Page 5 - IDEA Studie 09 2019 Platy ceskych ucitelu

Study 9/2019
Czech teachers’ pay: a new hope
auguSt 2019
Daniel Münich, VlaDiMír SMolka2
Summary
• Teachers’ pay has long been lower in the Czech Republic than in almost all the other most economically developed countries. That is a natural consequence of the fact that the Czech Republic spends around one third less of its gross domestic product (GDP) on regional schooling than is usual in developed countries.
• If Czech teachers’ average monthly salary was, relative to the salaries of other tertiary educated employees in the Czech Republic in 2018, comparable to the equivalent ratio in EU countries on average or in Finland or Germany, it should stand at around 53,000 or 56,000 CZK rather than the current 36,000 CZK.
• Relative to the average salary in the national economy, average teachers’ salaries rose year on year in 2018 by 2.9 percentage points to nearly 115%. Nevertheless, this only marked a return to the levels of 2008, i.e. ten years ago, prior to the global financial crisis. Teachers’ salaries were raised substantially in 2017-2018, but at the same time salaries for all tertiary educated employees rose substantially across the whole public sector. The raise in teachers’ salaries was thus hardly ahead of the game.
• In relative terms, teachers at the beginning of their careers in the under 30 age bracket are the best paid. In 2018, ‘only’ 69% of non-teachers in this age group received higher salaries than their teacher peers (tertiary educated, same age and gender in the same region). Next best is the situation among the oldest teachers, in the 50-59 and 60+ age brackets. Teachers in the middle age bracket, 30-49 years, receive the worst pay in relative terms: 80% of demographically equivalent employees earn more than the teachers’ average salary.
2 We are grateful to the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs for their permission to use the ISPV data, which is collected and administered by TREXIMA spol. s r. o. The authors would further like to thank Štěpán Jurajda for his valuable comments on the working version of this text. Any ambiguities or errors are the authors’ own, as are all opinions expressed in the study. The study was produced as part of and with the support of the Czech Academy of Sciences’ AV21 Strategy and is based on research carried out within Czech Science Foundation project GA ČR P402/12/G130.
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