102 5 Rural Teacher Issues
In 2012 the Opinion on Strengthening Construction of Teaching Force of the
State Council was released. It stated that it was necessary to ensure the legal rights
and proper treatment of teachers, reinforce the guarantee mechanisms for teacher
salaries, and ensure that the level of teachers’ salaries was not lower than the sal-
ary level of civil servants. It committed government to increase timely payment,
and perfect the reward and accountability mechanisms that are appropriate for the
teaching profession and the performance related the salary system that had first
been introduced in 1989.
5.4.4 Changes from Structured Salary
to Performance-Related Salaries
The structured salary system was introduced in 1989 to take replace of the single
fixed salary system, with the aim of connecting income to teachers’ performance.
In the compulsory education phase, the teachers’ salaries include the core salary
for the post, the salary related to the teachers rank, allowances, and special subsi-
dies related to the post. The post salary and rank link to the professional title.
Rural teachers’ salaries are mostly determined by the post salary and rank sal-
ary, and the structured part accounts for a very small proportion of the total and it
only weakly related to performance. In Xiji central primary school of Tongzhou,
only 1.1 yuan per teaching hour and 0.3 yuan/per student monthly for being a
home class teachers are allocated. These standards have been in force for 20 years.
One problem is that the home class teacher’s workload is much heavier than the
subject teachers. As the subsidy and workload are out of proportion, teachers don’t
want to be home class teachers. The students indicate that their home class teach-
ers changed frequently. The subsidy for working in rural school was only 10 yuan
monthly.
In December 2008, the former Premier of the State Council Wen Jiabao pro-
posed that from January, 2009, all of the compulsory education schools should
implement a new teachers’ performance pay system. The Ministry of Education
issued “Guiding Suggestion for Performance Pay of Compulsory Education
School Teachers” in 2009. In the reformed system, the structured salary includes
four parts: post salary, rank salary, performance pay salary and special job sub-
sidy. In other words, the allowance part was replaced by performance related sub-
sidies and the other three parts remain the same. The teachers’ salaries are still
mainly links with professional rank, but the performance related subsidy has been
increased and the part related to professional rank has been weakened.
The structured salary system has been implemented in Ansai. The basic prin-
ciples are “pay according to work, more pay for more work; pay according to
quality, more able persons should do more work; fair competition, rational dis-
tribution”. Within a school, structured salaries mainly come from the subsidy
component (accounting for 30 % of the salary) and direct school funding. The
structured salary is determined by teaching workload which is converted into