MERITOCRACY IN LANGUAGE SCHOOLS - A UTOPIA?

To mark my twentieth year as a teacher, I've been taking mental stock of the most significant and formative experiences of my professional life. Having already written up a list of some of the "bests" (see the article here), today I'd like to talk about meritocracy in language schools.

Premise

Meritocracy, here, doesn't refer to a political system in Michael Young's sense, nor to the idea that "everyone has the right to express their opinions" — rather, that "those opinions are listened to, and decisions are made based on whichever are judged best" (taken from a former Wired article on LinkedIn, unfortunately, no more available). What I mean by meritocracy in this piece is a financial and contractual reward system based on merit.

Background

As a native Hungarian speaker educated largely within German-speaking schools, my own sense of work and conduct is built around following rules, working hard, standing by my values, and finding my own solutions to problems, rather than asking for help. I was raised to believe that success and respect are earned through hard work.

This shapes my attitude as an examiner too. Before a Cambridge Speaking session, I — like many of my colleagues — insist on receiving no additional information about the candidates beforehand. Examiners are only human: they might unconsciously mark a student more generously because they're a dear colleague's pupil, or more harshly because they come from a particular school. Fairness and equal opportunity mean that students should receive the mark they genuinely deserve, judged purely on merit.

As straightforward as that sounds, this conviction has been tested many times over the years. In one of the first exam sessions I invigilated in Sicily, a candidate offered me up to 700 euros in exchange for the answers. When I refused, he stood up, threatened to have me fired, and stormed out of the room. I didn't lose my job, but I came to understand that some people genuinely believe wealth or power entitles them to whatever they want. What upsets examiners and invigilators about cheating, though, isn't really that the cheat gains an undeserved advantage — it's that other students, the ones who studied and worked hard, might not get the result they'd earned. Cheating makes their effort feel pointless, even absurd. Nepotism — extended to a wide circle of friends and friends of friends — and the misuse of power or money are simply other forms of the same thing.

So what about schools themselves? Are teachers promoted and rewarded for good work? Is language teaching, as a field, genuinely merit-based? In my experience, not really.

In brackets: I recently watched a video explaining why houses and flats are being sold for one euro in parts of Italy. The presenter identified a lack of meritocracy, at both state and company level, as one of the country's biggest problems: talented, skilled people often fail to land decent jobs simply because they don't know "the right people", while watching less skilled, sometimes under-qualified colleagues climb the ladder instead. This is a large part of why so many people — including a great many talented, qualified young professionals — end up leaving the country altogether, abandoning those very properties in the process.

As a teacher, I've prepared many outstanding students for exams and for a future abroad. Most of them are still far from Italy today. And while I feel for them having to leave, I recognise that a genuine reward system — one where hard, smart work leads to promotion — simply doesn't exist in Italian schools. As I understand it, this is largely a legal impossibility, at least for teachers. Schools typically offer short-term contracts (usually October to May) with a fixed payment for a set number of teaching hours. Most teachers realise around December that they've fallen behind on their hours and need to work harder for the rest of the year. This can lead to punishing schedules — availability from 8am to 9pm — and an unsustainable weekly teaching load, which inevitably affects the quality of teaching, and with it, the quality of the school itself.

On top of this, the best teachers tend to be handed all the most demanding courses, working right up to their contracted hours, while less motivated or less capable colleagues receive the exact same pay for a far easier schedule, since schools can't legally pay below the contracted rate. So, paradoxically, good teachers end up penalised for being the school's go-to problem-solvers. This drives high staff turnover, which in turn always shows up as a drop in teaching standards.

Merit-based collaboration: An example

Things look rather different outside Italy, where teachers often work freelance, with no guarantees from the school. There, a genuinely merit-based system can thrive. Let me give you an example: the very first language school I worked for as a freelance teacher, back in 2003, used a genuinely interesting meritocratic model.

They devised a five-tier system built around two factors. First, teachers were placed into categories, ranging from T1 (not particularly requested by students) to T5 (senior teacher: "star teachers"). New teachers started at T3, the middle tier, and could work their way up or down from there. Hourly pay depended on category: a T1 teacher, for instance, might earn 10M an hour for a General English course (let's say M stands for Monopoly money), while a T5 teacher earned 50M an hour for the very same type of course. Starting at T3 was a fair compromise, earning 30M an hour — slightly below typical private-lesson rates.

Second, pay also varied by course type, with higher rates for specialised courses (business English or exam preparation) and lower rates for more general, "easier" courses.

Crucially, T4–T5 pay exceeded what teachers could typically charge working privately, so no successful teacher ever had much reason to leave the school.

Here's a rough outline of the system (note that all figures are purely illustrative):

*ESP = English for Special Purposes (Medical, Legal, Business, etc.)

How could you move up or down a level?

To be promoted, a teacher needed to:

• Put in a considerable stretch of time with the school (T4 typically meant two to three years there; T5, four to five years or more).
• Ability to keep students and make them re-enroll with them for the following course. I remember courses that started at A1 and ran consistently through to C1 with the very same teacher — students would return year after year specifically to study with them. Exam-preparation courses, being goal-specific, weren't counted here. Keeping a minimum of four students across all your classes was enough to be shortlisted for promotion.
• Show genuine commitment to the school, by attending staff meetings (held twice a year, unpaid) and taking initiative — contributing worksheets or activity ideas to the shared teacher resource bank, for instance.
• Have their student feedback taken seriously and used properly. Teachers were required to collect anonymous written feedback from students during one of their final lessons, then analyse every questionnaire and summarise the results, both on their own teaching and on the school, using a separate form. This process proved genuinely useful: it let teachers — and the head teachers who reviewed the forms afterwards — see whether a given teacher balanced the four skills fairly (listening, speaking, writing, reading), varied their social groupings (pair work, group work, whole-class teaching or open discussion), used appropriate materials, and returned marked homework within a reasonable time.

Teachers were informed of any change to their category as it happened. Promotions were celebrated; demotions triggered a training session organised by the head teacher.

Whenever the school needed to find a teacher for a course, they worked their way down from T5 to T1. T5 teachers received the most offers and could pick the best courses, while T1 teachers were left with whatever contracts nobody else wanted — pushing them either to sharpen their approach, preparation and attitude and start working smarter, or eventually to leave the school altogether. It was a natural, self-correcting process for maintaining quality.

This system also protected the school from teachers using it purely as a springboard — building a name for themselves before poaching students into private lessons: it simply wouldn't have been worth it for T4–T5 teachers, and it would never have worked for anyone at T1–T3 either.

All in all, it was a practical, genuinely motivating way to get teachers engaged with the institution, working well, and feeling properly rewarded for it — a win-win for everyone involved.

Is the same approach impossible in Italy?

My previous CEO rejected this kind of reward system outright, arguing that teachers from the UK or Ireland (or further afield) would never come to Sicily without some form of guarantee. And, to be fair, he had a point — a foreign teacher is unlikely to want to go freelance in a completely unfamiliar environment.

That said, many local schools work primarily with teachers who've already settled in the area and want to build a career there. So my proposal would be a hybrid of the old and new systems:

Year 1: A school needs at least a year to get to know a new teacher properly. Culture shock is a real factor too — plenty of teachers simply give up after a few months of chaotic traffic and public-sector bureaucracy. To persuade new teachers to come to Italy at all, the old fixed-hour, flat-wage system still makes sense here.

Year 2: After a year, teachers who return for a second show real commitment, and schools have a first solid impression of their abilities. This is the point to start differentiating: every second-year teacher could be placed at T3, with a set pay scale for different course types. The average pay for a full-time T3 teacher should match, or come close to, a first-year full-time contract.

Years 3–4: These would be the first years in which teachers could be promoted to T4 and start earning higher hourly rates. At this stage, they begin earning properly, and they also start driving enrolment, since students specifically come back for them. During these two years, schools could also offer extra training to underperforming teachers, or simply choose not to renew their contracts.

Years 5–6: Schools could build a core staff of senior (T5) teachers alongside younger colleagues. Peer observation, peer mentoring and peer-led training could work well here too, easing the load on the Director of Studies. Larger schools might operate with a head-teacher team (in the school I described above, there were three head teachers — one chief, two deputies — each overseeing around seven teachers).

Two changes, in particular, would need to happen regardless:

• Students should be able to choose their own teacher.
• Course pay should be properly differentiated: teachers shouldn't be paid the same for a forty-student off-site public school course as for a one-to-one lesson delivered on-site.

Feel free to comment, add your own ideas, or raise any concerns. This is an important issue, and a significant shift for the Italian language-teaching market to make — but one well worth the conversation.

NB: This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 14 September 2023 (see the original post here).