Ask any owner what they want from teachers and you get the same list: turn up prepared, care about the students, stay a few years.
Then look at how they pay. In a lot of schools the pay model is quietly asking for something else.
Hourly
Pay for time in the building.
Rewards: availability. Hourly teachers accept extra sessions and cover at short notice, because covering is paid.
Quietly punishes: everything that happens outside the paid hour. Preparation, marking, a five-minute conversation with a parent at the door. If those are unpaid, they are optional, and over time they become rare.
Use it when your timetable moves a lot and you need people who will flex with it.
Guard against it by paying explicitly for preparation as a named line rather than pretending it is inside the rate. A prep allowance that appears on the payslip changes behaviour; the same money folded into a higher hourly rate does not.
Per class
Pay a fixed amount per session taught.
Rewards: finishing the session. Simple to calculate, and teachers know exactly what a week is worth.
Quietly punishes: small classes. A teacher paid per class earns the same for four students as for fourteen, which is fine for you and demoralising for them when the four-student class is the difficult one. It also creates a real incentive to not cancel a session that should be cancelled.
Use it when classes are standard length and you want payroll to be predictable.
Salary
Pay a monthly amount for a defined load.
Rewards: everything that is not a lesson. This is the only model that pays for curriculum work, mentoring a new teacher, or sitting with a worried parent — and those are the things that make a school rather than a room with classes in it.
Quietly punishes: you, if the load is undefined. "Salaried" with an open-ended timetable is how a good teacher quietly becomes an expensive one, then a resentful one, then a former one.
Use it when you have a core team you intend to keep for years.
Guard against it by writing the contact-hour ceiling into the contract and actually tracking against it.
The blend most schools land on
A salaried core of two or three, plus hourly staff for peak evenings and weekends.
That works. The failure mode is not the structure — it is that the ceiling for the salaried group is never written down, so within a year they are teaching more hours than the hourly staff for less money per hour, and they know it.
The pay model you never revisit is the one your best teacher is currently doing arithmetic about.
Whatever you choose, make it visible
Teachers who cannot see how their pay was calculated assume the worst, and they are sometimes right. Generated payslips with the lines showing — base, allowances, deductions — end more disputes than a raise does. The payroll guide covers how the monthly run works in Schoolory.