Make teaching in England more “intellectually attractive” says OECD’s Andreas Schleicher

Teaching in England needs to be made more “intellectually attractive” to increase competition for entry to the profession, the face of the world’s best-known international testing study has said.

Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said that teachers in England were “reasonably” well-paid. But he suggested that on other measures of job satisfaction, they fared less well.

He singled out Finland as a nation where it appeared that the profession was viewed as more intellectually attractive, as evidenced by the very high number of applications for teacher education, despite salary levels which were comparable to England’s.

Schleicher, whose organisation runs the “PISA” (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests of 15-year-olds every three years, was giving a UK-focused talk as part of the launch of this year’s OECD “Education at a Glance”, a weighty volume of global comparison data, despite its name.

He presented OECD slides (viewable here) which showed UK teachers towards the top end of an international league table for teacher pay, when compared to the average earnings of university-educated employees in each country, and with Finland among those nations with comparable figures on this measure.