Meritocracy in language schools – a utopia?
On the occasion of my 20th birthday as a teacher, I started to make a mental inventory of the most relevant and/or mind-forming experiences of my professional life. After a list of some ‘bests’ (see article here), today I’d like to talk about meritocracy in language schools.
Premise: Meritocracy here doesn’t consider a political system in Michael Young’s sense or the idea that ‘everyone has the right to express their opinions’ but only ‘those opinions are listened to and decisions are then made based on those that are deemed the best’ (read Wired article HERE). Meritocracy in this reading means a (financial and contractual) reward system based on merits.
Background
Being a native Hungarian speaker and getting most of my education in German-speaking schools, my idea of work and behaviour is about following rules, working hard, defending my values and finding solutions for my problems (instead of asking for help). I’ve been raised to believe in gaining success and respect through hard work.
This applies to my attitude as an examiner: Before a Cambridge Speaking Session, I – as many of my colleagues – insist on not receiving any additional information about the candidates. Examiners are human beings, they might evaluate some students higher because they are a dear colleague’s students or lower because they come from a certain school. Fairness and equal chances mean that students need to get the mark they really deserve, they need to be evaluated based on their merits.
As clear as it sounds, this strong belief in meritocracy was put to the test in many exam sessions. In one of the first exam sessions I invigilated in Sicily, I was offered up to 700 euro in exchange for the answers by one candidate. When I refused, the gentleman stood up and threatened me that he would get me fired and left the room. I didn’t lose my job, but I understood that some people really believe they can get what they want because they have wealth or power. However, the reason why cheating upsets examiners/invigilators is not really that cheaters receive undeserved advantages, but the fact that other students who studied and worked hard might not get the result they aimed at. Cheating makes their efforts useless and ridiculous. Nepotism – extended to a wide circle of friends and their friends – as well as misuse of power and financial means are a type of cheating.
So, what about schools? Are teachers promoted and rewarded for good work? Is language teaching a merit-based field? Well, not in my experience.
In brackets: Recently, I’ve watched a video about why houses and apartments are on sale for one euro in Italy. The speaker named the lack of meritocracy at state but also company levels as one of the biggest problems in Italy: talented and skilled people might not get a decent job, because they don’t know ‘the right people’ and might instead watch that an unskilled and often under-qualified counterpart climb the ladder. This leads to the phenomenon that people – and among them many young, talented, qualified and skilled professionals – simply leave the country – abandoning these real estates.
As a teacher, I’ve prepared many outstanding people for exams and a future abroad. Most of them are still far from Italy. However, as much as I feel sorry for them leaving, I realise that a proper reward system, where the ones who work hard and smart get promoted, does not exist in Italy. As I understand, it’s legally impossible, at least for teachers. In their case, schools offer a short-term contract (usually from October to May) with a fixed payment for a certain number of teaching hours. Most of them realise around December that they have fallen behind with their hours and have to work harder in the remaining months. This can lead to eternal days (availability for lessons from 8am to 9pm) and an unbearable weekly number of lessons. This directly affects the quality of teaching and so the quality of the school.
In addition to this, the best teachers get all the challenging courses and work up to their contracted hours, while their less motivated/less talented colleagues will still get the same payment for working a much easier schedule. Schools cannot pay less than stated in the contract. So, as a contradiction, good teachers get penalised for being ‘jolly-jokers’ for schools. This leads to high fluctuation in teaching staff and this always shows a low didactic level.
Merit-based collaboration: an example
Things are a bit different outside Italy, where teachers are free-lance and work for a school without any guarantees. There, a merit-based management can reign. Let me give you an example: the first language school, where I started to work as a free-lance language teacher in 2003, adopted a really interesting meritocratic approach.
They invented a 5-scale system with two aspects. Firstly, teachers were ordered into categories: they could go from T1 (not particularly requested) to T5 (senior teacher). Newbies started in category T3 (in the middle) and could work their way up or down to a higher or lower level. Hourly wages depended on the teacher’s category. So, a T1 teacher was paid, for example, 10M (let’s say M = monopoly) an hour for a General language course, while a T5 teacher earned 50M an hour for the same type of course. You started at level T3 as a compromise and earned 30M an hour which was slightly below private lesson prices.
Secondly, contracts varied also for the type of courses, so payments were higher for special courses (business language or exam preparation) and lower for ‘easy’ courses.
Mind, that the payment of a T4-5 was higher than what private teachers could ask for, so no successful teacher considered leaving the school.
Here’s a rough scheme of the system (mind that all prices are only indicative):
How could you get to a higher or lower level?
To get promoted, you needed:
- to work for some considerable time for the school (T4 were 2-3 years at the school, T5 spent 4-5 years and above with the institute);
- your students had to re-enroll onto the next course with you: I remember courses that started at A1 level and were consistent up to C1 with the same teacher. They came back every year to learn with that teacher. Obviously, target-courses (e.g. exam preparation) were not considered. If you could keep a minimum of 4 students in all your classes, you were shortlisted for promotion.
- you also had to show your commitment to the school by showing up at staff meetings (which were organised twice a year and participation was not paid) and having initiatives (e.g. contributing to the teacher’s resource bank with worksheets and/or activity ideas).
- Last but not least, students’ feedback was taken seriously and used reasonably. First of all, teachers had to ask their students for anonymous written feedback in one of their final lessons. Following this, they had to analyse all questionnaires and summarise the results about their work and the school on a separate form. This process was extremely useful, because teachers – and their head teachers who then checked these forms – could see whether a teacher divided skill practice equally (listening, speaking, writing, reading), balanced social forms (pair-work, group-work, frontal teaching or open-class conversation), used proper and suitable materials, corrected homework assignments in reasonable times, etc.
Teachers were informed about their category update if there was any change. If someone was promoted, they celebrated, if someone was demoted, their head-teacher organised a training session for them.
Every time the school had to find a teacher for a course, they worked their way from T5 to T1. T5 teachers got more proposals, could choose the best courses, while T1 teachers got only contracts that nobody else could or would take, so they either changed their approach, preparation or attitude and started to work smarter or they eventually left the school. This was a natural quality cleaning/fixing process.
The school could make sure this way that teachers do not use the school as a jump board, just to get known and then take their students private: it wouldn’t have been worth it for T4-5 teachers and it would never have worked for T1-2-3 teachers.
This system was a practical and really motivating way to make teachers engage with the institute, work well and feel rewarded. A win-win situation for everyone.
Is it impossible to apply the same approach in Italy?
My previous CEO refused this reward-system, because according to him, teachers from the UK or Ireland (or even farther) would not come to Sicily without any guarantees. I have to say, he is right. A foreign teacher will never want to go free-lance in a completely new environment.
However, many of the schools in town work with local teachers, teachers who settled down and want to work locally. Therefore, my proposal would be a combination of the old and new system:
Year 1: A school needs a year to get to know a teacher. Culture shock is a relevant factor to consider, many teachers simply leave after some months spent in chaotic traffic and with public school bureaucracy. In order to convince new teachers to come to Italy, the old fixed-hour average wage system could work.
Year 2: After one year, teachers show commitment by coming back for the next school year and schools have their first idea about a teacher’s abilities. So they could start applying the differentiation: every second-year teacher could be a T3 category and could have a payment list for the different types of courses. The average payment for a T3 full-time teacher should be the same (or similar) as a first-year full-time contract.
Year 3-4: These would be the first years, when teachers could be promoted to T4 and get higher hourly wages. This way, they could start earning well and they are also the engine behind enrolment: students come back for them. In these 2 years, schools could also provide extra training for underachieving teachers or simply not offer any contracts to them.
Year 5-6: Schools could establish their core-staff with senior teachers (T5) and continue working with younger colleagues. Peer-observation, peer-tutorial, peer-training might work well in order to ease the Director of Studies’s workload. Larger schools might work with a head-teacher team (in the above described school, there were 3 head-teachers – one chief and two vice – and they had on average 7-7 teachers to supervise).
Two changes were definitely to make in the current system:
- Students should have the possibility to choose a teacher.
- Course payments ought to be differentiated: teachers should not get the same payment for a 40-student off-site public school course as for an on-site OTO (one-to-one) course.
Feel free to comment and add your ideas or express your concerns. This is an important issue to address and a huge change to make on the Italian language-teaching market. It’s worth the time discussing.
NB: This article was originally published on Linkedin on 14th September 2023 (see original post here).
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