School leaders in Italy earn twice as much as teachers (and are among the highest paid in the world)

The report of theOECD highlighted a very particular situation with regard to Italian school wages. The salary of principals it is very high, among the largest in Europe, while that of teachers is rather meager.

Italian school principals earn about 102,000 US dollars a year, including allowances and insurance, corresponding to about 90,000 euros a year. This figure, after tax, leads to a salary of at least 3,500 / 4,000 euros per month.

And the teachers? In 2021 a professor of middle school earned about 1,700 euros a month, which although it is a respectable salary, is excessively detached from that of the managers. The gap between these two figures seems to be so high only in Italy, let’s see the data.

The salary of school leaders around the world

The OECD has collected all data relating to the salaries of school staff in well 30 countries, converting all currencies to US dollars to make comparison possible. Experts compared the major industrialized countries in the world, taking into account the purchasing power of private individuals.

Thanks to this accurate survey it is possible to compare salaries in an immediate way and the results are evident. The salary of Italian school managers is among the first placeswhile that of teachers to the last, with a differential of 2.38.

That’s right, an Italian headmaster earns 2.38 times (this is of course a figure obtained from a proportion) in more than one of his teacher colleagues, while in the rest of Europe the differential is much lower.

In Finlandfor example, teachers have a salary higher than 55 thousand dollars per year, 30% more than Italian colleagues. At the same time, however, the salary of the Finnish school leaders it is 20% lower than the Italian ones, approximately 81 thousand dollars the year.

It follows that the differential is very low, specifically 1.46. The latter figure drops further in the case ofEstoniain which teachers are paid $ 31,000 a year and principals 39 thousand.

Australia, Holland, Ireland, United States And United Kingdom they are the only countries with a salary of school managers higher than the Italian one. At the expense of this, in these countries the gap is much smaller than in Italy, indicating a certain proportionality with respect to the teaching staff.

Underpaid Italian teachers

The salary of the Italian teaching staff collides severely with that of their superiors, in an excessively skewed ratio in favor of the latter. However, this is not the only negative sign of the conditions of teachers in Italy.

There is in fact a second criticality that negatively affects the working conditions of teachers in our country. While the salary figures are unpromising but certain, the same cannot be said for work hours overall carried out.

As pointed out by Carlo Cottarellidirector of the Italian Public Accounts Observatory, are completely missing official data relating to the actual hours worked by teachers. Hours which, on the other hand, are not indicated satisfactorily even in the contracts.

The duties of teachers outside theclassroom teaching they are really numerous and go beyond even the correction of homework. It is therefore difficult to identify the average working hours, because a large part takes place outside the school walls.

This inevitably reflects on a decrease in school quality in Italy, with an ever greater decline in pupils. Teachers struggle to find a satisfying professional achievement, thanks to the high competition and the difficulty of progression from the wage point of view.