It's not just the poor level of pay, it's also the crippling workload and lack of progression. Beyond a certain point your only way to progress up the pay scale is to move into the middle management of schools, which becomes less and less actual teaching, so to get slightly more reasonable pay you have to sacrifice the reason you got into teaching in the first place. For the teachers I know who've quit though, they could never be paid enough to get back into teaching, the workload and stress, the lack of backup with agressive pupils, hostile work environement generally (multiple people have said the kids are bad for bullying, but the staff are worse). We need to look at teaching in other countries and take note, because they way we've set it up isn't working.