Short lifetime careers (or why teaching should learn from football)

There are a selection of careers that have a shorter lifetime than those the rest of us pursue. And these careers are often the sexy ones we aspired to do when - as I did - you attend, at age eleven, the 'come dressed as what you want to do when you're grown up' party. Firemen, police officers, soldiers, sportsmen and women, models. And, of course, dancers:

Dancers are notoriously bad at planning for their second acts. They underestimate the age at which they'll retire (the average age of retirement is 34), overestimate the amount of money they'll earn, and misjudge the forces that will end their careers. More than one-third of the dancers in a 2004 survey were driven to retirement by an injury; only 5 percent left because they actually wanted a new career. When dancers enter the workforce in their thirties, many are woefully unprepared. Only 3 percent of current dancers say that teaching dance is their preferred post-retirement line of work, but it's the most common fate: 53 percent end up teaching dance in some capacity.

You could write this script for footballers - we look at the mega-star millionaires of the sport and assume that this goes for all the footballers. But only the most talented reach this height, most footballers - like most dancers - ply their trade in the lower leagues. And while the top Premier League stars earn £1,7m per year on average in lower leagues this plummets to between £40,000 and £70,000. These are good wages on the face of it but not if you reckon that most footballers' careers only last 20 years at most. And like the dancers, these retired footballers all end up earning a (not always very good) living from hanging about the game they played - coaching, physio, commentary.

The problem is that, for all the money in elite sport and arts, there really aren't enough jobs out there to maintain the income levels and living standards that retired and redundant dancers and players got used to. Yet we look at the money involved and howl with horror even though, compared to our economy, the money in football, opera or ballet is a drop in the ocean especially given the pleasure sport and art gives to us all.

This problem - in a related but different manner - also applies to careers such as teaching and social work:

In other words, after ten years or so, one cannot remain in the classroom, one must go either upwards, into management or else sideways into a specialist area … or out. The days of Mr. Chips were long gone. One must be perma-vibrant, relevant and up with the latest fad. Especially with Ofsted bureaucrats breathing down one’s neck.

Much of the reason for this is the idea of career progression and that being a classroom teacher in limiting - at least in financial terms. Even with 'career grade' systems in these professions there remains the pressure on the most experienced teachers to spend less time in the classroom and more time doing other important but non-teaching functions. Same goes for social workers meaning that the most capable and experienced end up trapped in an office managing other social workers. In our system - one that presumes the boss is paid more than the people she manages - the teacher or social worker (perhaps also the salesman and engineer too) ends up as a manager, a consultant or advisor rather than spending time doing the thing that person is trained to do.

And this sort of brings us back to football. In football - probably because it is driven by the needs of the tournament - the people paid the most are the ones delivering the product. That £1.7million wage for the average premier league player reflects two things - the transient nature of his career (every time he steps onto the field he knows it could end) and the essence of the game as a contest between teams of the best. And the best are a rare thing.

In this place no-one suggests to the 27 year-old midfield superstar that his only hope of getting more money is to become a coach or a manager. Yet that is precisely the measure we apply to teachers and social workers even while paying lip service to the idea of a career spent in front of a class or in the field. Perhaps we need to change the way in which we pay these vital public servants, to end the tyranny of the spinal column pay scale, national negotiations and a world where school administrators earn more than the best classroom teachers.

Most short term careers have worked pretty hard at making sure there's a life after playing - for public sector ones like policing, fire and soldiering there's a pension and extensive investment in retraining and support. This doesn't stop many of those leaving these uniformed, regimented roles finding civilian life tricky but it shows someone's thinking about the issue even if perhaps not hard enough. In sports like football there's a lot of financial advice and support but just as we saw with the dancers, too many ex-players end up like so many Ghosts of Football Past earning a not especially good income from clutching onto past glories.

But the brightest sportsmen do end up in coaching and management but this is done in a situation where they can't do what got them there - play 90 minutes of high-intensity football. For the other careers we've touched on such as teaching there's really no excuse - we should be begging the best to stay in front of a class.


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On the valuing of education...

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And how state systems don't value teaching well. At least not compared to this:

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Kim is paid this much because the product he provides - or rather its benefits - are valued very highly. And the hagwon system rewards the best teachers because they are what the pupils want:

The most radical difference between traditional schools and hagwons is that students sign up for specific teachers, so the most respected teachers get the most students.

This is a strikingly different world from that we are familiar with - a system where the best teachers get the biggest reward and where the choices of the customers, the learners, drives that success. In Korea the failings of the state system lie behind the hagwons, that coupled with the pressures to achieve socially, academically and financially.

And the conclusion? It might be this:

...in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too—or the free market may do it for them. 

Certainly food for thought and a challenge to the deadening government systems we see in the UK.

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Guilt by association...the Telegraph tries to skewer an MP on his predecessor's sins

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The Daily Telegraph reports on the success of Conservative MP, Stephen Phillips:

Stephen Phillips, the member for Sleaford and North Hykeham in the East Midlands, has reportedly been charging clients about £600 per hour in his capacity as a commercial lawyer.

He is believed to be the best-paid politician in Britain as a result, clocking up more than 1,500 hours of non-parliamentary work since July 2011.

Mr Phillips, 43, has received £922,380.20 in barrister's fees since July 2011, in addition to his annual MP’s salary of £65,738...

Now this seems to me wholly admirable. Mr Phillips points out that he does this work when the House isn't sitting (and that it's turnover not profit) plus mentioning how this provides him with a tentative link to the real world.

In my view we need more MPs like Mr Phillips who see it as public service rather than just a job (albeit a quite well paid job).

What I didn't understand, since no-one is accusing Mr Phillips of wrongdoing or dereliction of duty, let alone expenses fiddling, why the newspaper chose to conclude the article by talking about his predecessor Douglas Hogg. Seems to me that this is a rather unpleasant attempt to smear Mr Phillips by associating his working life with the moat-clearing expense of the man he succeeded as MP.

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On national wage deals...

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Up here in the relatively less well paid North the pay of the teacher, the nurse and the social worker - set by national collective bargaining or through a national pay body - is a good wage. In truth a better than good wage compared to average earnings in the North's private sector.

The opposite is true for London.

Which is why we should welcome this:

Foundation trusts are showing an unprecedented willingness to publicly consider moving away from nationally negotiated staff terms and conditions.

Of course the unions don't like it:

In April, the Royal College of Nursing passed a motion allowing it to ballot for industrial action if an employer attempted to impose any proposal “which challenges the nationally agreed pay agreement”.

But then we don't run our health services for the benefit of those employed by those services do we?

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