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/

That assumes they are all investment bankers. Plenty of lawyers, accountants and bankers earning comparable amounts to teachers and working far beyond their contracted hours.

It’s not clear if they are in the graph as it doesn’t say which grads are part of the sample.

So I looked up the methodology and the sample includes anyone holding at least an undergraduate degree working outside of teaching. So would include your bankers and lawyers.

The 'similar graduates' line is because the sample has been weighted so that the demographic is similar to that of teachers (e.g. majority female, low average age).

Yes I’ve been reading it too. I think it presents one picture but not a complete one. Comparing postgrads and people with professional qualifications might be more relevant.

It explains why it doesn't and why it compares to all graduates. Because those are the jobs that teachers leave to go to.

It doesn’t even raise the idea of a post grad comparison. Given you have post grad quals it’s the more relevant comparison re working hours etc.

Over on the other thread that's going at the moment it sounds like teaching is the worst thing ever.

So why on earth would anyone go into it?

No WFH, poor money, managing difficult classes? Can't afford to live near where you reach?

Yes the pension is good and the holidays, but is it really worth it?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5031198-to-think-change-is-desperately-needed-in-schools?reply=133902498

^

This, if anyone's interested

@Babyboomtastic
"...WFH (only teachers do it for free)" -granted, clumsily expressed. The "only" is meant to read "it's just that teachers do it for free", as opposed to we're the only profession that does. Of course many other groups routinely put in extra work out of hours.
But if I think of my friends who have worked in their graduate professional roles for a similar amount of time (20+ years); they're generally earning at least twice as much as I am, their additional hours are generally billable or can be reclaimed as time off in lieu, and certainly do not tally up to 15 free hours for their employer each week.

If older students could be easily taught on line from home, they'd be doing it, but it isn't so they don't.

@LittleBearPad You aren’t the only ones doing huge unpaid overtime, never having a lunch hour, not being able to plan anything in the week. Yet many of you assume you are

This a thread about teachers. If those in other jobs want to raise their working live/ pay, etc. let them start their own thread.

@Babyboomtastic
I'm not saying teachers have it easy, but acting as if you're the only one is ridiculous

No-one has suggested this.

Yes, I get it, you want to restrict the dataset to only people you think work long hours. But then you also want to restrict it to the subset of those who also do not earn very much money (or pay potential).

Actually someone did, but they accepted later that it was clumsy wording ('only teachers do it for free').

I'm not sure that friends data is the most accurate. Based on 'friends data', my teacher friends really don't work long hours (go out every evening, full weekend plans), whereas I know a lot of people who aren't paid more/much more than teachers who regularly do 25+ hours unpaid work above their contracted a week. I've certainly been one of them in several jobs.

But my friends data isnt necessarily more accurate than yours and vice versa. They are just snapshots of individual lives.

But honestly, having been there, it's really not unusual for people to be working a 60 hour week, paid for 35, and not being on big bucks. It's really wrong though and I hate employers who have that expectation.

really not unusual for people to be working a 60 hour week, paid for 35, and not being on big bucks

I'm not saying it's unheard of, but this assertion is just not representative of the normal picture.

@echt I did use the word 'only' but have subsequdntly clarified usage.
@Babyboomtastic yes, you're right; it's wrong whichever group of workers is concerned.

I worked full time as a secondary teacher until I retired at 60 - no way could I do that now. When I started teaching in the early 90s (a late entrant to the profession), teaching was relatively family friendly. Yes, I did long hours in the evenings and weekends, but I could work around the kids’ bedtimes and activities. So long as I arrived in good time for registration and did a weekly after school duty, I could leave at the end of the timetabled day. Lunch was nearly an hour so I was able to run urgent errands, or get some down time most days.
Gradually and incrementally, the workload increased. Weekly morning briefings became longer, more frequent, and we were required to be in earlier. Morning team meetings became commonplace, a real problem for those doing the school run (and not helped by dropping the convention that children of staff could attend the school, even if out of catchment). Staff were discouraged or forbidden to leave at the end of the teaching day. After school meetings became commonplace. Data related tasks ate into what used to be teaching prep. time. The job became far more intense and demanding, though much of extra activity did not necessarily improve teaching and learning, rather was driven by the demand for data that was not necessarily reliable or helpful.
From the early 2000s the “always on” element, facilitated first by email and later by text and WhatsApp, ate more and more into teachers’ time, blurring the boundaries between work and personal life. I know teachers who are regularly emailed/texted/WhatsApped over the evening and through weekends not only by managers but by pupils and their parents. This is ridiculous (though perhaps individuals should be clearer about their boundaries).
It would make a lot of sense for teachers to be able to WFH in PPA time, if possible. It would also make sense to reduce enforced presenteeism, be sensible and accommodating about directed time, and have rules to ensure that teachers should not be contacted electronically outside working hours except in case of real need. (For those who say “but bankers…but binmen…, these are not comparable occupations, and both bankers and binmen can sort themselves out with regard to their work conditions.)

No I don’t. I’m saying the comparison isn’t particularly accurate. I haven’t said anything about restricting to low paid or low pay potential. You are making wild assumptions

You want to restrict it to professionals even though they clarified that they wanted a realistic comparison of other jobs that teachers could be doing.

You brought up lawyers and bankers as working long hours but when it was pointed out this is usually for much more pay you said that not always.

So basically you aren’t happy with the comparison because it isn’t comparing solely with graduates who work long hours for poor pay, but instead graduate jobs that the sort of people who become teachers also go for.

It’s a comparison of what those people in the job market will be weighing up. It’s not ‘teachers are the only ones who work long hours’. It’s ’can teachers do something else that’s less work?’ and the answer is clearly yes. The wage comparisons are also unfavourable.

No I’m saying it should be compared across professionals with post grad degrees and more relevant to the qualifications teachers hold.

I said all bankers weren’t earning six figures. I also said some accountants and lawyers earn equivalent amounts to teachers. This is all true. TOIL is vanishingly rare as someone upthread says.

If you’ll look upthread I also said teachers should be paid more.

A key disparity between teacher pay and other professions is the pension - perhaps teachers should be able to decide whether they want the pension contributions divided between income and pension contributions and be able to flex this choice as they grow older.

PPA time should be scheduled for the start and end of days so the teachers can head home early/arrive late. Certainly some of the SLTs discussed above don’t seem to treat their staff like adults.

And more money needs to go in the system to provide more cover and flex so that an unexpected absence isn’t a disaster.

The WFH argument is foolish as it allows government and the right wing press (who hate WFH) an easy headline knocking teachers as out of touch and silly. At which point the argument is lost and nothing gets better.

i wonder if grads aren't going into teaching because they remember what a horrific experience school is for large swathes of pupils and want no part in it.

schools aren't working for pupils, parents or teachers. i huge overhaul is needed.

@LittleBearPad

"PPA time should be scheduled for the start and end of days so the teachers can head home early/arrive late. Certainly some of the SLTs discussed above don’t seem to treat their staff like adults."

I certainly agree with you about SLT not treating staff like adults. However, I just don't think it's possible to timetable PPA for the start and/or end of the day for all staff. Building a timetable is complicated enough without adding restrictions to where PPA can be placed, plus you would have issues with staffing tutor time, attending briefings, after school meetings/trainings/parents evenings etc. It's a nice idea but I can't see it working for the majority of secondary schools.

The simple fact is that if the pay and conditions were good enough to be attractive to graduates, then we wouldn't be struggling to recruit and retain teachers.

We are struggling to recruit and retain teachers, and there are large gaps in a number of subjects. Therefore the pay and conditions are obviously not good enough.

If we want to have enough good quality teachers to educate future generations we need to address this.

Yep.

None of this is remotely a matter of opinion either. You can't argue your way out of it, and it doesn't matter whether anyone subjectively thinks teachers are paid enough, it's a piss take or whatever. The labour market disagrees.

There are discussions to be had about what the incentives ought to be, but what we do know for certain is that they're currently insufficient.

Exactly. All the arguments above about "but X works harder!", "but Y has more flexibility", "but Z gets paid more/less" are pointless nonsense.

Society needs teachers, and it is clear that the current package isn't enough to attract and keep good ones. If a private sector company was struggling to recruit people, it would improve the pay/benefits/working conditions to whatever level was needed to recruit people. That's literally how capitalism works.

(Arguments about whether capitalism is a good system are irrelevant. The government is pro-capitalism, and that is the system we are living in, so those are the rules the government needs to play by.)