Many female academics are deserting universities and retraining as school teachers. Is it the better pay, the promotion prospects or the child-friendly holidays? Helen Hague reports on why it might be smarter to be a teacher than a lecturer.

Female researchers are deserting universities to retrain as school teachers - lured by better pay, longer holidays and a fairer and more transparent career structure.

The past two years have seen a 25 per cent increase in the number of women with PhDs and masters degrees signing up to train as teachers - many have abandoned plans to build an academic career, frustrated by a succession of badly paid short-term contracts.

According to the latest figures from the ÖйúAƬ Statistics Agency, 800 women with higher degrees enrolled on the postgraduate teacher-training course this year - compared with 728 the year before and 605 two years ago. The number of men with research degrees training as teachers has risen from 511 to just 515 over the same period.

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This trend is good news for schools facing a recruitment crisis. But it is yet another blow for the beleaguered ÖйúAƬ sector, under fire from unions and government for its record on promoting women.

The government has set up an Equal Opportunities Directorate within the ÖйúAƬ Funding Council to speed change. Evidence that highly qualified women are turning to more amenable careers in classroom teaching will fuel growing demands to close the gender gap on pay and promotion.

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For men and women, the starting pay in universities is low. An academic starts out on Pounds 16,665 at an old university - or Pounds 14,000 at a new institution - after at least three years writing up a doctorate. They can find themselves teaching undergraduates who could be earning an average of Pounds 18,610 in their first job this year, according to Incomes Data Services, the independent pay research body. "It can be quite galling," says Monica Hicks, spokeswoman for the Association of University Teachers.

And figures published last month by the AUT flag up the widening gender pay gap: last year male academics earned on average 18 per cent more than women doing the same jobs. There are startling disparities - male permanent full-time lecturers at Derby University earned on average 28.3 per cent more than their female counterparts.

Postgraduates can see the way the land lies and many - especially women who want to combine children and a career - are choosing to change direction and are moving into school teaching. Tamara Joseph, postgraduate consultant at the AUT, says that postgraduates teaching in universities are not really treated as employees or properly remunerated. "It is seen as pocket money and work experience."

Together with the National Union of Students, the AUT is researching pay and conditions of graduate students in six universities. It is emerging that postgraduates work twice as many hours as they are paid for in their teaching role - preparation, marking and meetings do not seem to count.

Researchers are also exploring why women starting out on academic careers are choosing to leave the sector. "Not that many graduate students have children, but those who do can find it a real struggle," Joseph says.

David Lambert, lecturer in geography at the Institute of Education, believes the trend for more people with PhDs and masters degrees to enrol on teacher-training courses will continue, boosted in part by the Pounds 6,000 to Pounds 10,000 salary the government has offered from September to all trainee teachers. He is convinced that it is pay, conditions and lack of career progression - a culture of short-term contracts and blocks on promotion - that are making universities seem less attractive.

By contrast, the Teacher Training Agency has beefed up pay and career progression to address a growing recruitment crisis. Teaching in schools attracts a starting salary of Pounds 15,141, performance-related bonuses and the prospect of earning up to Pounds 40,000 in the classroom.

Ralph Tabberer, head of the TTA, welcomes the trend. The agency plans to pitch for highly qualified people - including academics - as part of its strategy to encourage late entrants and those who want to switch career. "The graduate labour market is more competitive than ever and we have got to be as good as the best recruiters in business," Tabberer says.

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Mike Fleming, director of initial teacher training at Durham University, says that it is important that people with "good intellectual branding" can progress in teaching and he is glad to see more women with higher degrees opting for the classroom.

"Many of the academics training teachers in universities would be on far higher salaries if they had stayed in schools," says Fleming, who left classroom teaching a decade ago. "The pressures on academics have increased hugely in that time - decreasing resources, increased teaching, peer review, quality assurance."

Education consultant John Howson predicts that more people with higher degrees will leave academia for teaching. "If ÖйúAƬ is not competing in the jobs market, it will lose people." He believes some academics see "a repressive research culture and casualisation as too high a price to pay when they can get job satisfaction teaching in schools".

Ashley Tauchert, an English lecturer at Exeter University and member of the AUT women's committee, says anecdotal evidence abounds of female lecturers "putting off having babies, terrified that their reproductive capacity will cause them to slip off the career ladder".

For a woman chasing short-term university contracts and intent on starting a family, the classroom - with its child-friendly hours, employee status and better pay and prospects - looks increasingly appealing.

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Hesa: Teacher Training Agency:

Teaching, page 42-45

'I LOVE SCHOOL TEACHING AND i FEEL MORE VALUED'

Laura Humphrey, now happily teaching science at a large comprehensive in Lowestoft, had an unconventional background. She was always "bunking off" school and took a day-release City and Guilds as an apprentice gardener, working with disaffected teenagers on a city farm in London.

She had her son at 19, took a diploma in ecology at night school, followed by a first-class degree in environmental biology at Greenwich University. She then uprooted her family to work on a PhD in genetics and ecology at Coventry University, deliberately choosing a former polytechnic.

But she found "an intensely snobbish" culture, where it was assumed that postgraduates had no children and independent means to see them through the lean holiday periods.

Humphrey relished both research and teaching. But in her fourth year, after a major operation followed by pneumonia, she found little support or sympathy from staff at Coventry. She took a postgraduate certificate in education at the University of East Anglia and, at 34, started a new career as a school teacher last September. She is yet to write up her doctorate.

"I miss research, but moving around the country chasing contracts would be too high a price. I love teaching and feel far more valued. I'd recommend it to anyone who is fed up with life in universities."

* UNIVERSITIES HAEMORRHAGE TALENT

Mary Berry is passionate about organic farming. At Wye College she completed her doctorate, drove a tractor, farmed college land and planned a career in academia.

Armed with a PhD, she had a succession of poorly paid, part-time, short-term contracts and was not lecturing enough hours to qualify for maternity pay when she had Francis, her first son, five and a half years ago.

"Having a family has always been important to me. I wanted to continue in ÖйúAƬ, but it dawned on me it would be very much an uphill struggle to do both."

Francis was born a week after she gave her last lecture. Before he was one, she had enrolled on a postgraduate certificate in education at Christ church College, Canterbury, and went on to have two more sons. Four years after qualifying as a teacher she is head of biology at an inner-city boys' comprehensive in Coventry.

Berry is still breastfeeding eight-month-old Benedict and keeps in touch with the land - tending organic vegetables on her allotment.

Combining a demanding job with three children under six is possible, she says, only because her senior lecturer husband shares domestic chores and does the supermarket shop.

Though happy with her career switch, she believes female academics who are raising families should be able to stay in the sector without losing out on promotion. Those who hanker to return after having children often fall foul of the research assessment exercise and "miss the boat" because they cannot get funding for their research projects. "The sector is haemorrhaging talent it can ill afford to lose," she says.

"Contract culture, lack of job security and poor pay are deterring men as well as women from building a career in academia. Teaching in schools can look very attractive when you are chasing funding for research."

Berry has done some tutorial work at Coventry University and hopes to start a part-time masters degree in education - on how boys achieve.

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"You could say I've got a vested interest with three of my own."