The Assembly believes that one MLA is worth two teachers. That’s the inevitable conclusion from last week’s decisions in Stormont. While teachers were offered a 5.5% pay rise, the Assembly introduced plans which could give MLAs a salary increase of over 37%.
The starting salary for a teacher is £30,000, which would increase to about £31,500. MLAs ‘earn’ (in the very loose sense of the word) £52,500. Their possible pay rise would give them an annual salary of about £72,000.
So an MLA would earn more than twice the starting salary of a teacher.
Welcome to the privileged world of Stormont, where the public purse is being used to fund failure and punish education. Only People Before Profit’s Gerry Carroll and the TUV’s Timothy Gaston have so far opposed the proposed salary increase.
Read more: No public consultation for bill that could give MLAs a 36%+ pay hike
So how does teaching compare with being an MLA?
Entry into the BEd (Hons) course at Stranmillis University College requires at least two grade A passes and one grade B at A-level. The course includes four years of lectures, tutorials and workshops.
Stormont does not hold information on MLAs’ academic qualifications, presumably because they require none. If the Assembly provided training for aspiring MLAs, it would probably involve three different modules.
Module 1: Learning how to read a speech prepared for you by someone in your party. (Understanding is not necessary – just the ability to read.)
Module 2: Acquiring the skill of eating subsidised food at Stormont. (There will be a practical assessment of this module in which student MLAs will be observed eating.)
Module 3: Learning how to wave a flag. This includes continuous professional development in flag waving, which may lead to a semaphore degree.
The only difference in the two types of training is that while teachers are taught to think, MLAs are taught not to think.
However, life is not as easy for MLAs. They have to learn the names of Stormont’s 17 committees, made up of nine statutory committees, seven standing committees and a chairpersons’ liaison group (that’s a committee which discusses other committees). Perhaps MLAs believe that the Department of Administrative Affairs in the TV comedy Yes Minister was a documentary.
Presumably as part of their plan to free Ireland (within the EU, which does not allow freedom), SF recently announced the appointment of some of its MLAs to the following posts: chair of the committee for health; chair of the Windsor Framework democratic scrutiny committee; chair of the committee on standards and privileges; deputy chair of the committee on procedures; deputy chair of the assembly executive review committee; and deputy chair of the committee for communities.
Having aspired to ‘Brits out’ by supporting IRA bombing, SF is now trying to end British rule by bureaucracy. (Coming soon: the Wolfe Tones’ latest single, ‘The Boys of the Old Bureaucracy’.)
The education minister says that teachers’ industrial action is “corrosive”. MLAs were absent from work (while being paid) for five of the seven years between 2017 and 2024. Presumably that was not corrosive
Ah but, you say, (but only if you are an MLA) the new salary levels will be determined by an independent commission. However, it is a basic law of government that you should never appoint anyone who is independent to an independent commission.
So why not appoint these three: a teacher, someone who has been waiting five years for medical treatment and a mother who sends her child to school hungry every morning?
The new salaries legislation (which is not open to public consultation) states that only salaries and pensions will be considered by this “independent” body. Expenses (and there are loads of those for MLAs) will be decided by the Assembly Commission, which consists of members of Stormont’s five main parties. Teachers do not get expenses.
In the year up to October 2023, when the Assembly was collapsed, MLAs claimed £10.3 million between them in expenses – about £29,000 a day. That’s just under a complete year’s starting salary for a teacher.
The likely salary increases of £19,000 for 90 MLAs will cost about £1.7 million annually. That would pay the starting salaries of about 56 teachers.
The education minister says that teachers’ industrial action is “corrosive”. MLAs were absent from work (while being paid) for five of the seven years between 2017 and 2024. Presumably that was not corrosive. (If Stormont wants an example of something corrosive in education, it should look no further than its shameful adherence to academic selection.)
Someone once said that if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Stormont has taken that opinion literally and is now investing heavily in ignorance. It should fit comfortably into its programme for government.
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