Teachers - how much do you earn?

[coopekid]

So it's my 5th year of teaching, not in London or fringe, and I am on £27,260 and have been since Sep 19 (no across-the-board pay increase as announced last summer for me ) This - according to the NEU advisory pay points puts me somewhere between M1 and M2. Interested to hear what other Teachers are earning?

@Metallicalover Yes, in the UK. This was about 6 years ago so the starting salaries may well have risen.
It was an old friend and we were discussing salaries. She told me herself what she earned...of course she may not have been honest but I don't see why she would lie and say she earned less than she did.

I know lots of people my age in the private sector earning more than me, some with fewer qualifications, my dh in sales earned about the same as me before I went part time and he doesn't have a degree. His pension will be smaller, but he's never put in as much of his salary into his pension as me either. The people I went to university with who went into private sector earn a lot more than me.

However as others have said it's not the money that is a problem, it's not bad at all, but the stress, I'm part time now after I left a middle management position with stress, I was a SENCO and becoming ill with stress in that job is very, very common. In my large secondary there are 3 qualified SENCOs working as ordinary teachers with no intention of returning to the SENCO role.

I'm currently looking at retraining as a psychologist because I'd like to go back to full time work, but not as a teacher.

I think a lot of people over-estimate private sector salaries outside London / in the North

Big 4 managers will be on about £45k, accountants £40k - £50k, lawyers slightly more, but without the pension and holidays. Obviously in these professions you can work yourself up to partner / finance director, but the vast majority won’t, and the salaries I’ve quoted aren’t unusual.

I agree @wonderstuff. Myself and DH spent a total of a decade between us training to be teachers. He worked insane hours, his hair fell out in clumps by 25, he had suspected heart attacks at 26, he wasnt sleeping, and was doing 70 hour weeks for 25k. He quit after 3 years and strolled into a job in the private sector that he could have done out of school, on the job training, permanent, with a starting salary of 30k and then bonuses of a couple of thousand each year. He is home at 5PM and cant work from home, so free every evening and weekend. As a teacher I regularly wonder why I earned a lot less doing a lot more work for years, but I do love my job so dont want to leave.

This has been an eye opener for me- as a teacher! Maybe because I work in primary you don't get the extra and run departments as your usual tlr so impossible to get to £50k

An eye opener for me as well, it does seem like it can be harder in smaller primary/ SEN settings to progress into leadership if that’s what you choose. In my school all staff share curriculum responsibilities, there are no additional payments for this. I considered applying for Key Stage Leader last year when the vacancy came up however realised there is only an additional TLR 2 for this. Considering you are responsible for 5/6 classes as well as line manager for approx. 20 staff - Teachers and support staff (Special school) I decided against!

You can get sucked into more and more responsibility in primary without the financial bonus too, in the argument of 'it'll be good for your career' or just because there's an ethos in the school of it being good to be seen to do more. And then the UPS is used as a stick to get more out of staff when it's not, or at least wasn't originally, used as a way of making people work harder and take on more.

When I started working in the 90s you didn't have a significant subject responsibility without a subject leader point (TLRs didn't exist).

Then they were scrapped.

Most schools start you on the lowest of the low TLR and try and get a lot out of that and only have one or two TLR posts in their school. My own TLR was only raised from the lowest 3 (supposed to be just for one year fixed improvement projects) to a 2 when I was given leadership responsibilities within school that were ongoing and put me in charge of 4 other classes (and 4 other staff member's performance management), as well as undertaking a school-wide improvement project that involved visiting and leading improvement in other schools. I put my foot down on that one and did get the raise in TLR.