Teacher costs

The purpose of this technical brief is to assess current methodologies for the collection and calculation of teacher costs in European Union (EU) Member States in view of improving data series and indicators related to teacher salaries and teacher costs. To this end, CRELL compares the Eurydice collection on teacher salaries with the similar Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data collection and calculates teacher costs based on the methodology established by Statistics Canada as explained in Indicator B7 in Education at a Glance1 (OECD, 2014). This indicator allows for analysing the different factors that influence teacher costs: teacher salaries, teaching time, instruction hours and student/teacher ratios, as well as class size. The analyses will provide specific information on the contribution of the different factors used to derive the Salary Cost of Teachers per Student (CCS) and how they might depend on the way data for the different factors are collected. On the basis of assessing the different data collections with similar methodologies, suggestions for development work that could be undertaken to align the Eurydice and OECD data collections are offered.