...to think teachers DO get paid over the holidays?

well yes, of course. I’m trying to figure out the bit about part time teachers getting 100% of the holiday.

Think of some of the holidays as school closure, rather than a person's holiday allowance.

So a PT teacher gets all of the school closure days.
Part of this is their pro-rata holiday allowance. The rest is their school closure days.

In most schools, ime, bank holidays etc are not given as pro rata - they are when school is closed. If you are PT and work on a bank holiday day, you don't go in. If you are PT and don't work the bank holiday day, then you are still off but you don't get time back for that day, or another day off at another time

£46, 500 sounds great, but unfortunately UPS3 is unobtainable for most teaching staff. It should be for more experienced teachers but in the last three schools I have worked in no one is on it and only a couple are on UPS1 and usually have to do on a responsibility such as maths and English. Earlier in my career TLRs were given for these but as budgets have been squeezed this only seems to happen in larger schools. This is primary I’m referring to , I think secondary is probably better paid in this respect .

I never say my pay is more but I’ve been teaching nearly 20 years and would say for the first ten years amongst my non teaching peers I held my own salary wise but most now out earn me considerably.

What %-age of schools are still LA maintained. Aren't most Academies now?

My school is LA maintained.

Correct

How are you way behind graduate peers after 15 years? I am an LA Ed psych.

Outside London upper end of standard pay scale is 46500 odd as of September. If you go into leadership or headship, pay is higher.

Ed psychs (not in management) earn 52 k or up to 57k if they can prove their excellence and get additional points. We have to do at least 7 years training and usually longer. We also work a 48 week year not a 39 week year as this whole thread has insisted teachers are not paid for their extra weeks of holiday (and yes I know, as a former teacher, that you work some of the holidays). So week by week you are earning more or at least as much as an EP who has done an additional doctorate degree, surely?

I think most public sector graduate workers earn similar ball park amounts. Nurses, police, youth workers.

I mean we can all look at office workers in London and get envious at the pay. (I mean I don't, because I don't want that lifestyle and I like my public service pension). But then there are factory workers, supermarket workers, care workers, nursery teachers, people in bar or hotel work who look at our salaries and probably feel envious. I don't get it. Nobody forced you to teach. Go and be an office worker if that's what you envy.

It's more than semantics though. It's important to understand because as pp have said, teachers 15 years in are way behind graduate peers in many careers in terms of pay.

I know people respond to that by talking about people they know who work harder/ are more qualified / more impactful but in general it's a fact.

So we have more days off - if we really were paid FOR our holidays we would be worth very little.

And the upside is we don't have to pay loads of childcare for our own families in the holidays!

It's very simple.

They get paid for, say 10 months, but that total amount for 10 months is split over 12 months. So they do't get paid over the holidays, technically.

So, using random figures: paid £120 per month for 10 months = £1200 paid over 12 months in 12 equal monthly salary payments = £100 per month

They're underpaid, basically, for the work they do.

You mean give you all unpaid leave.

Or give us all more holidays!!!

Yes. It's just semantics. And they get shit loads of holidays.

But they do work bloody hard!

It’s definitely linked. You are in breach of contract and therefore your employer can withhold a day’s pay to reflect that. Because teacher contracts under the SPCD don’t explicitly say “you are only paid for term time plus statutory holiday entitlement” teachers in England, unlike Scotland, are technically paid for all the holidays (and weekends) and it’s up to them to choose when and where they work outside of 1265 hours on 195 days where they can be “directed” to get their job done. This works in our favour when it comes to strikes or unpaid leave as our deductions end up being smaller than colleagues in Scotland. Unfortunately, it means that the whole “not paid for the holidays” thing is technically untrue, even though it reflects that any increase in directed time days would have to be renegotiated in terms of salary as it would be a fundamental change to our working arrangements.

In Scotland you get the paid statutory holiday in your contract. We don't in England.

In Scotland, we lost 1/235 of our annual salary for each strike day.

Exactly. And if I work 5 mornings while the 5 afternoons are my own time I still only get 5 mornings off in the holidays as the afternoons are still my own time.

@Takoneko - are you sure that isn’t because strike pay is not related to the employment contract, as a strike is technically a breach of contract? To link strike pay to your legal, contractual entitlement is to be confusing two different issues, I would have thought.

There’s still clearly a lot of misunderstanding. Admittedly because it is odd and confusing.

Teacher contracts were negotiated on the basis that the remuneration was deemed fair for teachers to be directed to work 195 days per year and for the rest to be “holidays” and that this covers their statutory holiday entitlement. That doesn’t mean that they are only paid for statutory holiday entitlement. It isn’t that simple. When teachers miss a day of work unpaid (for example when taking strike action) pay is deducted at 1/365th of salary per day not 1/223rd (which would be the case if we were only paid for 195 days plus 28 days statutory leave.) Teachers are paid for every day of the year but are only contracted to be directed for work on 195 of them.

I'm not talking about pay though, I'm talking about part-time teachers benefiting from extra time off work, comparatively. Theoretically a teacher could work one day a week and still have 65 days holiday a year
I'm not understanding this. Say I work Mon-Wed. In the school holidays, I still get Mon - Wed as holidays. Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun are not "holidays" for me as they are just days I don't work, same as all the other Thurs-Sundays that there are in a year.

School staff don't get paid holidays.

I have a specialist role and get unqualified teacher salary.

So it's 40 weeks a year pay and 4.6 weeks holiday pay. I get 44.6 weeks pay.

But it's paid equally over 12 months.

So months where I work the full days I get less than my actual hourly salary and months where I don't work (august) I still get the same.

The annual salary reflects the number of hours I work in the school. It doesn't reflect any extra hours I do, days I work during days I'm not paid for (so any of the days beyond the 40 weeks I'm physically paid to be in).

It's exactly the same for teachers on the main teachers scale. However their salary reflects the number of weeks school runs for and holiday pay. They do MUCH more. So the pay is very low for the number of hours they actually work.

With a degree in biochemistry Adesola could get paid £29k tax free to train as a teacher.

@MasterBeth - you were asking what relevance the hourly rate has to a salaried employee. The relevance is the National Minimum Wage (and probably/possibly other areas of employment law, I don’t know - you’d need to speak to an employment law specialist if you were genuinely interested). It must be possible (as in, it is the law) to work out from your employment contract what you basic annual hours are in return for your salary. From that you can calculate your basic hourly rate. If you are working so many extra hours on top of the number of hours set out in your contract that your actual hourly rate falls below the minimum wage, that is illegal.

As PP have explained, teachers are paid for the contracted 195 days plus statutory holiday amount and bank holidays, which leaves approximately 8-9 weeks "unpaid". These weeks are not specified.

During some of this uncontracted time there will be tasks that need completing. Eg, my first "contracted" day of the new academic year is 4th September. That's a non-pupil day but my contracted hours have been filled for that day with training. I went in today and during the summer break the classrooms have been cleaned and all furniture moved and stacked. I spent several hours putting it back and still have some display boards, labels etc to do plus planning. It would be impossible to get this done before the students come back without doing it during non-contracted time.

Because of the additional length of non-contracted time compared to professions requiring a similar level of training, responsibility etc, teacher pay is comparatively lower. Despite having to work some non-contracted time, most of us still get a lot more holiday than those other professions. For many teachers, this extra holiday time used to make up for the lesser pay. Increasingly, however, many teachers are preferring to leave the profession (and ita holidays) hence the problems with recruitment. The longer holidays are no longer much of an incentive for keeping people in the job.

I have to add I’d actually prefer if the summer holidays were reduced ( I might be the only one 😂- just because 3 -4 weeks off for me in the summer is enough to rest and holiday- it can end being more expensive as I tend to spend a lot more money during the holidays than term time).

I always understood it as I’m paid for approx 9+ months and the salary is split over 12 monthly payments. The pros for me are that it allows me to manage money better if I was just paid for 9 months I might have to pay more tax because of the salary increase each month and might be tempted to spend the increase in salary! And would have to ensure I saved enough to cover the non months/ weeks of payment.
Because as I understand the salary would increase if the school holidays were reduced on this basis as it is 195 days we are actually paid for.