You can’t eat diamonds. You can’t drink them. And they definitely won’t tell the time, do the dishes or entertain your kids. Diamonds are, all told, pretty useless.

Yet diamonds come at a hell of a cash price. You can buy a litre of water, the most precious, life-sustaining resource on Earth, for pennies. Into that same bottle, you could pack a number of diamonds, the value of which would make even the Sultan of Brunei blush.

A hard-headed economist would argue, however, that this makes absolute sense: any product is worth what people will pay. Romantic love has an iron grip on the collective imagination - it has dominated the plots, lyrics and canvases of the world’s cultural outpourings for time immemorial; diamonds, therefore, carry a stratospheric price tag because humans have made them symbols of extravagant, heady love: we have imbued diamonds with significance and therefore value.

So what, you might ask, does that tell us about teachers?

Water is to diamonds as teachers are to the Kardashian family: one is essential for the continuance of civilization; the other is no more than an icon of vulgarity. Yet the bottom line is that, sadly, in cash value, teachers come cheap.

Few would deny the importance of teachers - just look at our fortnightly My Best Teacher feature in the magazine to see their far-reaching influence. And last month, former US education secretary Arne Duncan told us that a good teacher should be making as much as $150,000 a year (about £103,000), while headteachers should be paid $250,000 (about £171,000).

That’s a long way from reality in Scotland, where even a class teacher at the top of the main scale earns less than £36,000 and the best-paid state-sector headteacher gets £86,000.

So beneath politicians’ flannel about the importance of our teachers, is there a painful truth? Are teachers taken for granted?

‘Less attractive’ role

Many appear to think so. We report exclusively this week on a survey by primary school leaders’ body AHDS which, with more than 2,500 replies from all levels of teaching and beyond, gives a rare and detailed insight into the mood of the profession in Scotland.

When asked about how to resolve staffing crises around the country, pay comes up repeatedly. But not in a remotely money-grabbing way - this is about a sense of fairness, of being valued, with supply teachers seen as getting a particularly raw deal. “The role is less attractive now than ever before,” said one school leader - a view echoed time and again.

“We can’t compete with higher salaries and more attractive packages in other employment sectors,” observed another.

The SNP’s manifesto for yesterday’s Holyrood elections held the door ajar for Teach First, the English scheme that fast-tracks graduates who might otherwise be attracted by more lucrative professions. It has been repeatedly rejected north of the border, but some survey respondents had started thinking way outside the Scottish educational box. One suggested that antipathy to Teach First was not uniform, that it could attract professionals with families, who could not afford to pursue a postgraduate qualification.

But that’s a battle for another day. For now, one school leader captured the collective mood with his or her five-word remedy for the staffing crisis: “Stop treating teachers like shite.”

It would be nice if the market were to agree.

This is an article from the 6 May edition of TESS. This week’s TESS magazine is available in all good newsagents. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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