dumb questions about teaching

[CuriousPerson]

Idly speculating, after reading schools get the extra bank holiday dates because the official one falls in half term.

I've NCd because I suspect people will think I'm starting a bunfight and I'm really not, I'm just naive. I am honestly trying to work out how the hours everyone works in different jobs compare.

So if you're a teacher your offcial working hours are the days of term time plus insets or whatever is required. Is that right? And with an expectation that marking and lesson prep and all other paperwork etc is done in your own time. Is that right? I have heard and believe in practice there are very late hours like working 7am-10pm in term and/or having to work in holidays. How many real hours would you say you have to work if you're a teacher? Is it, say, half of every one of your, what, 13 holiday weeks (2-3 days a week of any holiday week?) Is it more? Less? Is every single day in term time a 7am-10pm day, honestly, or is that, maybe half the time, otherwise a more manageable 8-4?

For comparison my office job is 8-6 with 20 days leave and usually a lot of late hours too, on average one or two really late ones per week and say one weekend day in 4. Probably works out at 43 hours a week with some weeks 50 hours and some 30. With 4 weeks hol. I and my colleagues do these same hours on salaries ranging from 27-45k. This is hard work but I don't feel massively unusual for normal professional jobs.

So teaching pay - this is the naive bit - if a job advertised in teaching at 30k, that's the total right? It's not 30k then pro rata'd down for the actual term weeks? I mean if it is then that is certainly a lot more work for less pay!

I think the answer will probably be that the hours are longer than you might think in teaching (all year!) and the pay is comparable to other professional jobs but not on the high side.

But I still suspect a full time, non teaching, hard work professional office job, with people management, constant 'on your feet' type presentation work... isnt too different as a working life. And I wonder if it's the same, less, or, more hours in the year, of a similar kind of intellectual work, and can be with comparable pay. (Obviously loads of examples of much higher pay in sectors other than teaching but for the purposes of this I'm comparing similarly paid sectors.)

If teachers are working longer hours on less pay than others then crack on with the extra bank holiday. But if they're not... why do they need an extra bank hol?

Dons tin hat !

I was a secondary teacher. I used to arrive at work at about 7.30am and leave at 5pm. Didn't really work in the evenings, maybe a little bit on weekends and very little in the holidays (maybe 1 or 2 days in Easter and 3 in Summer)
BUT I worked in a department with a very sensible head - we only had to mark set pieces of work, not everything, and we had a centralised scheme of work so planning was much less than it could have been. If I had to plan everything from scratch it would have easily been an extra 2 hours on each day.

Primary probably have to do a lot more as they have to mark and prepare a lot.

The extra bank holiday is for the Platinum Jubilee. We didn't get one for the Golden or Diamond.
I wouldn't worry too much about teachers getting an extra bank holiday every couple of hundred years or so.

Can you let me know where you work @DogsAndGin ? Because it sounds like a paradise if you don't do any work out of school hours. How on earth do you get away with it? And can I get my DD and partner jobs there please?

why do they need an extra bank hol?
Why do you need an extra bank holiday? Why does anyone? Because its a national celebration that we are all entitled to...

I am a teacher who has taught across three subject areas and three sectors. I have also worked in business and run my own business so have a few different experiences. Teaching is not the same all over. One school had a big focus on staff well being so had sensible marking policies and made as much time as possible for teachers. There was still extra work but nothing compared to the school that needed every lesson to be in the right format or the right PPt with before work being marked according to the hideous marking policy. Days were long and holidays allowed catch up. Working in a tough school and you never sit down, tough classes take a lot of energy and a walk down a corridor takes an age as there is stuff to sort. FE is slow paced comparatively so staff last longer but they burn out in schools particularly under toxic managers. Working in business was a doddle, own business quite lovely but teaching is busy enough to be unsustainable hence the high rate of drop outs. I had a twenty something in tears today not seeing how it is possible as she was so tired. It’s not a job I would want to be trapped in.

I’m not ‘getting away’ with anything. I am fulfilling my duties very well and my contract. SLT encourage me and praise me for having a good work life balance. I work in a primary school, I teach 33 10 year olds with a part time TA one hour a day.

It does feel a trap though doesn't it. I had one non teaching interview say "I wasn't sure you've got the experience for fast paced/plate spinning"... must admit I laughed a bit at that...

So many questions. When do you plan, mark, prepare and assess? And is this a state school?

I think they've posted before - on these type of threads! They seem to be the only teacher I've heard of working like this. Kind of the Daily Mail stereotype of a teacher. Not worth engaging really as much as for them to acknowledge they are in a very unique position - as most of this thread shows!

Although it seems in Ireland teaching is completely different and much less stress. When Irish teachers post I do get envious!

Ex-teacher here now work a 9-5 office job with 26 days leave. I make £10k more than I did in my last year teaching (2 years out) and can safely say the holidays in teaching do not make up for the exhaustion. I was starting work at 7am and on the go until I left which would be anywhere between 4pm and 7pm on an average day.

Teachers work extremely hard. Let them have the extra bank holiday same as everyone else!

Oh wow - what are you doing? I keep looking at quite low wages...

Also in a professional job - you can go to the loo, have or take breath, maybe even claim lunch expenses.

I am pretty sure you won’t have been called stupid, told your (my) bum is too big and had a ball chucked in your (my) face - and that is just a few the delights from today where I was inspiring young minds.

All answers here are for LA schools, not private or academies as they can do what they like. And for a class teacher, not someone on the leadership scale as they are not bound by the same day/time contracts.

So if you're a teacher your offcial working hours are the days of term time plus insets or whatever is required. Is that right?
A full-time teacher is contracted to work 1265 hours a year over 195 days (190 with pupils, 5 INSET). It works out as 6.5 hours a day.

And with an expectation that marking and lesson prep and all other paperwork etc is done in your own time. Is that right?
Teachers get 10% of their contact time (time when they're with the pupils, as non-contact time, called PPA. It works out as about 3 hours a week. This is the time you're supposed to plan, prepare and assess 20-25 lessons a week for around 30 pupils each time. Anything you don't get done in this time is done in your unpaid time.

I have heard and believe in practice there are very late hours like working 7am-10pm in term and/or having to work in holidays. How many real hours would you say you have to work if you're a teacher?
It varies, depending on your school and how much they load on you, and how long you've been teaching. When I was a full-time, mainstream teacher, I would be in school working roughly 8am-5pm every day with 15-20 mins to eat lunch. That's average to include parents' evenings but leaving earlier maybe on a Friday. Factor in another 3-4 hours on a Sunday afternoon and evening/weekend once or twice a week of about another 3 hours a week. So I suppose around 49.5 hours a week on a normal week. Marking end-of-term assessments or report writing will be more, perhaps. So, paid for about 50 hours a week but paid for 32. I'm guessing that's about standard in other jobs? It wasn't when I was in retail, not when I worked for the prison service as you got overtime if you worked over your shift, but those are the only other areas I've worked in.
I usually worked the equivalent of two days over a half-term, 5 days over Easter and Christmas holidays and maybe a full week over the summer. So I did a further 21 unpaid days over the year.

So teaching pay - this is the naive bit - if a job advertised in teaching at 30k, that's the total right? It's not 30k then pro rata'd down for the actual term weeks?
No, that's the salary. But all our holiday is unpaid. At the very top of the teacher payscale where I live, I'd get ~42k. That's after 12 years of teaching experience and an MA in education, PGCE and PG Dip. If the salary offered for over a decade of industry experience plus qualifications was only £35k (I tried to work out the prorata for 195 days of a FTE of 165days!) I certainly wouldn't still be here. It's bad enough on £42k.

I'm genuinely interested to know how much in your industry someone working for that long, with that level of qualification, is earning.

I wonder whether OP would even question whether NHS staff would be entitled to have a paid day off for a national bank holiday.

Whoops! Not £35k. For some reason I was using 235 days as the FTE. Of course, it's 335 (22 days hols plus 8 Bank holidays). It would actually be 58% so the prorata salary would be £24,300 is.

How many people in your industry with 12 years experience and an MA and other related post-grad qualifications earn £24k?

Teaching is only comparable to presentations in other sectors if

1. you have to do 5 different one hour presentation a day.

2. the colleagues you're presenting to are CONSTANTLY looking for opportunities to interrupt, or disrupt

3. you have to miss your lunch to supervise the detention that arises from the constant disruption

4. your disruptive colleagues get their mums to phone your boss to complain about that lunch that you had to miss

5. the presentees are expected to produce work after every presentation, of a totally random quality that Michael Gove deemed appropriate 4 years ago.

6. you're expected to provide individual feedback on that work. Daily.

7. you're expected to be responsible for the emotional wellbeing of all your colleagues, who are mostly just standard hormonal teenagers but who are occasionally very unwell young people.

8. every single week you have to cover presentations on topics you know absolutely nothing about, for clients you've never met before, for colleagues who can't face coming into work.

So yeah, it's basically just an office job really 🤷‍♀️🤣🤣🤣

My dd is a secondary school teacher. She is at school by 8am. She gets home 5.30 ish, has tea then starts lesson planning until 10.30pm.

She does get a rest in the holidays though

This is all very useful and helpful thank you for taking the trouble to tell me, everyone!

I'm not "pissy" over teachers getting a bank holiday. I've taken on board that everyone should get one and that makes sense!

I think I've taken from the thread that the teaching hours and pay are in fact comparable to a serious full on corporate job... but there are three complexities:

1. the hours are "bingey" and there's less recovery time in holidays than a person might need for their health, it's easier to work 50 weeks of mildly insane hours than 30 weeks of complete burnout with 20 weeks of lighter work. I understand that.

2. The actual hours are strenuous with very little discretionary time and a constant pastoral care role which makes them draining. Though I would mildly point out to the person who said imagine presenting 20 ppt decks then annotating them... that is scarily close to my actual job! I don't have 30 kids to wrangle though and take the point. But the idea of a lunch hour for example is not normal in many jobs... many senior professionals are grabbing lunch in 10 mins between meetings not just teachers.

3. it varies a lot between subject specialism, geography, public private sector and seniority level, which I get.

Some people think I'm trying to prove teachers don't work hard. Quite the reverse in fact.

I STILL don't understand why teachers say they're only paid for the term time... if the salary is for the year it's the total for the year, just your version of "the year" includes term time which has super hard work, plus likely some lighter work in hols. I don't go round saying "Well I'm only paid monday to friday you know! If I was paid for the weekend I'd get much more!" .

I STILL don't understand why teachers say they're only paid for the term time... if the salary is for the year it's the total for the year, just your version of "the year" includes term time which has super hard work, plus likely some lighter work in hols. I don't go round saying "Well I'm only paid monday to friday you know! If I was paid for the weekend I'd get much more!"

I'm actually with you on that. I taught for forty years, and I never heard this trotted out by teachers until I Mumsnet two years ago!
It's basically just a contractual wording thing. Our salary is reasonable, it's paid monthly, and it's ridiculous to imagine that we'd be paid vastly more if, technically, we were paid for the holidays.

I wince every time someone mentions it here. It simply isn't relevant, nor does it do us any favours to pretend it makes any difference to what we take home each month. It's just silly, and I don't hear it at all in real life.
What we should fight for is for our TAs to be paid for the holidays, and not pro rata.

Until I JOINED mumsnet

I’m a teacher and 70 hour weeks are normal for me. When I got my first teaching job, I worked such long hours I was on less than minimum wage. I have also never gone a whole holiday without working

I just left teaching as despite the "really great holidays" and the "6 hour days", it actually works out at only being paid for 2/3 of the year, working twice the payroll hours and essentially being on just above minimum wage.

We wouldn't need 6 fucking weeks off in summer if teaching was more sustainable in England.

I'm actually with you on that. I taught for forty years, and I never heard this trotted out by teachers until I Mumsnet two years ago!

I wonder how much of that stemmed from people saying that teachers should work through the summer holidays after lockdown and teachers pointing out that they aren’t paid during the holidays.

Also, my school is actually not giving us the extra bank holiday. It’s in half term, so tough.

To answer your Q about how much teachers actually work, I refuse to do any work at home so work from about 8-16:30 each day in the building with an hour lunch break.