Teacher lunch hour!

In some areas there are paid lunchtime supervisors.

Legally in the UK you cannot work more than 6 hours without having a 20 minute break.

Not in secondaries in Scotland. Would be SLT

Whether teachers are paid for holidays isn’t really relevant as they get an annual salary, which is paid throughout the year.

Teachers are only paid for the statutory amount of holiday - the rest of the time is unpaid.

Of my 28 days of summer holiday, 7 of them were spent working 10 hours per day in school setting up a new classroom and other resource provision. That’s 70 hours of my unpaid holiday. It doesn’t account for time spent working at home during the holidays on lesson planning/SEND documentation/ data analysis.

I’m on this thread as it’s my unpaid day off. I’ve worked 5 hours so far today, having completed 4 days in work 8-6.30, and still have about 2 hours worth to complete. Children may go home at 3.30 but that’s not the end of the day. We have meetings, parent meetings, after school clubs before we even start on our own work.

Yes, all teachers do. Because our number one priority is keeping children safe. If a child is hurt then obviously that is awful in itself, but it also costs schools/ LAs huge sums of compensation is applicable.

No, they are completing UNPAID supervision of children for 30 minutes and then taking the remaining 30 minutes unpaid for lunch/ marking/ preparing afternoon lessons/ dealing with parent messages/ dealing with pastoral issues/ managing children that the MDAs can’t manage. Apart from any time actually eating, this is all unpaid work.

Your complaint is with your employer, not with us or the parents.

But yeah, some will sympathise on here and others less so - the second group probably also in a job with poor management and/or demanding clients and/or unrealistic workload, who also regularly work through their breaks (my own manager makes a point of scheduling meetings strategically over the 2 hours in which we are allowed to take our break, so we either get nothing or cannot take the full break. Yes, she is a nasty bit of work and it is burning me out, but predominantly because this is just the tip of the iceberg).

The post I was answering to clearly says that the issue is specific/worse for teachers. Or maybe I misunderstood - apologies if that’s the case.

Lolz nice one 😂

Schools have to balance their budgets and maximise the amount spent on teaching and learning. It’s much more efficient to use a resource already in the building to supervise lunches than paying expensive outside staff.

Tbh I think teachers could be doing much more ancillary work to free up resources. DH is a headteacher and teachers at his school do a lot of admin, cleaning, maintenance and catering tasks.

That means he has more resources to spend on DC.

When i was a primary school teacher my school had it's faults but lunchtime for teachers was protected time. None of us used to take the full hour, by the time you'd got yourself sorted for the afternoon lessons we had about 15 to 20 mins if that. We didn't have to supervise the kids as they were with the lunchtime supervisors. EYFS was a bit different it was a shorter lunch of 45 minutes but then they'd have some carpet teaching time so the TA would help set up anything needed for the rest of the afternoon.

Teachers need the full hour to eat something, go the loo and set up for the afternoon in their lunchbreak. Even then it can be a push.

Now I work in an office, I can go to the toilet whenever I like! If I choose to work through my 30 min lunchbreak I can, and leave work 30 minutes earlier. Absolute novelty after leaving teaching. Wouldn't go back to that thankless shitshow for all the money in the world.

No-one is saying it's worse for or specific to teachers.

This is a thread about teachers' T&C so your comparisons are beside the point.

@Cucy what would have happened if the teachers refused to do lunch duties?
We had a HT who tried to do this. The staff refused. She couldn't force them to do it.
Same with lunchtime clubs

Parents love their children but also find them exhausting. If you're doing it well, you're also constantly 'on' as a parent.

Parents are shattered by the end of the day and there are plenty of threads on here from Parents who are burnt out, exhausted and in need of a break.

And most of us have far, far fewer than 30 children.

Teaching is a being like being responsible for the full on parenting of 30 children for the hours that you are with them whilst trying to do a demanding professional job, with high expectations and a number of non negotiables, at the same time. That why it's tiring.

In most of the schools I know of in England.
The dinner ladies were put on a zero hour contract and had their hours reduced.

And the TAs all had their hours reduced as they apparently aren’t needed for the entire day 🙄

The teachers have then no choice but to cover lunch breaks.

My friend is a TA and is sometimes asked to cover the lunch break for £2 for 20mins.

Less than 5 years ago I was told as a teacher I could have a free lunch up to £2.40 to cover 30mins of lunch duty (everyone had to do at least 2 a week).

When we got our new timetable it was simply timetabled in as part of your work. Lunch and break duties.

You had to do at least 2 lunch duties and 4 break duties, as well as 2 morning and 2 afterschool duties each week.
I think primary schools are worse for it.

Love this

I was with you until this post. Why not just acknowledge that the issue of being expected to work during lunch break is not specific to teachers? No, I don’t supervise 30kids, but are you making several decisions a day that could cost your employer 100s of £ if you get it wrong? Others will be dealing non-stop with members of the public that are being rude to them. Others are having to be on their feet non stop. Etc.
We each choose our job knowing it has perks and downsides. Yes, working at lunch is no great, but definitely not specific to teacher or worse for teachers.

I didn't say I get half an hour to eat at my desk!
I said I do my half hour lunch duty on the playground, then I go back to my office to eat a sandwich at my desk, whilst working. If I'm lucky I might get 10 minutes to eat whilst I read and respond to emails before I have to go into a meeting, or deal with an incident or safeguarding issue, but it's usually more like 5.
I'm not complaining by the way. I think it's way more important for staff who are teaching all day to have a proper break, hence why SLT at my school do playground duty on a rota.

The point im making is that at my desk im not getting time away from my work stakeholders... People are still messaging me, stopping at my desk to speak to me. Im not getting an escape from that much as teachers aren't always managing an escape from the kids!

And i regularly am desperate for the loo because a meeting has run over and I cant leave it to go to the loo.

Dinner ladies

“Only working 8-3.30”… I didn’t realise people still believed teachers only do these hours!