The worst thing about teachers' crap pay is how it impacts men

[noblegiraffe]

Is the message I'm getting from this Times article
https://www.thetimes.com/article/6d47f549-bc16-42f5-87eb-1a742ca8dbb0?shareToken=632bef4c3b70c58fa6f1720e42fc2d68

Teacher pay is crap, which means that men are leaving teaching, which means that boys aren't seeing enough positive male role models in schools.

Fine for women to limp along on shitty pay for years though?

A job with 13 weeks of holiday a year you say? Fantastic! That sounds like the kind of job that LOADS of people would like to do! I wonder why they don’t???? Perhaps you have some ideas?

By the way: do you know what ‘annualised pay’ is?

Eh??

Again, male primary head teachers are only slightly over represented.

Oddly enough, it's not the holidays they struggle with. It's the job. If the holidays were enough to compensate for that, there wouldn't be a recruitment amd retention crisis, would there? Come on, keep up.

Not when taken as a proportion of male teachers in primary schools, when they are disproportionately in management:

No surprises there then:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2022-0197/#:~:text=In%20November%202021%2C%20despite%20only,deputy%20head%20teachers%20were%20men.

It's incentives to encourage equal numbers, maybe, but that's not the same as pay. We could also have scholarships for women going into leadership roles. The argument for one doesn't have to take from the argument for the other.

That is not what it is saying at all.

We have all heard how important it is to have role models that 'look like us'. That's because it is and always has been 🤷‍♀️

… because this is where the money is!

Pay inequality in education is huge, and gets bigger the more senior you are, so while on average male classroom teachers earn a little more than female classroom teachers, male headteachers earn significantly more than female heads, one of the unions, I think NASUWT did some research on it a couple of years ago. Teaching is so sexist, as a woman you have to be better than any man applying for a job, because we so desperately need to recruit and retain men. Anecdotal I know but at one point at my last secondary 6/7 members of the SLT were men.

What really blows my mind at the moment in teaching is that the majority of people leaving are women of child-rearing age, and it has been accepted that flexible working patterns would help, but in a female dominated, completely unionised profession we have minimum statutory maternity package. I'm well past the age now, but when I was having my kids, lawyer friends were getting 6 months full pay on the understanding they returned to work for however long afterwards, while I was getting 6 weeks at 90%.

I personally think we need to look at improving pay and conditions until we aren't in this awful recruitment crisis, and that I think will mean capping hours (it would be lovely to work a 45 hour week in term time with very limited working in school holidays) and improving the curriculum to make it more interesting, inclusive and accessible as I think this would improve behaviour and reduce the difficulty in meeting SEN needs.

@CJsGoldfish It absolutely is what the article is saying.

Some people's reading comprehension on this thread is concerning.

We might have heard how important it is to have role models that 'look like us'. That doesn't mean it's true.

The way Western society is structured is to divide and compartmentalise. 'You can't be what you can't see' is a perfect model of this. It encourages us to see people as the 'same' as us or 'different' to us based on external and immaterial factors.

Whether it's our genitals or the colour of our skin, we shouldn't have to limit ourselves to aspiring to the achievements only of others with the same features as us. As a society we should see everyone as equally capable of doing anything they want, and able to be inspired by anyone whose personal qualities and achievements piques their interest. This is what we should be teaching young people. Not perpetuating the idea that if you're a boy you need men to look up to (with the subtext that women can't teach you anything about how to live) and if you're a girl you need a woman to look up to (with the subtext that you won't want or be able to do what that man is doing).

No, it’s true. They are over represented but only slightly. Certainly nothing like the “all head teachers are male” comments many posters are suggesting.
15% in general teaching vs 26% in really not a huge discrepancy.

@wonderstuff What really blows my mind at the moment in teaching is that the majority of people leaving are women of child-rearing age, and it has been accepted that flexible working patterns would help, but in a female dominated, completely unionised profession we have minimum statutory maternity package. I'm well past the age now, but when I was having my kids, lawyer friends were getting 6 months full pay on the understanding they returned to work for however long afterwards, while I was getting 6 weeks at 90%.

I don’t know a single teacher who received statutory maternity pay, I think your experience of this is wildly out of date.
It’s half pay for several months, which is a significant uplift on statutory pay.

No one said all headteachers are male.

My husband has been a primary school teacher for the past 15 years in a school in an extremely deprived area. For many of the children he has taught, he is the only positive male role model they have. Lots of children at his school have entirely absent fathers/fathers who are violent/fathers who are in prison, etc. My husband is a very calm man, he may be the only man these children have spent time with who does not shout/behave aggressively. He can show the boys an alternative way to be, and the girls an alternative type of future husband/father for their children to want.

He is in a minority as a male teacher, and feels that. He says he would feel uncomfortable teaching children below Year 2 in case they hugged him/needed help with toileting, as he is so wary about his behaviour being perceived as inappropriate in any way, which is really sad. He definitely feels that is less so for female teachers.

Our son (Year 1) recently had a male Teach First trainee covering, and I was stunned by the sexism from many Mums at pick-up towards him, openly discussing how unusual it was he was teaching younger children, how weird he looked, how their children didn’t like him. It was truly awful, and saddened me that my husband’s fears seem well founded!

So it doesn’t surprise me we are lacking male teachers. Do we need them? Absolutely!

I've seen male primary teachers be completely fawned over as 'wonderful' even if they're just totally normal teachers because they can 'talk to the boys about football'.

Why aren't they seeing male role models outside of the classroom and whose fault is that? Is it womens too?

According to another thread on here, yes, because MN is telling them to LTB.

Yes, it's 'we want more male teachers!'... 'but wait...not those male teachers!'.

Scholarships for male trainees may be legal (as a pp pointed out there are some for women only in certain fields) but:
a) it wouldn't be morally right- women have more barriers to accessing eg leadership roles, mediocre male teachers/trainees are snapped up due to the rarity value
b) they'd be promoted out of the classroom (and sometimes to roles like MAT exec head with no pupil contact at all) so not there to be a role model to boys
c) £30k training bursaries throw money at the problem but end up with uncommitted trainees that take the money and leave- scholarships would be the same.

Pay and conditions need to improve drastically for all teachers. A side effect of that might be more men apply.

I think they always go for ever-increasing scholarships to try to improve recruitment because the DfE have control over the scholarships and so it's something they can actually do. Teacher pay on the other hand comes from the Treasury and they are shit at long-term planning.

Still disproportionate.

Yes, and then the training bursary makes the pay look even worse by comparison! The same amount for being a total novice than after the very steep learning curve of teacher training.

In some areas in some subjects it can work out that you get more money in your training year than your ECT.

Huh?

I think lots of professions aren’t “paid enough” but doesn’t mean I’d support them downing tools completely.

You literally tried to claim all males are head teachers.