Teachers should receive a 1.8% premium for not working from home

[noblegiraffe]

Interesting suggestion from the NFER who say the teacher recruitment crisis shows no sign of abating.

They suggest at minimum a 3.1% pay rise this year for teachers (govt recommendation is 1-2%) but interestingly, to make teaching competitive with other graduate jobs that allow some element of working from home, teachers should receive 1.8% extra on top of that.

I think commuting costs used to be a given for any job, but now it’s something employers are going to have to start thinking about paying for if they want people in the office.

https://www.nfer.ac.uk/press-releases/teacher-recruitment-and-retention-crisis-shows-no-signs-of-abating-new-report-reveals/

I would never be a teacher.

I have the skillset for it, but I would not want to go in every day, and having no flexibility on holiday dates is a big turn off. I have a nice job which pays well and those two things are not an issue, so why would I choose to teach instead?

It must be very rewarding to help young people - but I'm not a charity.

Teachers need a big pay rise for the very important work they do. They need to make the profession more appealing.

Um tea. What do you do instead? Asking for a friend...

People who work from home because they have to are entitled to claim tax relief for some of those expenses, like heating.

That's hardly anyone.

Who can claim tax reliefYou can claim tax relief if you have to work from home, for example because:

• your job requires you to live far away from your office
• your employer does not have an office

Who cannot claim tax reliefYou cannot claim tax relief if you choose to work from home. This includes if:

• your employment contract lets you work from home some or all of the time
• you work from home because of coronavirus (COVID-19)
• your employer has an office, but you cannot go there sometimes because it’s full

Are the government going to offer compensation to support workers who do not work from home and get paid way less than teachers?

I thought teachers were considered hybrid workers? I mean, all the posts about working in the evening and the holidays and that is not 9-3 with 13 weeks holiday...

I'm not denying the long hours btw, but it seems hypocritical to get extra money for not being hybrid whilst also saying that about half the workload is done at home?

Many jobs are truly not hybrid (nurses, police, prison officers) whereas teachers do have flexibility about where they do their prep.

School support staff should be paid way more than they are. The issue with support staff isn’t competition with WFH jobs, but places like supermarkets who pay more.

So the issue there is with the base salary, not that one job allows wfh and the other doesn’t.

Hybrid working is generally considered to be something like working out of the home a couple of days a week, at home the rest, not working out of the home and at home every day.

Yes working at work all day AND then prepping at home in the evening is part of the problem...

Can I ask a question if there are any teachers around, can teachers do their PPA session(s) I think its called from home? Presumably yes or am I being naive?

I am #TeamTeachers all day long. With their workload they deserve a lot more than they are getting!

Either that or manage without, yes. Those are the choices.

I think you need to pay what you have t to attract staff but linking it to not WFH will cause a lot of resentment (which teachers and nurses already get plenty of)

There are the usual jobs that are trotted out these discussions and then a lot lot more beside that will never get a not WFH bonus as their job would never be WFH.

To be clear - this isn't random teachers asking for this. It is a report produced by nfer who are looking into how to deal with the very real and very urgenr recruitment and retention crisis in England at the moment.

It was their last issue but the one the media have run with. But yes it's an issue in terms of recruiting graduates. So if they can't offer wfh for obvious reasons there's even more importance on improving conditions ns somehow as we need to attract graduates. You'd be a fool to go into teaching as a new graduate currently.

I 100% agree with this. Do not link it to wfh. Lots of jobs can not be done wfh and these are often very low paid.

P/T teacher here (day off!). Yes, in theory I can do my PPA at home. However, as a secondary school teacher, most of my PPAs are a non-contact hour between other contact periods. I live 28 minutes from school, so I wouldn't be able to walk to the car, drive home, drive back to school & go back in during that hour. If I had a PPA first thing in the morning or last lesson, I could arrive late or leave early. Once per fortnight I leave early on a Friday, but that's probably because I was given a crap timetable this year, so they gave me alternate Friday afternoons off to compensate.

Not a naive question at all. Prior to Covid, some schools didn't allow you to leave early. In the last couple of years however, it hasn't been an issue.

Actually there are some graduate employers that now pay a lower rate to those who decide work partially from home than those who go in. I would be careful what you wish for because it could have the opposite effect.

Which, for the ones that can't fill vacancies, sounds like a problem for that sector to address. Not teachers, or anyone who works remotely.

It was mainly "trapped time" for me when secondary so for example period 3 wasn't contact time when period 2 and 4 was. I would tend to photocopy in this time and catch up with phone calls home and other admin. And still plan at home! I do think it's hard for non teachers to see what goes on in the role when you're used to being the other side of the desk (same for many jobs I'm sure!)

The link with wfh is important as we're not comparing to other low paid jobs. The link in the report is to other graduate jobs. If we want good, we'll qualified graduates we need to attract them so the report is highlighting how wfh is now partly expected by graduates which is a huge shift from when I graduated. And highlighting that as this is an issue we've got an even harder uphill battle enticing people into teaching!

I find this to be an interesting take from the NFER. It seems to suggest the 2/3 major issues with teaching are pay and working location. However, whenever I see teachers on here talk about what is making them unhappy, it's more likely to be student discipline, parental demands, too much red tape, too high a workload, inspections and not enough genuine teaching.

I have no doubt pay is a factor - because it almost alway is and because people will put up with more misery if they are paid more - but I am surprised to read these are the best suggestions the NFER has to improve the teacher shortage and crisis. Even their suggestion about workload is weak (imo): "an independent review focusing on how to reduce teachers’ workload related to behaviour management and pastoral care, which should also consider the role of external support services." Hmmm.

Yes it's the actual job, the way schools are structured currently, the way exams are structured and the curriculum which are issues. As well as micromanagement and school funding meaning schools look to get rid of experienced teachers and everything runs on young staff...

So so many issues. Workload is a huge part of it.

Noble has been tirelessly bringing this issues for a long time now and is far more articulate than me on it all.

Getting teachers in London will be a massive problem- the only single teacher in my school who can afford to rent even a small one bed flat is senior management. We have several who have at least an hour’s commute away, mostly arriving by 7:30 if not before, and some of those will be moving out of London altogether at the end of this academic year, as they want to start families and can’t afford to do so.
Almost all of the younger teachers ( under 30) live with their parents.
Its not realistic to expect them to commute for more than an hour each way, on top of the huge workload.
Its getting harder to recruit cleaners and lunchtime staff. I wonder how these schools will be staffed in 5 years time.

It wouldn't be enough to tempt me back into a school based role I'm afraid.

I'd be more likely to return if the workload was manageable and we could focus on teaching instead of filling the gaps caused by underfunding in countless other services.

I think people are missing the point here. It's not as such about working from home, obviously there's jobs you can't do from home. It's about jobs like teaching not having an attractive package.

At my first grad job I was receiving just a bit less than the average starting salary for a teacher, but I could WFM (wake up 5 minutes before my day started), have private health insurance, flexible working hours, flexible holidays, reasonable bereavement leave and other similar perks. I could go to the gym on my lunch hour, do laundry while I was in the house so I got more time back in the evening and I didn't have to lesson plan, travel to work, or even spend a lot of money on work clothes!

Teaching just isn't attractive enough on paper to compete with that, and they can't rely on a love of the vocation to carry people through when they could simply work elsewhere with more flexibility. People need to have a reason to choose to become a teacher and and at the moment there aren't enough

And sorry, to answer your original question OP - I don't think 1.8% is nearly enough to compete with the allure of a WFM job- salary is a good place to start but theres much bigger overhaul required