Why do people think some professional jobs like teachers/ midwives aren't paid well?

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I read a lot on here about people moaning about teacher/ nurse/ midwife wages etc. I thought in the NHS you start off on around 25k which I think is a decent wage. I've seen on MN alot of nurses and midwives earning £30/40k upwards.

I genuinely am wondering why people think that's low pay? What would they want as a reasonable salary? Am I not understanding something. This is a genuine question and I am in no way being goady.

I earn very low @17k so perhaps my perception is slightly skewed.

Emergency services too
Emergency medical technician- band 4. So 20k plus 25% for antisocial hours

Emergency call handler - band 3 £17k ish plus 25% antisocial hours. Make a mistake and you can kill someone, for what, £10ph? Or end up in coroners court

The pay seems appropriate hahahaah

You have no idea.

Starting pay should be at least 30k. I'm currently paid less than £1 per hour per patient despite constantly providing interventions to keep them alive and/or better their health and/or support their death.

If the pay was appropriate, people wouldn't be leaving in droves. If the pay was appropriate, we wouldn't have a massive shortage. If the pay was appropriate, people wouldn't be leaving to work in different countries that actually pay their nurses properly and/or provide safer environments with less stress

I work admin in the NHS, I fanny around with spreadsheets all day and earn more than some of the teachers on here
Same but in IT. Nowhere near the responsibility of the nurses or teachers but I’m on a much higher band than even the senior nurses and ward managers.
They aren’t well paid jobs for what they entail.

The pay seems appropriate hahahaah
You have no idea.

yes because the ONLY reason someone could disagree with you is that they “have no idea”?

It's the level of responsibility combined with lack of progression (most wont go beyond band 6/35K) & stress.

I've been in the NHS 25 years & never seen it so bad; no wonder we can't recruit. It's only going to get worse.

Lucky you if you can get hold of the key to the supply cupboard! However there’s probably plenty of room in there due to shortage of supplies...

Meetings are held where the recruitment and retention is discussed. I point out pay and flexibility are poor but no one wants to hear it. Where l live is on the edge of London so the trust could pay people £120 per month outer London allowance but they won’t. They hate offering flexibility so people go elsewhere on a zero hours contract (go bank), go community, quit nursing altogether or stop working full stop. 7am starts are hard with small children as childcare doesn’t open early enough plus other commitments people have. Consequently recruiting is hard and people don’t stay in post long

prequelle I have done somecstressy jobs including aching pressure role on a daily newspaper but nothing has come close to teaching for stress and pressure. But then I read posts like yours about nursing and I think, yes, that's certainly worse. Hats off to you and all nurses, none of you are paid enough.

You don't even get those crazy holidays teachers have to laze about in 😂😂

Seriously, the thing that would amend teaching would be more PPA time - a day a week would mean less marking and more time to do it. But yes, more money would make it more appealing to work so many hours per week.

To a pp who said they know lots of people working 50+ hours a week for less than £20k - really? What do they do? Unless they are in the media or theatre or similar highly in demand roles done fir the love of it 🙄 then I am dubious.

I faff about with papers and emails all day in an admin role (in the NH S funnily enough) and earn nearly as mch as I did as a teacher. And I can sit and do nothing on Easter Monday afternoon cos I don't have five classes of 13yos ready to ignore my every word tomorrow - or next week - thank goodness.

sorry for typos!

the entry requirements are not as high or competitive as other professional jobs thirtyrock your experience of getting in easily to teaching is simply your experience. I’ve taught for a long time and staff when I started talked of how much easier it was to get a job for them - they basically picked where they wanted to go. I couldn’t just pick but had a lot of permanent vacancies to apply for. Student teachers I see today have next to nothing to apply for - just temporary or part time jobs which isn’t what they want - and the competition for them is fierce. I think a generalisation about how hard it is to get into teaching is unfair.

Teachers in the uk are paid a pittance I’m in Ireland and they start on over 36k I earn approximately 40k and I have only just rejoined the pay scales

And I just want to note that teachers in Ireland don’t do the hours that uk teachers do either. We work 9.00-2.40 and most have left the school by half3! 4 at the very latest!!

I’m on an above average salary as a deputy head, but my husband in a normal 9-5.30pm job who earns more than me (both professional jobs, but he has no management responsibilities) struggles to take holiday as I am always working.

This Easter holiday, 3 weeks for us, I have had 1 day on a training course and 2 days off, plus good Friday and the weekends. I do usually only work from 7am to 4pm in the holidays though. My normal term time hours are 6am to 6pm weekdays more if you include parents evenings and evening events etc.... , plus i’m In school at least one of the weekend days for at least 8 hours. Yet I feel guilty if I clock off at 3pm on a Saturday and left my boss at school today when I left at 2pm, having been there since 7.15am!

I personally don’t feel i’m rewarded enough for the job I do when compared to other staff in school who earn more than me with no management responsibilities. My head does try to help, she gave me a 10% pay rise in my first year, and is trying to cut my teaching, but recruitment for specialist teachers is very hard.

I think with teaching it seems like a job that you can't just leave at work. When you get home you've got to do lesson plans and all that malarky haven't you?

There's times I take my work home mentally or every now and again I have to plan training or an awareness board but that's it. Once I've finished unless I've got training or education I'm out of there. Teachers though, you don't get paid for that lesson planning time and all that do you? What about marking? I expect the extra hours you have to put in outweigh those summer holiday things

I’m a midwife, I earn £22.5k for 37.5 hours a week, in reality I never get a lunch break even though that’s unpaid and almost never finish on time so work more like 44-46 hours a week. If you count all the unpaid hours we do I get just above minimum wage. Not what I would call good pay for having 2 lives in my hands, studying for 4 years and having thousands in student debt to pay back. Plus we pay each year for the right to work, pay to park at work etc. so actually bring home very little.

My parents are teachers (now retired) and always said ‘do whatever job you want, but don’t be a teacher’. My friends who teach seem to get to work at 8am and work most nights till 10pm doing prep and marking during term time, so I think they were right.

Working in an independent with small classes, excellent leadership, supportive parents and a realistic workload for 40K = happy.
I wouldn't go back into inner city maintained sector for double and doubt they would have me anyway.
I don't know anyone who I trained with who is still teaching.
It's not the salary , its the stress, abuse and unachievable targets that make it a bad job.

The marking schedule at m school meant I had to mark each class's books once a fortnight, so roughly one set of books a day. I got five hours a fortnight PPA time to do this and all planning and other assessment. So yes, every evening I marked a set of books - I used to take them to ds2's athletics training to do while I waited for him. Took about 2-3 hours a set. I used to spend all Satuday planning. Then teach/sort things in school from 7.30-4 daily. Holidays usually three -four sets of marking plus a couple of days of planning. Maybe those who are more experienced or just better than me (Miss, you're a fucking crap teacher, as one 12yo observed to me) can do it more quickly. I'm not sorry to be able to drink coffee and chat at athletics now 😄😄

I’m a healthcare support worker in the community, we are being given more and more responsibly and yet are only paid as band 2. We work on our own, venepuncture, dressings, catheters are all par for the course. I am now hoping to do my degree through the open uni so I can actually get paid a higher band for the amount of responsibility I have. It isn’t about the money for me though, I love my job and love helping people, getting my degree is just a bonus

I do think teachers also compare their salaries to finance/IT style jobs but their working hours to admin/retail jobs. They seem totally unaware that lots of people work all evening as a norm or that if those same people even if they are silly money contractors wouldn’t be getting those salaries if they had as many weeks at home for Easter/summer/Christmas. It’s not a high flying career with humongous salary, but it’s certainly not peanuts

Agree!

Sometimes I feel like it's not the pay that's the problem it's the amount of work and stress that's expected for the pay and the lack of thanks. I work in the NHS I'm not a nurse theres not any amount of money you could pay me to take one of their Jobs they are overworked and underpaid for what they do

Many teachers and nurses are women, and as we all know women's work is generally undervalued and underpaid! Which is why men in teaching and nursing very often go down the management road which of course is proper mans work so better paid!

My dd works in local government which has a lot of people getting what to my eyes look like massive salaries for not very much in the way of responsibility compared to a teacher or a nurse.

I agree with you OP. I do think teachers and nurses are paid a lot for the academic qualifications and "intelligence" they require. Both these occupations are fairly average in terms of intellect required (higher than shop assistants etc of course but I can think of tons of jobs which require more "skill/intellect" like engineers, scientists etc. who quite often are paid less which is a shame.

Even back at school, the teachers were fairly average and knew nothing more than the scope of the syllabus.. I'd ask questions for further understanding and they wouldn't be able to answer them. In fact, by A-levels, a lot of the teachers would get me to grade other students' papers and even teach the class..!

"Management" is another area where the individual often doesn't have much academic ability nor requires huge effort yet gets paid a lot compared to those below them who actually do the work.

I do think teachers and nurses are paid a lot for the academic qualifications and "intelligence" they require. Both these occupations are fairly average in terms of intellect required (higher than shop assistants etc of course but I can think of tons of jobs which require more "skill/intellect"

I would invite you to learn the amount of anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, management of acute and chronic illness, sociology etc that we have to learn before commenting. Yet another person who clearly thinks we are monkeys who slap a bandage on or wipes a bottom. Very generous of you to put us above shop assistants nice of you to belittle them as well.