ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a summary of the Whitley system with its Burnham variant, followed by a discussion of what happened to pay when Burnham failed. It deals with long-term trends in Teachers’ pay and the basis for any future national and local pay system. The determination of Teachers’ pay levels, structures and make-up remains one of the central issues which dominates the power and conflict relations within the education system. One consequence of the forced competition between schools and the abandonment, de facto, of national pay setting is that school is set against school and teacher against teacher in a free market rumpus which attacks the root of unity and therefore undermines the strength in numbers needed for national collective bargaining. The government can blame pay review bodies for wrong-headed arguments and the Review Bodies can blame government for inadequate funding, but both survive and there is no national industrial action over pay by teachers.
