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

You cannot compare the teaching your parents apparently did to modern teaching. It has changed beyond belief.

No, my views are not as hard as I have come across. I was pretty upset by people calling me a liar. However, I do know that all teachers don’t work these hours but some do. There are so many jobs that require people to do extra hours. One of my children is a GP and nobody would believe the extra hours that they put in. My child only works part time because otherwise they would probably have to work for a lot of the weekend. They often leave work at 8.
As I said, my parents were both teachers and we often went camping for most of the summer holidays. My father taught special needs ( then called ESN (classed below 70 IQ)). My mother taught needlework and other than marking exam papers once a year, put in no extra time. My sister was a primary teacher but gave up after having children. I always remember her having lots of free time when she was teaching. I do remember constant moaning about the job from my parents. They weren’t great parents either. I know times have changed but they have for everyone. I think there is burn out in a lot of jobs.

There are so many variables in teaching though - what you teach, who you teach, the culture of the school, the Head, what the support staff look like.
I worked HR for several years for a trust and teachers work load is very variable. Some are working tons of hours outside of school and honestly some aren’t. Being a DT or PE teacher and being an English teacher is very different. I had a maths teacher who was very happy as almost all their homework had gone online, they encouraged peer marking in class, she had data to analyse, but her marking now was minimal. Most of her lesson plans were set by a very enthusiastic maths director to be standardised. The same wouldn’t be true in English who would still have masses of work in and out of school.
So does one teacher get paid lots more than the other?

I think the best change they could make just now is increasing the quantity and quality of support staff. It’s very easy to cut those staff and keep their wages/hours down so you won’t attract what you need. I had TAs leave to be supermarket pickers because the hours/money was better. One school had appointed an 18 school leaver and was having her do ‘behaviour intervention’ work, she just couldn’t have the experience/skills to deal with that. She left after a few weeks.
If you let teachers just teach and staff the other issues it would work much better to start with.

When that happens I shall take great delight in pointing out that they brought it on their own children by making all the teachers who've left the profession feel so disregarded and belittled that they had enough. I might even bookmark some of these threads as a reminder!

Yep, and then people will be slagging off schools and teachers even more because their child isn’t taught by a consistent subject specialist, or their needs not met because their teacher doesn’t know them.

100% this. Very rarely works past 5.30pm @Ionlymakejokestodistractmyself ? That’s at least 9.5 hours if she gets in at the latest reasonable time, possibly with 30 mins break (but probably has to do duty, detentions, deal with upset kids or lost locker keys in that time). That’s 45 hours a week. My contract is (unbelievably) for 32.5h/week. By your own ‘evidence’ of her manageable work life, you’ve proved that your friend works quite a lot of unpaid overtime.

Your last point is the most crucial of all IMO. When people jump to slag off teachers and discount the fact that so many are leaving the profession due to reaching their limit with the working conditions and expectations, don't they realise it's their child's education that will consequently suffer? That the teacher recruitment and retention crisis is very real, and if it continues on the same trajectory, in ten years or so, while pupil numbers rise by an expected 20%, fewer teachers mean class sizes will have to increase, more unqualified staff will need to be used and certain subjects at secondary level will have be dropped. And that's just on the same trajectory. If the Govt goes ahead with plans to offer more mainstream provision to SEN pupils and that current teachers will train up to take on an increased specialist workload, even more will leave.

Your ‘lucky’ friend is likely to only be paid for the teaching hours of 32.5 hours a week plus a generous half an hour unpaid lunch - this would put her directed in school time as roughly 8:30-3:30 each day.

She’s likely to get into school at the very latest 8am, as any later wouldn’t give her the time to be as organised as you say she is. So 2.5 hours per week before school. Then you say she finishes at 5:30pm each day? So 2 hours per day after school is another 10 hours a week.

So potentially your friend is working a minimum of 50 unpaid hours per month. Is that ‘reasonable duties’ outside of her working hours. I’m not sure we should envy her because she’s not doing even more unpaid labour during her holidays. And I bet she is - you just don’t see it.

Loads have, loads are planning to, loads are off sick.

Others stay because they are trapped by the salary or huge mortgage payments, others feel trapped by the holidays.

Some are in better situations than others-like their boss, work close to home, don’t have family commitments so are willing to give more hours to the job, so don’t feel like they are always failing.

People are all different.

I think if your profession was continually bitched about by the press, across social media, even by your own government, you’d probably try to defend it as well.

This is the key. There was a point some years ago where almost every morning I'd wake to my clock radio to hear schools and teachers being slagged off by some government minister. I think that period was when parental support for schools and teachers started to deteriorate. Education student became the hot topic, the press joined in, and suddenly the job became more difficult.

I know nothing about the jobs my friend do, so I don't spout opinions on them or tell them that they have it easier/harder/whatever.
But everyone seems to think they know what a teachers job is, and they (understandably to a degree) feel invested in what schools and teachers are doing. And with the advent of social media, we had to see a while load of misinformed criticism. It's really hard to read this stuff and not defend oneself.

Support staff are heroes and woefully underpaid. You deserve so much more.

I haven’t left because I adore the job. I do a lot of unpaid overtime (yes, I actually do). But, for me, the pros outweigh the cons.

I do know that if it wasn’t for the holidays, I wouldn’t be able to cope with the burnout and I would leave. For the same reason, I could never work as a doctor, nurse or social worker, as I think the inflexibility and burnout would be as bad/worse but without the holidays. I couldn’t do it.

What you’re saying is, not all teachers are burning out. Yep, I would agree with that. The fact is, however, that a worrying number of teachers are burning out and are leaving. Your point of view seems rigid, in not accepting that this is a very real problem that is literally damaging kids’ education as we speak.

Teachers are paid a salary
Support staff are paid pro rata
Both are paid on a monthly basis
To be support staff sucks as the actual pay is so much lower than what is advertised
I work term-time only and am top of my scale so will never earn more than that and pay never keeps up with inflation
This is why you find many support staff are female with caring responsibilities
We need term time only so put up with poor wages

It's silly to compare an employed role with a self-employed one.

The cleaner will have many unavoidable costs of doing her job that she has to meet herself from her income - the same/equivalent ones of which an employee's employer will cover as standard, independently of their actual salary.

Also, don't forget job security. A cleaner may have 12 clients and receive 12 phone calls in one day telling her that she's no longer needed/they can no longer afford her, reducing her future income instantly to zero. What employed professional job can you think of where you would ever run that risk?

I have a normal job now, after 5 years of annualised hours contracts. Ive never been a teacher.

I work 225 days a year as I get 104 weekend days, 8 bank holidays and 28 days annual leave. Which is fairly standard for a professional role. So its 195 / 225 which is more 0.87 FTE. (If you believe its a pro rata role and not a full time contract structured differently)

But if this is the case why haven’t they all left ?

If you say so!

Well my parents and sister were both teachers. Sorry.

I should give up trying to defend the profession too. I'm not even a teacher! But my partner is a dedicated one and it really grinds my gears when teachers are disparaged for daring to point out that they don't get paid for holidays and that there are lots of cons to the job. Honestly, the best thing he can do is join the exodus and then I can sit back and enjoy the same MN members who delight in slagging off teachers now starting threads like "My kid's school's science dept has only one teacher because they can't fill the posts" or "My kid's class is being taught by a constant stream of supplies" or "My kid is now one of 40 in a class" because I know it's largely the fault of parents like them that teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

So @Yetone , do you honestly believe all the teachers who say they are struggling or collapsing under the workload, many of whom are leaving the profession as a result, are just wrong? Why would they say it? Why would they leave, if it wasn’t their lived experience? What, actually, is your point?

I was a teacher for over three decades before retiring. The problem with teachers pay is while on the surface it looks a good salary it doesn’t take account of the overtime hours teachers have to do just to do their job. As the years progressed this became more and more of an issue as schools, which actually means the teachers, were and are expected to do more and more.

An example of this:
For the first twenty five years of my career a speech and language therapist would come into school weekly and provide targeted speech and language therapy to this children who needed it. This worked well and the children made good progress.

A few years before I retired this was withdrawn by the council LEA (to save money) and replaced with school staff - teachers and TAs - giving speech and language sessions. How did this work? Well at the beginning of each term the S&L therapist would come in for tow days and assess the children and then give us the plan to teach the S&L sessions for the coming term (usually via Talk Boost or Nuffield). This meant either the teacher or TA having to take out children for small group or individual S&L sessions. It takes up so much time and energy to do this. To check the resources, assess the pupil, decide nest steps, talk to parents etc. This was all done by a qualified S&L therapist before but is now done by unqualified teachers and TAs who have had three INSET sessions about teaching S&L. The actual therapist goto university to qualify as a S&L therapist. How does this help the children.

I could go on about children with other additional needs and how the teachers and TAs are expected to plan for, monitor, assess and make progress when in the past other professionals came into school and did this. It has all fallen to school staff in the name of cutting costs. Parents truly have no idea what school is like now for the adults working in them unless they have school staff in their families and see it firsthand.

The paperwork for SEND is mainly completed by the class teacher, the planning, the assessment, the meetings, the research of topics (how can you teach The Saxons unless you have researched it) the preparation of resources, the marking…….. I could go on.

I worked 50/60 weeks in term time and prepped in the holidays. If you are moving classrooms and year groups then a minimum of two of the six weeks summer holiday are gone on sorting and preparation.

Teaching as a career is not something I would recommend to anyone now, it is just too much and that is why people are leaving after a few years teaching. You can earn the same money and still have a life in another job.

The pay doesn’t reflect the amount of hours needed just to keep your head above water.

I'd say it's a very good salary - certainly not one that in isolation could be stated to be a poor salary. Whether the conditions of that particular job mean that many teachers don't believe that it's sufficient remuneration is a different matter; but as salaries go, it's a very, very good one.

Loads of us have degrees and don't earn anything like that amount. Plenty of jobs that don't really even need a degree will still demand one, but won't actually pay concomitant with it.

Of course you do. Why is it every time that a poster is challenged about sharing misinformation about teachers, they suddenly whip out an army of close relatives who just happen to be teachers too? Every time! 😂

I didn't realise that salaries in Scotland were much higher until I read this thread and looked it up. We start newly qualified on 43k and progress to 55k within 5 years. I am guessing many posters are in other parts of the UK so it's quite a different scenario when worked out this way. I've never looked at it like that. That's interesting.

That may be your interpretation but not mine and not theirs. They are my neighbours and I do talk to them. They said it was really good being able to start at 4 on the decorating.
I come from a family of teachers. Parents, sister etc. My parents always complained about doing extra work of which they did very little. Times have changed but many many jobs require extra work.