AIBU to be confused about how teachers' salaries are paid?

But you're just describing a normal professional job. For everyone in professional roles the work is literally never done.

This is so not true for vast numbers of employees. I have a set 2 weeks in the summer I have to take, I have to also take set days at Christmas time and I am left with 4 days leave a year I can take when I request it but it has to be approved by employer in advance, and they aren't the most obliging in giving approval. My dh has a set 2 weeks in summer too but they don't co-incide with my two weeks so for years we didn't get a summer holiday together. He also had to work during the Christmas/NY period so again no holiday together. We were not unusual either.

How do you know what the teachers across the road are doing? Are you solely referring to when you see them at home, as opposed to being in school?

Teachers work at home, y’know 🤦‍♀️

DH swipes in at work. At the end of the year they get data of their working hours. He does 140% on site. He also takes phone calls at home and answers emails.
His pay has been comparable to a teacher without the holidays, which is why people in his profession try to make the switch.
He doesn’t get overtime. When he has cancelled a/l or gone in on a weekend he sometimes gets a voucher 😂

I would strongly encourage all teachers who can take a bit of a pay cut to go into tutoring.
It's been transformative for me.
Do I get paid any holidays? No.
Sick pay? No
Teacher pension? Also no.
Is it one of the best decisions I ever made for myself and my family? Absolutely.

I’m paid around the same as a teacher, my standard working day is 7.5 hours. I work extra time relatively regularly due to overrunning meetings, paperwork needing completing when days have been nothing but back to back meetings (eg I just did an hour of accounts checking to ensure my suppliers are paid on time, I don’t start work for another half hour in theory)

It’s a myth that other equivalent roles don’t require extra hours. I get 25 days annual leave. I would never say that my friends who are teachers don’t work hard or deserve their salaries, but they aren’t doing anything outside the ordinary at that level.

https://michaelt1979.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/are-teachers-paid-for-the-holidays/

This is quite an interesting read that goes into the details.

@MyLimeGuide There is also a difference IMO between primary and secondary.

Teachers are paid for 195 days of the year , 1265 hours of directed time split into 12 monthly payments
Yes they will be working far outside of that.

Not exactly. Contact hours are typically 900 per year. The other hours within 1265 are "directed time" Eg. Being asked to do a specific task, planning or training.

On top of those, teachers must do "any additional work required to discharge their duties" Which can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the school, and can lead to entirely unreasonable workloads.

All the 1265 really does is protects standard class teachers from a phone call at 2am from their boss.

We have to pay the teachers for doing PE, drama and music outside of normal school lessons, it's not something they do as part of their teacher jobs (as our primary school, anyway).

I'm pretty sure the contract is for 1265 contact hours plus the work around this necessary to do the job. A contract for 1265 hours a year would a) be ridiculous for a salaried, professional job (£43 an hour!) and b) not make any sense (when do you think teachers would do the prep, marking and admin aspects of their job? It's clearly in the non-contact hours that are expected to support the 1265 contact hours).

Working about 2,000 hours a year is entirely normal for most salaried, professional jobs paid at the same salary as a teacher.

You could say that about almost any professional job, to be fair. We're all working past our hours, it's a pretty normal state of play.

I think this is the sort of thing people mean when they ask why teachers don’t strike more over conditions rather than pay.

I struggle often to understand how teaching can be unionised and yet continue to end up doing this stuff while anyone at my work informed they were moving the office furniture over the weekend (while not having a union behind them) would just say no. I guess you feel pressure to do it if others will or if you’d feel like you were letting kids down but genuinely if you just said “no I’m not available to move classrooms in the summer holiday” what would happen? I presume you can’t be sacked or disciplined for not doing work that isn’t part of your employment contract?

Primary school teachers frequently have to do a classroom swap at the end of the year- this entails moving furniture, moving all the books and resources, completely changing display boards, alongside doing any deep cleaning we want to happen. We can't safely do any of that with 30+ children in the room, so we spend the first week or two of the summer holidays doing it.

The rules around industrial action mean that teachers are only allowed to take strike action about their own pay and conditions. We aren't allowed to choose any other battlegrounds to take industrial action over.

The major problem with teacher pay directives over the past few years is that the government haven't funded the pay increases they have settled on. This means that schools have to make cuts from other elements of the budget to pay salaries, which results in worsening conditions for students, and for everyone working in schools. Class sizes increase so that teachers can be made redundant to save money, TA positions are cut to save money, support for children is withdrawn because it can't be funded, children with additional needs are placed in situations where they can't cope and everybody's learning is disrupted, workload for everybody increases to unsustainable levels, and school buildings fall into disrepair. Teachers want schools to be properly funded so that children's needs can be met.

The point of strike action is to bring about change, and for voices to be heard there needs to be a noticeable impact on everyday schedules. A teacher strike on a Saturday wouldn't be noticed by the world at large, but would just leave us with our work to do (unnoticed) on a Sunday.

Yes - Whether it should work that way or not most professions demand overtime and are increasingly looking to get more work from the same staff or the same work from less. It feels like something we should be able to commiserate over across the board vs having to get into a debate about who has it hardest.

I have a lot of sympathy for having to deal with the challenging kids (& parents), the utter lack of flexibility and the endless curriculum changes that seem to be governed largely by education ministers wanting to show they are doing something. I can see why people decide to leave as while it isn’t a terribly paid job it also isn’t brilliantly paid and it’s got elements that really are pretty shit. It just annoys the heck out of me teaching friends won’t acknowledge that they get amazing holidays and how helpful that is in particular if they have kids. It doesn’t stop the bad bits of the job being bad but refusing to admit that’s a good bit is just silly.

Surely the bottom line and the only thing of relevance is what it says on their P60 at the end of the year.

The teachers i have known will work hard to get it all done during term time so they can enjoy the holidays. But were all different i guess.

Exceptional, yes. Yet there is still a huge retention and recruitment crisis.

Secondary

My (state) school has longer school days, and more before/after school training than most. As a result swe only work 2 inset days and get the rest as time off, plus an extra couple of days due to the longer school days. So yes term times are intense, but I prefer it that way due to the extra time off.

I’m never markingexams or writing reports in holidays - our exams/assessments and data deadlines are all in term time. Again that makes term time crazy, but leaves the hols more free. So the work I do in the holidays is planning and resourcing - 3 weeks is just about enough for that. Having said that, I don’t have a leadership role. I expect I’d work more in the hols if I did.

This is such a moot point. I work as admin staff in a school and I work full year, some of my admin colleagues work term time only so get their salary pro rata.

Every full time teacher gets their full time advertised salary despite being essentially term time only.

In my eyes, even if you work the odd week or so in the holidays or a few days in half term, the holidays are exceptional if you are a teacher.

You must work mad hours in term time. 1 week out of the 13 is INSET days so that leaves 2 weeks for all the long and mid term planning, any exam/test marking, prepping resources, and writing reports.