The Australian School Libraries Research Project

Australian School Libraries Research Project Report 1: A snapshot of Australian teacher librarians

Salaries and titles

18.905% of participants in this survey have been employed in a non-school library. Approximately 10% of participants earn less than $40K. A further 14% earn between $40-50K per year. This is comparatively low considering the requirement of a dual qualification to be a TL. While a correlation analysis hasn’t been done as yet, salary does not appear to be related to length of service as a TL or type of qualification. An example can be seen in Table 4 for participants in Victoria who earn less than $40K per year.

Table 4: Australian TLs: Victorian TLs earning less than 40K/year

State	Length of Service	Qualification	Title
VIC 12<$40K	<1 <2 <5 <5 <10 <10 <15 <15 <15 <20 <20 <25	Grad Dip None BA Grad Dip Grad Dip BA Res Tea Course BA Grad Cert BA Res Tea Course BA	TL TL TL TL TL Library Technician TL TL TL TL TL Volunteer

 

Figure 35: Australian TLs: Salaries (i)

A comparison between levels of salary with length of service indicates that over 60% of TLs in this survey earned more than $60K/year. This is not surprising since 58% of participants in this survey also indicated they had more than 10 years experience in the classroom/library. However, only a small number of participants fell into the highly paid salary bracket, with less than 2% earning more than $80K.

Figure 36: Australian TLs: Salaries (ii)

Figure 37: Australian TLs: Salaries, by state

Figure 37 indicates that there are some discrepancies between states, with SA and WA having more participants in the less than $40K salary bracket. While WA has a higher number of inexperienced TLs (<1 year), SA does not. Further analysis and correlation statistics will need to be run to determine if there is any link between salary and length of experience. Of course length of experience as a TL is not a reliable indication of length of experience in education as many students come to the profession after a considerable time in the classroom as evidenced in Figure 13. The salaries of TLs and teachers are usually determined according to length of experience.

Figure 38: Australian TLs, Salaries by school type

Figure 38 indicates that TLs in Anglican and Christian schools received higher salaries than TLs in other school types. Few Government schools pay their TLs at the top salary rate. Most of the participants used the title teacher librarian (85.406%). Interestingly, the higher the salary, the greater the likelihood the TL will be using an alternative title.

Table 5: Australian TLs: Titles

Salary	Title
<80K	3 Library Manager 5 Other 10 TL
80K+	1 Info man 1 Library Director 6 Other 4 TL