Last week in her response to Gonski’s recommendations the Prime Minister implored the states to join her in a crusade centred on school improvement and getting best and brightest young graduates into the classroom. This week the three biggest of those states are locked in an old-style arm-wrestle with teacher organisations over wages, conditions, class sizes, government schools getting their fair share, the lot.

In Victoria teachers packed out Rod Laver Arena in protest at the Baillieu government’s failure to deliver on an election promise of big teacher pay rises.

The Queensland Teachers’ Union is holding a ballot of members to allow industrial action over Newman government plans, which, it says, threaten class sizes, pay for beginning teachers, and the teacher transfer system, all in exchange for a derisory pay offer.

The NSW Teachers Federation has declared the O’Farrell government “a disgrace”, and claims that its true agenda “is ripping resources out of public education, using weasel words like ‘local decision-making’, ‘realignment’ and ‘efficiencies’ ” to do it.

It’s not hard for the teacher organisations to make out their all-too-familiar case, particularly if the OECD happens to release its international comparisons of schools spending, class sizes, teacher pay and the like right in the middle of it all.

The Australian Education Union draws on the OECD report to show that Australian class sizes are average at best, that teachers spend more hours in the classroom and more weeks per year at school than their peers in most other countries, and that by way of thanks they get paid less, experienced teachers particularly.

The unions use the report to reveal spending on schooling as a percentage of GDP below the average, “an alarming decrease” in the share of government funding going to public schools, and under-investment “that has contributed to a drop in our overall performance”.

Of course it would be possible to cherry-pick the OECD’s stats to show that Australian schools and teachers aren’t treated all that badly. But the real problem for the union case is that it has been made many times before and hasn’t worked.

I recall writing a long piece for the Independent Monthly reporting chronic antagonism between the teacher organisations and state governments over working conditions (class sizes particularly) and poor and declining pay. That was in 1989. The same conflict has continued, off and on, ever since. Yet a recent study by ANU economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan found that teacher pay is, if anything, worse now than it was 25 years ago.

Another and newer problem is that unions’ arguments carry less weight now than they did in 1989, some of it thanks to the OECD international comparisons drawn upon by the AEU.

Does more spending produce better results? Not necessarily. The OECD’s top performer by a country mile is Finland, but Finland spends less per student than we do, and a smaller proportion of GDP overall. Do smaller classes produce better results? Not really. Another international study, a digest of more than 800 meta-studies of school systems around the world shows that smaller classes are much less effective than other ways of lifting student performance. And it doesn’t need an in-depth study to show that hiring more and more teachers to put in front of smaller and smaller classes is a very expensive option.

There is no doubt that teachers are badly paid by comparison with other Australian graduate occupations and, to a less marked extent, by comparison with teachers in other countries. The Leigh and Ryan study suggests that there is more to this than a fair deal for teachers. As teacher wages have fallen relative to other occupations, Leigh and Ryan ague, so have the academic attainment of entrants to the profession, and that, in turn, seems to be related to lower teacher effectiveness in the classroom. It is probably in students’ interests, as well as teachers’, to lift teacher pay substantially.

But where will the money come from? Ever since 1942 when the federal government took taxation powers from the states, the states have struggled to make ends meet. Schools are a big item in state budgets, and teacher salaries are a big part of that. Even a small improvement for a quarter of a million employees is hard to find.

For 50 years or more teacher organisations have wanted it all: better pay, higher entry standards, smaller classes, better working conditions. At first it worked. Class sizes tumbled and teacher pay rose, but the big gains were achieved by the 1980s. Since then things have plateaued at best. It is surely time to think about a different approach.

Perhaps the most promising route is via trade-offs, of several kinds. One possibility is suggested by a recent US calculation that found that five more students per class would fund a salary increase of 34% for every teacher. Other approaches were canvassed in the Grattan Institute’s influential Learning from the best report, including larger classes and/or less of them to give teachers time to meet, review, diagnose and plan, and for the only really effective form of teacher development, rigorous workplace appraisal, feedback and mentoring.

Yet other possibilities are suggested by the OECD report relied upon by the AEU. It shows that Finland’s teachers spend a higher proportion of their at-school time in the classroom, and have a markedly shorter working year than Australian teachers.

If it is time teacher organisations started thinking outside the square in these and other ways, it is far past the time when employers should be taking the responsibility to lead.

That can’t and won’t happen in the middle of a brawl that will end in the usual compromises, unsatisfactory to both sides. But once the dust settles each should start thinking about how to play it next time. They might even get together to think about it.

And if the PM really does want to get top-gun teachers to staff her campaign for top five in ’25, she should make it a condition of new federal Gonski money that the states rethink industrial agreements in the interests of a better educational as well as industrial result.

*Dean Ashenden has been a consultant to many state and national education agencies and ministers.