school teachers are more likely than state school teachers to possess post-graduate qualifications, and to be specialists in shortage subjects. Recruitment from the state sector is an especially important source of new teaching staff for independent schools which has been growing over the medium term. The flows into the independent sector of both newly qualified and experienced teachers, trained at the state’s expense, constitute a small though increasing deduction from the supply of new teachers available to state schools. Inter-sectoral flows depend on the attractions of jobs and accordingly we also investigate how working conditions and wages vary between the sectors and over time. Independent school teachers work with fewer pupils and enjoy longer holidays and, in the case of women, shorter weekly hours. The level of job satisfaction over hours and the work itself was higher in private schools in the early to mid 1990s, but there is evidence of some convergence in job satisfaction since then. Among women, pay is lower in the private sector, which we interpret as a compensating differential. For men, there is no significant inter-sectoral difference in pay. However, for both men and women there is evidence of a substantial pay premium for independent-school teachers trained in shortage subjects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".