AIBU? Working during annual holiday

And most definitely alot of people certainly not just teachers work in their personal time be it holiday or spare time.

None of our staff respond to parent emails ever. They do not give out their emails.
In the holidays you would only recieve a message from school if there was an emergency like a fire in school.
Only the DSL on the holiday rota would respond to an emergency.
Everything else gets an automatic response.

True for new teachers, but surely like any job you know what needs to be done after a few years and it all requires a lot less prep time, you'd hope so anyhow, certainly what I've witnessed with the teachers I know.

So 50 x 39 weeks is 1,950 hours. Divided by 48 weeks in a year, its about a 40 hour week. Divided by 44 weeks in a year, it's more like a 44 hour week.
The 48 or 44 weeks represents two reasonably ordinary years of an office job, one with a bit more, one with a bit less holiday per year.

So it is comparable to a 40k a year full time office job in terms of total hours. The problem is for a teacher those hours are very compressed into a gruelling term time. And the contact hours are very high energy and high skill, so I think they should be paid far far more!

The only point I'm making is that when I take a job I think 'how much do I have to work per year and how much money do I get per year'. I don't do that extra bit of martyrish point-making about how certain days are really my holidays or my directed hours or what have you so it seems somehow more egregious that I am working. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a comparable yearly salary divided by hours.

I would say teachers work 50 hours a week in term time. Across 39 weeks of term per year that is 390 hours of overtime or about 10 weeks (assuming a 40 hour week). Then they work in the holidays too. I worked very hard in my office job but not as hard as that.

I didn't say you shouldn't. I said it's unusual that parents don't have the teachers email address.

Their school email address, not their personal one. And like my work email address, it only gets checked in work hours!

I am very sure they do - they work very long hours.

I am not really interested in directed hours and whether things are described as pro rated or not. Fact remains teachers get 40k for fewer days work per year than a "full time 40k job" in an office would be. Even with weekend and evening working it's probably not as many total hours in the year as a 40k office job.

It is very stressful and they should be paid more - and there are lots of other kinds of ways people structure jobs, like shifts and contracts. But it just isn't a "full time job at 40k" because there are genuinely fewer days worked in the year than a full time job with the usual annual leave. Even if you work til 10pm solid every night in term time.

It feels more like when someone goes down to 4 days/week and gets a slightly lower salary. Doesn't mean they don't work evenings and weekends as unpaid overtime as this is normal in all professional roles. But they are paid for fewer hours in the year and in fact do work fewer hours than the 5 day a week colleague. You don't compare their 40k salary with their colleague's 50k salary and say oh poor so and so they are paid less. They are not working the same hours, so you say well it's swings and roundabouts.

The teacher saying "on a 40k job I should not have to work in my holidays" - I was just saying well it's a 50k job comparably, and maybe a tiny bit you do.

@Buggeroffboss

we can’t email teachers directly either - every communication has to go to a central office email

“Do other £40k jobs respond to comments or other members of staff during their annual leave”

yes HTH

Exactly.

Especially when other agencies work year round, meaning that sometimes information is needed etc.

People do life admin when it is convenient for them. That can be during the summer. It might be at 2am. That doesn’t mean they expect responses outside of business hours.

It's very normal in Scotland.

It has absolutely never been the case in any school I've worked in over 40 years that teachers should be available 24/7 in any circumstances.

Wer're allowed to have a life outwith teaching.

That's unusual these days.

Our school is if anythng too far the other way - messages can only be sent to one central email address and that gets a bounceback to say that messages won't be read until the first day of term - when I've been a class rep I've had issues where parents have had very reasonable clarification questions (e.g. about changes to uniform requirements) and no way to get answers until it's too late to be useful.

Other £40k jobs absolutely not but the expectation has always been that teachers work 24/7 in all circumstances. So while you're within your rights not to work on annual leave, you may well get criticised for it by colleagues and bosses.

I left teaching because if I wanted to work that much, which I don't, I could do it as a banker in London and earn millions.

Unless it's a safeguarding issue or similar, what action are you expecting a teacher to take in 6 weeks when they're not going to have any direct involvement with the child?

People are cheeky bastards. It wouldn’t occur to me to email teachers in the summer holidays.

Just have your OOO on and reply on the first day of term in September.

Of course I'm not.
I am absolutely saying that unless it's something that needs immediate attention they should not be doing so during school holidays.

Are you suggesting parents shouldn’t ever need to email teachers about any concerns about the education and wellbeing of their child? Because that’s what you seem to be implying by asking that question. I mean, come on…

What are you emailing about?

I’d just go by what your contract says

No parents at our school can email teachers directly even in term time.

From the parent’s perspective it’s not ideal that teachers don’t reply to emails for 6 weeks. I’m not sure there are any other jobs where people are off for so long and not expected to reply to emails and the person needing a response shouldn’t expect one within that period. Then school starts up and you have hundreds of emails and those emails from parents right are the start of the holiday likely get forgotten about or are no longer a priority.

You're fortunate to be in a job where that's possible - my last senior role paying that kind of amount, it simply wasn't possible to do the job effectively without sometimes doing significant extra hours outside of those contracted.

Some weeks I wouldn't have to, some weeks demanded 100 hours or pulling all-nighters and everything in-between. It wasn't about being "stupid" it was simply the way the industry worked and one person couldn't change that - even if as an organisation we said "that's not the way we are going to work", we'd have bankrupted ourselves within the year because it's how the industry operates - we were asked to bid for new work to tight timetables and you had to just be ready to put in the time to develop a proposal when the opportunities came up. If you didn't new business would dry up.

Ultimately I couldn't work like that and moved to a different industry (on a lower salary) that is much more 9-5.

Put your OOO and pick up when you return and being paid to work.

I'm a parent and wouldn't expect a reply.

I also would not look at works emails during my annual leave and phone and laptop are both switched off.