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

Definitely this. My mum was a primary school teacher and needed the salary year round for all 12 months.

Well, I did my PGCE in 2015. I kept in touch with 5 people from my course.

3 have left teaching and are in other careers, 1 has left the workforce altogether and is a SAHM, 1 has gone abroad to teach in the Czech republic.

2 others that I didn't stay in touch with left before the course finished.

I married a teacher, and we've both left.

Many of the teachers I met whilst I was teaching have now left.

Yes teachers are paid for 195 days but that is split over 12 months so technically they are not paid for the holidays and cannot legally be directed to work in that time, although many do.

Yes, pretty much any job needs "a degree". The degree can be in underwater basket weaving as long as you've got one. My job requires a degree, it happens to be law and then a PGCE but it could have been anything.

There's not many jobs that require a dedicated, vocational degree and pay so poorly.

Doctor- £105-145k
Dentist- £70k-110k
Pharmacists- £65k
Solictor- £60-150k
Vet- £50-75k
Architect- £65k+
Civil Engineer- £70k+

The only exception is nurses and social workers (also, by some super weird coincidence, heavily female dominated).

Police officers, who can join at 18 (although some choose to do a policing degree) typically earn more.

Today I’ve seen my neighbours in our gardens as I’ve been popping out to hang out washing, water plants and so on.
I’ve also done about 90 mins marking and about to get back to it. I haven’t mentioned to my neighbours that I’m going to go inside and mark. That would be weird. To them they probably think I’m having a day pottering in and out of the garden.

So they've categorically told you that once they've finished their DIY, they won't be marking books or planning lessons into the evening, they're just going to watch TV with their feet up?

It’s just semantics. They’re paid a salary split into 12 like many of us are.

It would be great if you invited them to post on this thread-would be interesting to get their perspective.

maybe I talk to them.

How do you know what these teachers do in the evenings after school, in their home?

Every single day on the news there are articles about how graduates are struggling to find jobs. Hundreds of graduates with good degrees from good universities competing for one McDonalds or supermarket shelf-stacker jobs. Loads of threads on Mumsnet every week about how their graduate child or their child’s graduate friends are applying for hundreds of jobs a month with no success.

Yet teaching has a critical shortage. They have a recruitment and retention crisis. The government can’t recruit anywhere near the numbers they need for core subjects and increasingly, pretty much every subject now despite throwing out some generous bursaries for some subjects.

This should tell you how unappealing the job of teaching is to so much of the general public and new graduates. They clearly don’t see teaching as a job that is adequately well-paid for the hours put in or for the inflexibility or the workload or nature of the job. They do not see the extra days holidays as adequately compensatory for the pay and conditions and workload. It’s actually irrelevant whether a few people think teaching is a “good deal” and “good pay”. The market doesn’t seem to think so, neither does the general public considering that the profession has a critical staffing crisis.

As a side note, I think the biggest disparity we are going to see in the next decade is between people who can WFH vs those who have to do front line jobs so can’t. Teaching, policing, doctors and nurses, emergency services, labourers, cleaners, drivers, carers, maintenance workers etc. are going to have to start offering a premium in salary (for jobs that require the same level of skills, qualifications and educational level) to offset the advantages of working from home. The demand for working from home is so high now for obvious reasons and non-WFH jobs are struggling to recruit. Everyone wants a WFH job. The market will have no choice but to start having to pay higher salaries for jobs that cannot be done from home.

Sorry; a regular amount of paid leave and some unpaid leave.

Your sums assume that teachers don’t get any paid leave. They get a regular amount of unpaid leave and, unusually, some unpaid leave. Both paid and unpaid leave are known as school holidays. This is causes some
misunderstanding from people who don’t understand and resentment from people who have no clue.

But it's a pointless comparison because no teacher works their directed hours only. It would be impossible to get the job done.

Yes, its approaching double what average incomes are in the uk excluding the south east (teachers in inner and outer london are on dufferent payscales too). Loads and loads of degree educated people who've then done career specific training on top are only earning 40k, 45k.

I think teachers imagine loads of people are on huge 80k,100k salaries. They are not. The average salary data for the UK tells a very different story, its a really small proportion of uk workers earning big salaries and the vast majority are on between 25 and 39k.

Salary is based on 46 weeks per year, we are paid for holidays but not 6 weeks in summer. In the old days, this meant we didn’t get a pay cheque in August, but it changed to make it so the monthly payments were less but paid every month for 12 months. This has been the norm for so long now. But essentially, whatever the salary is, it would be 6 weeks higher if it weren’t a teaching job.

Teachers get holiday pay on top of the 39 weeks though - I think it's 4 weeks plus bank holidays - so let's say 5 weeks - so in your examples the teacher would still get more than the architect but there would be a less dramatic difference.

Teachers are not working unpaid hours. They are fulfilling the part of their conditions of employment which requires them to work outside the 1265

Of course teachers are paid for holidays. Their holiday entitlement is the same as anyone else's - it just has to be taken during the school holidays.

Teachers have to be available for work on 195 days of the year - 190 days teaching and 5 days inset. In that time, they can be directed to work for 1265 hours.

Teachers also have a clause in their contract/ conditions of employment which states that they must work outside of/in addition to the 1265 hours in order to complete their duties ie planning, marking etc

Teachers are paid a salary which is divided into 12 monthly installments.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Teachers' unions/teachers already campaign for smaller class sizes and reduced workload alongside better pay.

If you were a teacher, why did you leave the profession?

I don't doubt your daughter works lots of unpaid hours. Many GPs do.

But that's not really the point being made. Nobody is saying teachers are the only profession that works beyond their contracted hours or that they work harder than everyone else. If GPs' contracted hours also don't reflect the reality of the job, then exactly the same argument applies to them. It's not a competition over who has it worse.
Acknowledging the workload in one profession doesn't diminish the workload in another.

No one gets paid for their holiday. That's why you can get accrued leave paid back when you leave a job part way through the holiday year.

But if you consider that they aren't getting paid for holidays they get an absolutely whopping starting salary. An nqt gets 30k for 39 weeks a year so £154 a day. A part 2 architect (same level as nqt) might get 27k for 48 weeks a year £113 a day. Both of those roles will be doing masses of over time. The teachers will get paid to do their cpd but the architects will be expected to do it in their own time.

I know lots of teachers and used to be one, no one works throughout all their holidays maybe a day or two at the end of each holiday. I think personally teachers are wrong to complain about pay and should be agitating for smaller class sizes to reduce their marking workload to fit into ppa time and reduce the day to day stress of managing so many children.

Yes, I said this. Jobs have changed for lots of people too. Hence my children doing lots of unpaid overtime.

^ This is spot on!

Even a shift worker in a factory gets extra money for working irregular hours.

For secondary school teaching, typically you work 10 to 11 hours per one day you work. So a full time teacher will work 50 to 60 hours in term time. Then there is always work to be done in holidays too. That's very irregular hours!

And then there's the fact you get sworn at and spoken to appallingly by pupils sometimes, not to mention the abuse you get from some parents who think their child can do no wrong...

Teaching is a tough job that no one does for the money, as the money isn't that great given the stress the job can entail.

I spent 10 years working in a high stress engineering job which was much easier than teaching in terms of mental load.

But... saying that, I do know of some teachers that are in it for the holidays, and do the absolute minimum. Thankfully this is a minority though.