There has long been a fascination with comparing the UK’s teaching system with what’s in place elsewhere in the world.

Everyone from Ofsted chief Michael Wilshaw to the former education secretary Michael Gove have expressed admiration for Singapore’s education system, where young pupils achieve highly in maths.

Research has now found that the education system in Finland offers the best value for money, with teachers achieving high Pisa scores, despite getting moderate salaries and teaching relatively large classes.

The study of 30 OECD member nations by Gems Education Solutions, compared government average spends on teaching, which makes up 80% of most education budgets, with pupil results in Pisa tests assessing the reading, maths and science skills of 15 year olds.

Finland was ranked first, followed by Korea, the Czech Republic and Hungary, in terms of efficiency. Brazil and Indonesia’s education systems provided the least value for money, the study found.

The report also found that the UK would need to increase the number of pupils to every one teacher in school and cut salaries around by nearly 10% to match Finland’s Pisa scores. However, the study’s authors did not advise making these changes, noting that other cultural factors should be taken into consideration such as family attitudes towards education.

Given the various reports available, we have put together some data to explore how the job of a teacher varies around the world.

Where is teacher pay highest?

Of the 30 OECD member countries, teachers in Switzerland get the highest annual salary, an average of $68,000 (£41,000). This is higher than the average salary in the country, which is around $50,000 (£30,000). Switzerland is followed by the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium in terms of having highly paid teachers.

Comparatively, teachers in the UK earn less than the annual UK average of $44,000 (£27,000), receiving just over $40,000 (£24,000) and ranked 13 out of the 30 countries listed. Teachers get paid more in the UK than other European countries. In France, for example, the average teacher salary is $33,000, and in Greece teachers earn an average of $25,000.

Which country has the most teachers per school?

In Brazil there are an average of 32 pupils to every one teacher, compared to Portugal where there are just seven. Norway and Greece also have relatively small classes, with the UK ranked 14 on the list in terms of having the highest number of pupils to teachers.

In the UK Gems research showed that if the government wants to reach the educational efficiency of Finland they could increase the numbers of pupils in school from an average of 13 to 16.

Where do teachers get the greatest respect?

Last year a report showed that teachers in China get the greatest respect. The UK and the US ranked in the middle of the Global Teacher Status Index, lower down than South Korea and Greece where teachers were more valued.

Israel was ranked lowest in the survey of 21 OECD countries. In each country 1,000 people were asked questions such as whether they thought teacher earning were fair and whether they’d encourage their children to become teachers.

Pessimism about how respected teachers were by students was highest in Europe compared to Asia. In China 75% of those who took the survey said they thought teachers were respected by their students.

Do UK teachers work long hours?

The Teaching and Learning International survey found that teachers in England work an average of 46 hours per week in term time, eight hours more than the international of 38 hours. UK teachers spend less time in class and more time taken up on other tasks. Finnish teachers tend to have 32 hour working weeks and in Italy they only work 29 hours per week.

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TALIS Teacher Survey

• Teachers
• Principals
• Professional Development
• Time Use

Compare home > TALIS Teacher Survey

Teachers are the front-line workers of the education system. They are responsible for engaging students and promoting their learning. The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) provides basic information about the teaching workforce and the school environment. In almost all the participating countries and economies the majority of teachers are women. The average age of teachers ranges from 36 years in Singapore to 49 years in Italy.

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Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 Female teachers, %	Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 Average age	Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 With tertiary education, %
Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 With teacher education or training, %	Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 Years of teaching experience	Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 Full time employed, %
Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 With permanent contract, %	Created with Highcharts 3.0.1 Students per class

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More teacher facts

• The US government spends the most on education ($809bn), followed by Japan ($160bn), Germany ($154bn), Brazil ($146bn), France ($123bn) and then the United Kingdom ($123bn)
  
  
• The UN estimates 8 million extra teachers are needed worldwide by 2015.
  
  
• Secondary school teachers in the UK are expected to be working 39 hours in an average week – MPs are expected to work 40-hours weeks.
• International figures show 68% of teachers are women and the average teacher age is 48.
  
  
• The average working week of a teacher is 38 hours, but in Japan – where teachers work the longest week – they clock up 54 hours.

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When I finally passed my first year as a newly qualified teacher friends congratulated me. It had been a long gruelling journey to get there: three years as an undergraduate, two as a teaching assistant, and a year on top of that doing my PGCE. Finally, I had completed my first year and it had been a hard one.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and I’m proud of what I do. I work in a London primary school rated good by Ofsted, but there is one aspect of teaching that has been a revelation to me since I got started and that is the staggering financial cost of the job.

You might think, as I did when I first started, that teachers would have a well-equipped classroom and a bank of good teaching resources to help them but you would be wrong. As a newbie I was expected to add yet another qualification as a cut-price interior decorator to my CV. I had to virtually redecorate my teaching room it seemed, largely at my own expense.

Primary teaching rooms are expected to be themed, and this means myself and my more conscientious colleagues working over the summer to get everything we need to theme our classrooms using whatever we can find to prepare our classes for the new educational year.

In total, over the past year, I must have spent at least £200, only a fraction of which I was able to reclaim. That is to say nothing of the unpaid man hours I’ve had to work in what is supposed to be my holiday.

Of course, I accept that teachers have to work during their time off, preparing lessons and changing whole schemes of work to keep them in line with changes to the national curriculum or its guidelines, which both seem to change with every new education secretary. But there’s no time for that, the classroom has to be set up, a task that could perhaps be done as effectively by teaching assistants, but most teaching assistants are on term time only contracts, which means they’re not paid to come in during the school holidays.

I have had to spend my own money on everything from laminating pouches, display items, storage boxes and folders to metres of fabrics suitable for the chosen theme.

What is frustrating is that there is an expectation that I will pay for all this myself, and when I ask for reimbursement the response is often: “Sorry, we haven’t budgeted for this."

As a new teacher I’m not very well paid, especially by London standards, and I’m already struggling to pay my rent. There is a kind of guilt associated with claiming money from school funds, which are already inadequate and stretched beyond their capacity. So, what next? Are we going to ask parents to pay for all this? Oh, I forgot, we already do that. It’s usually called a summer fayre, isn’t it?

Another hidden professional expense for the beleaguered teacher is the cost of printing: I often have to print out whole class sets of worksheets at home when my printing allowance at work runs out. To produce the volume of printing needed I have had to buy a good-quality laser printer. A set of ink cartridges for it alone costs more than £300, to say nothing of the cost of run-off paper.

Then there are the seemingly endless stationery costs for items such as a paper trimmer, pens and marking stamps. These are, of course, supplied by the school as far as the school can afford it. But if the departmental budget has run out, year 5 are having the lesson next day and an Ofsted inspector is going to be observing it, what are you going to do? Don’t expect to get your money back any time soon.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the schools that are to blame for this but an educational system that drip feeds them with totally inadequate funding, with which it demands they achieve ever-improving results year on year.

The working conditions of teachers also need to be improved, so that we are not expected to plan our teaching programme and our lessons, redecorate and refurbish our classrooms, create and reproduce study materials and worksheets all at the same time in our own time, and sometimes at our own expense.

I know it’s a privilege to teach, but should I really have to pay for the privilege?

• Have you had similar experiences or do you want to share any money saving tips on how to re-stock your classroom on a budget? Drop us a line by emailing sarah.marsh@theguardian.com or tweeting via @GuardianTeach.
  
  

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