Do you think this is a feminist issue?

teachnottech, where do you get the 12 public holidays from?! I have counted 7 (in England).

We get 20 days annual leave, which is (I believe) the legal minimum. Many companies will give the minimum.

This means a total of 27 days, or 5 weeks and 2 days. So we work very nearly 47 weeks. We also have to work evenings and weekends as standard.

So it is actually very different from the teachers' 39 weeks of term time.

I am not going to say that teachers don't work hard overall, but it is nonsense to pretend that they don't have longer holidays.

I do think that it is a gendered issue that so much of teachers' work is not recognised contractually. Without getting into who works harder than whom, for me, the interesting point is the invisibilisation of necessary work, which is a classic women's issue.

Men often end up being women's bosses in both primary and secondary as they are subconsciously seen as worthy of promotion to management positions or 'breadwinner' type jobs in leadership, even when the people doing the promoting are female. Then the men in management positions further reinforce the idea that women just have to juggle their time.

Beardsareweird please tell us how you manage that. Are you primary or secondary? How long do you take to make resources / displays etc? How do you cope with changing expectations from senior leadership in terms of planning and assessment? As a pp says, you should run inset days on how to work those hours and no more - there are many of us who NEED to know.

Those are the terms of my contract Caroldecker - so it's certainly the case for all teachers in Scotland (centrally negotiated contacts).

All I can find after a brief search for England and Wales is "teachers annual leave co-incides with school closure time" and "is in accordance with the working time directive" - so 28 days including public holidays the remainder being school closure, I think. So neither of us quite right!

I think the issue of unpaid overtime being expected, is largely down to a mostly female, committed workforce doing what they felt needed to be done and a host of managers deciding that that meant everyone had to it (while busily screeching that learning had to be individualised to each chold and "one size fits all is ridiculous. People work best in different ways, make sure your outcomes are adapted to your learners").

I also agree that when men say they need more time, they get it but when women say the need more time they're accused of being ditzy, disorganised or wasting time.

Teachnot I am no expert, but I often read on here that teachers do not get paid holiday and the wage just covers the working hours, but spread over 12 monthly payments.
As other jobs get paid holiday, I used a 52 week flex.
If teachers are paid for holidays, then your comparison is correct.

I don't think the overtime is a feminist one per se but I do think the teaching profession in general has many issues which are concerning from a feminist point of view.

In my experience, when female teachers complain about workload impinging on family life (or, possibly, other leisure time too), other people (such as senior managers) make sympathetic noises but the general response is that juggling work/life balance is just one of those things that has to be endured. However, when male teachers complain about workload impinging on leisure time (or, possibly, family life too), other people (such as senior managers) try to take action by, for example, extending deadlines, eliminating minor tasks or trying to arrange some sort of assistance.

Women's time is expected to be compromised, men's not so much. Teaching is female dominated, even in secondary, but this may also be happening, disproportionately, to women in other professions too.

Beards you should do INSET training to tell others how to achieve that, you'd be raking it in. How do you think you manage it where many others do not?

This out of class work is necessary and an essential part of the job. You can't do the job at all if you don't do it.

I have been teaching for over 25 years and have never, ever worked a 60-70 hour week. I arrive for work at 7.30am and I leave at 5pm. I don't take work home with me, and I don't work in the holidays. Everything gets done and I manage my time well.

You need to remember that the "12 week holiday" includes all public holidays, 30 days annual leave and the remainder is unpaid 'school closure'. It's not a case of doing 39/52 x other salary as pro-rata to compare, because no-one should work 52 weeks a year.

Most professionals get 8-10 (sometimes up to 12) public holidays and 25-30 days annual leave. That's 5-6 weeks annual leave plus 1.5-2 weeks public holiday. Those professionals actually have 6.5 - 8 weeks worth of holidays. That means other professionals work 44- 45.5 weeks a year, compared with a teacher's 40 weeks.

Even those on statutory minimum leave (28 days, including public hols) only work 46.4 weeks of the year.

caroldecker it's 39 weeks not 30, so more like £37000 for full year I think, although my maths could be completely wrong.

I don't think it is a feminist issue, I think it is an extremely poor management issue. I am from a long line of teachers in a non UK country. They do not nearly work the hours UK teachers work and have longer holidays yet the education outcomes between the 2 systems are in a par according to international standards. Teachers are working much harder in the UK for not necessarily better outcomes so I completely believe it is an entirely flawed system.

Speakno - therefore their salary is higher - £28k for 30 weeks a year is c.£50k 'full' time. Very much a professional salary.

They are expected to put in free labour that simply isn't expected in most professions

I have never worked anything resembling my contracted hours

It's a real stretch to see this as a feminist issue. It's more an issue with teaching at the moment, and what is happening in schools and in the profession as a whole.

Traditionally there are a lot of far more 'feminine'/female dominant professions that are paid less in comparison to 'male' professionals. I don't imagine anyone is going to question that.

But for me it falls into the wider issue of many essential professions being underpaid - police, paramedics, fireman etc. Not women being underpaid per se.

TeiTetua teachers technically aren't paid for the holidays, their pay for term time only is divided across 12 months. So if you wanted teachers to work in their current holiday time you would expect to pay them for that time.

That's really interesting about the 'masculinisation' of working environments, Sparrowhawk. I've not seen it articulated quite like that before, but it makes a lot of sense.

In my industry (banking), it's not that women are expected to put in the effort above in a way that men aren't (or at least, to a greater degree than we do in the world in general ), so the way the OP phrased didn't to me seem to be overtly sexist. That said, in banking, it's very clear cut that the number of women falls off a cliff at a certain level of seniority. One of the (many) reasons for that is that the job starts to become an overwhelming, 80+ hour week type of thing, and so many women just can't accommodate that. The unpaid drudgery was expected of both sexes equally. But there's a much wider point to debate I think, and there are so many different factors at play in different industries.

I'd describe myself as a feminist, and work in a job which is male-dominated and earn at least the same, often more, than my colleagues.

Extra hours are expected and normal.

Personally, I don't think what you describe is a feminist issue. If you have a profession, or any level of responsibility, it comes with the job.

I think the extra hours are a feminist issue from the point of view that the traditionally 'female' things that teachers do, like nurturing students, giving encouragement, dealing with emotional issues and simply being nice to pupils and chatting to them are seen as unnecessary timewasting, while more 'masculine' type work like collecting data and meeting targets are prioritised over everything else. Similar things have happened in nursing, where women had developed a very 'feminine' way of working and a huge part of the job was just being with patients. From a 'masculine' viewpoint sitting chatting with a patient isn't work that should be paid for, that's just women gossiping and wasting time. The result of the 'masculinisation' of these working environments and the editing out of feminine working is chaos - stressed teachers and nurses who continue to do the 'pointless' feminine aspects of their job while trying desperately to justify their existence with data and targets.

It's a similar thing to how mothers are seen. Women are responsible for bringing every single one of the 7 billion people on the planet, plus their billions of ancestors, into this world and for the most part every single person in the world who has ever lived has been raised by a woman. And yet pregnancy is seen as a nuisance and staying home with children is seen as 'doing nothing.'

If we're going to talk about the extra hours that teachers put in, we should also consider the very long holidays that they get, versus other people in the paid workforce who work all year round. It's funny how one item gets plenty of discussion, and the other doesn't! What's a teacher's salary on a per-hour basis?

I also can't think of a profession that doesn't require overtime (paid or unpaid).

Agree with thedancingbear - when people say 'Solicitors' they immediately think of people in the city on loads of money. But your typical provincial solicitor probably, imo, has comparable pay with a teacher.

Also is teaching female dominant? Primary definitely but I would think secondary is fairly equal.

Very much female dominant at primary. Slightly male dominant at secondary.

Depending on how you measure it, I wouldn't be sure of teachers earning less than solicitors or accountants. There are some very high-earning solicitors and accountants that will drive the mean up quite a lot, but I'd guesstimate that the medians were about the same. There are many legal aid solicitors and the like with full-time incomes beginning with a '2'.

It's probably a feminist issue in that, as the profession has become more female dominant, it has been more and more undervalued. This seems to be a trend with all careers and jobs that become female dominated. For example, medicine in Russia. The converse is also true, when industries become more male dominated, they become more lucrative, for example, computer programming.

Unpaid overtime in any job is an issue anyway. If employers value your contribution, they will pay for it. If you're expected to do lots of unpaid overtime, your employer probably doesn't value your input enough, so you just stop doing it.

Also is teaching female dominant? Primary definitely but I would think secondary is fairly equal.