This week two versions have been spread about what public education teachers earn in Spain that seem irreconcilable. On the one hand, it calculates that preschool and primary school teachers earn 54,487 dollars gross (about 50,130 euros at the exchange rate at the time the data was taken) annually at the beginning of their career. A figure that is based on the same method as in September (about 56,190 euros) when starting to work.
The amounts, according to the OECD, an organization made up mainly of developed economies, place Spanish teachers in tenth place (teachers) and seventh (secondary teachers) in the classification of the best paid in a total of 36 countries, ahead of their colleagues in Italy, France, Ireland, Sweden, the United States, Canada or Japan. The point is that this is not what teachers in Spain actually earn, but rather an estimate that the OECD makes to compare salaries between countries. Their salaries, in reality, correspond to those of , and are around a third lower.
In an autonomy located in the middle of the table, like Andalusia, early childhood and primary school teachers earn about 35,000 euros per year at the beginning of their career (without seniority), and secondary school teachers about 39,300. There are significant differences between some communities and others, which reach up to 638 euros per month, in secondary school – between Basque teachers, 3,309 euros, and Asturian teachers, 2,626 -, according to data from the report that UGT prepares each year using official salaries.
The OECD data is based, instead, on the purchasing power parity (PPP) method for private consumption, which calculates what can be purchased per monetary unit, in this case a dollar, in each country. Economists consider it useful because it allows comparisons to be made by eliminating the distortion created by the different price levels in each place. The system is built with information on what more than 3,000 products and services cost.
One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the application of the method, points out Ángel Martínez, economist at Analistas Financieros Internacionales, is that, indeed, depending on the price level of the country, Spanish teachers are better paid than most of their colleagues in other countries.
The analysis is supported, Martínez continues, with another comparison: according to OECD calculations, Spanish secondary school teachers earn at the beginning of their career 85% “of the average income of working people with a similar training at ages between 25 and 64” ―a percentage that is reduced to 61% in the average of OECD countries and 58% in EU countries―. And the maximum remuneration that secondary school teachers can achieve throughout their working career is 22% higher in Spain than what professionals in the country receive with jobs that require an equivalent educational level (which is 23 points more than in the OECD as a whole and 32 points more than in the EU).
A flatter race in Spain
This conclusion requires, however, nuances. The first, points out Jesús Carro, professor of Economics at Carlos III University, is that . That is, they start with relatively high salaries compared to their environment, but their salaries advance less and more slowly. When they have been working for 15 years, primary teachers fall, according to the OECD, from 10th to 14th best paid (in this case, out of a total of 33 countries, and also using the purchasing power parity method). And those in secondary school go from seventh to tenth place.
The situation improves a little for Spanish teachers if we look at the maximum salary they can earn: Spanish teachers are in 12th place and secondary school teachers are in ninth place (out of 34). But this data also presents an important nuance, points out José Luis Valero, from the technical office of the UGT Education sector: “In Spain it takes 39 years to achieve the maximum salary, while in the Netherlands, for example, it is reached at 18.” On average, in the EU, it takes 32 years to reach the maximum salary.
