SALARY BAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 109, 11 May 1939, Page 12

SALARY BAR.

"FLAGRANT INJUSTICE ,, TEACHERS' OPPOSITION. GOVERNMENT DISAPPOINTS. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) WELLINGTON, this day. The declaration that if justice meant anything at all, there was urgent need for the immediate and retrospective removal of the C grade salary bar, was made by the president of the New Zealand Secondary School Assistants' Association, Mr. H. A. Heron, Wellington, in his addreee at the annual meeting of the association yesterday. "When we consider the great improvement in the attitade toward education and teachers which has accompanied the accession to office of the present Government," Mr. Heron said, "it becomes all the more difficult to understand how there has been tolerated ho long such a piece of flagrant injustice and discrimination as that produced by the removal of the C grade salary bar in technical and combined schools without a similar removal in the secondary service." Mr. Heron said that with the decision .to set up a salaries committee already made, the removal of the bar for certain members was, to say the least of it, not necessary, and had meant that representatives of secondary teachers had gone forward to the sa'ary committee in a position of relative disadvantage, which had tended to prejudice the chance* of mutual agreement with the technical teachers. Such an action, he continued, could not be justified on the grounds of expense, because the amount involved was small. Whatever the motive for it, this discrimination could not te regarded otherwise than as highly disparaging to teachers in secondary schools. "Stated in practical terms," Heron, "it means that a teacher in the Auckland Grammar Schools, Palnierston North Boys' High School, Wellington Boys' and Girls' Colleges, Otago Boys' High School and Waitaki Boys' High School, may reach a maximum salary XSo lower than that of an equally efficient teacher in a technical school. This is in spite of the fact that the academic qualifications of secondary teachers are on the average much higher than those of technical teachers, "and the standard of work reached in a •secondary school is considerably higher than that reached in a purely technical school."