To think midwife’s get a rubbish deal compared to teachers?

They are two completely different jobs so you are comparing apples to oranges.

And the pay is rubbish. Worse than teaching and worse than midwifery! Workload is horrendous and getting worse.

Become a midwife then teach at a Uni? 32 days holiday plus you get paid at lecturers rates, lots of WFH etc

This isn’t entirely accurate. The extra shifts they pick up yes they get laid for. The shifts they get off late, sometimes hours late, and the times they work a 13 hours shift and have to work through their lunch, they don’t get paid any extra for.

Midwives get paid for their overtime.

Teachers don’t…and on average work 26.5 hours over their paid time every week.

In my 30s I trained to be a teacher. On paper it seemed like an attractive career.
The reality? Teaching until 3.30pm, meetings or after school sessions until 5.30pm. Marking sometimes until midnight. Most of the school holidays spent creating resources, teaching material, lesson plans etc
Day to day teaching dealing with behaviour issues, abuse, safeguarding issues. So many politics to deal with and the ongoing Ofsted stress.
I left the profession.
My friend is a midwife and finds it emotionally difficult. Bad hours, emotionally demanding. She experiences some very emotionally distressing situations with drug addicts, people in extreme poverty etc

It takes a very special person to do either of these professions.

The odd part is the comparison between teaching and nursing constantly. They aren't even similar!.

Yes, exactly what I meant-they are so different.

I could understand if you couldn't choose between nursing/midwifery/radiography/physiotherapy/occupational therapy as they all have a similar feel, but to do either midwifery or teaching (and nothing else) seems strange to me.

The odd part is the comparison between teaching and nursing constantly. They aren't even similar!.

I dont think it is odd at all. It is fairly typical of intelligent women from working class families to go into teaching or nursing as that is what they know.

I haven't read the whole thread but I used to be a teacher and considered leaving to train as a midwife for a long time. In the end (and after speaking to lots of midwives throughout my pregnancies!) I concluded it was just as bad. So my advice would be neither of those things.
I did quit teaching.

She has LITERALLY said right there that midwives don’t have the same amount of admin.
Doesn’t mean one job is easier than the other.
why not just be supportive of each other, they’re both tough jobs in an increasingly challenging climate?

Quite.

Both jobs are hard. It's not a competition !

So do midwives have to grade test papers each night, mark classwork and homework, plan lessons, contact students and parents about this and that and teach classes in the day time?

It’s not a case of an unexpected death every shift. But midwives deal with terminations for fetal anomalies, earlier miscarriages and preterm births which often don’t have good outcomes. Plus obstetric emergencies which while don’t (thankfully!) often lead to death but can be really stressful to deal with and (rightfully so) are often investigated afterwards, which isn’t easy to switch off from.
These Things happen a lot more frequently than you’d expect. Most midwives deal with these things pretty regularly if you work on the delivery suite.

Midwives entry band 6.

nurses band 5 lower than midwives
not to mention junior doctors salary which roughly starts on average £14 an a
hour.

I really hope it's not true that midwives deal with death every shift - it isn't as common as that surely?
Certainly there'll be life and death decisions being made every shift, but I hope there isn't a mother or baby dying as often as that.

Exactly, the two jobs are so different that makes it hard to compare.

It also then seems odd that those are the only two jobs in the world that the OP's sister (who hasn't come on the thread herself to speak to any of the teachers or midwives to ask about possibly the biggest career decision of her life) is considering. I'd say there was a huge pool of help here!

I'd say most teachers wouldn't want to be a midwife and probably vice versa. It's a completely different skill set with very different pulls and draws to them. Having the holidays might be massively important to one person, yet the medical pull might be huge to another.

Unless the decision between only those two jobs has come from a, 'awww babies are cute, but ohhh, so are 5 year olds playing in the sand' line of thought.

I agree it is not useful to compare. Midwives deal with life and death every shift. Obviously after dealing with a stillborn baby and a woman losing pints of blood, or dealing with a family finding out their much awaited newborn has a condition which means they will walk or talk is not something that be just switched off after the shift.

Presumably as a midwife you go to work and do your shift and that’s it? Teachers are working constantly during term time even on days off and many of the holidays are spent preparing for classes.
It’s not helpful to compare jobs like this - join a union and campaign for better pay and conditions.

We definitely don’t live like people on minimum wage with me earning nearly 50k working 4 days a week. But knowing that I could work 2 days a week and take home more than TAs/shop workers working full time means I am very grateful for my pay packet, rather than seeing myself as hard done by.

I would say similar, I work part time and enjoy it and probably earn the same as working full time in the sort of jobs I could get without completing retraining (which would be expensive in itself) I did used to work more days and didn’t enjoy it so much then and I do find the full timers seem to be much more prone with suffering burnout. A few I know recently in exactly the same role as me have just had enough and left completely. Financially it does have a significant impact on us and we have to live more like someone on the minimum wage but it’s a worthwhile compromise

Sometimes teachers, especially primary teachers, do need to stand up for themselves a bit more. Not a chance would I do SENCO without the allowance. I have the qualification, no other teachers in the school do do, it's not a popular role - clearly I have the upper hand there as the school needs someone to do it. I've asked for a pay rise in the past before too and got it but don't know any other teachers who have. I've always worked in bog standard, underfunded schools. I work very hard but I'm clear it's a career to pay the mortgage, not something I do just out of the good of my heart.

I stay in tracing because I do enjoy it and on 4 days a week I still earn almost 50k a year (upper pay scale teacher with TLR). Not many other jobs I could do that in without taking a massive initial pay cut that we can’t afford, so dropping a day a week at work was the better solution.

I know. I left in 2021 but got about 4k for SENCO/deputy head in a 2 form primary work h a full class teaching responsibility!!

Our senco doesn't even get a TLR!