AIBU to think teachers are not paid that well in England and Wales

[ImaynotliketheEducationSecretary]

If salaries in England are so "good" why then are salaries in Scotland £9K higher?

If salaries are so good, why then apart from the NE and Scotland (who are on far better salaries) are teachers, 4-5 years post qualified, paid less than the average salary? If salaries are so good, why could so few teachers even think about buying a house? By the way, I by no means think teachers in Scotland are overpaid. I think they probably are paid far, far more fairly than E or W)

Do we really think so little of education that that is what teachers are paid? People who need degrees and post-grad qualifications to teach their subject? Who need passion and empathy to care about their students? Who do not just do 9-3 in the classroom - but, many, many hours outside the classroom too?

Read below and if you really think teachers salaries are so good, would you, on reading the below, encourage a friend/DC/sibling to join this well-paid profession?

Figures all from end of 2022:
M4 is what you could be earning c4-5 years after qualifying.

Scotland
Teachers Salary - Starting £30,081 & M4 £42,915
House Price average £191,492
6.3 x starting salary
4.5 x M4 salary

Average salary in Scotland in 2022 was £33K
Actually, you maybe OK being a teacher.

Wales
Teachers Salary - Starting £28,866 M4 £33,5877
House Price average £220,326
7.6 x starting salary
6.5 x M4 salary

Average salary in Wales in 2022 was £34K
You maybe OK to be a teacher - but only if you live in a cheaper part of Wales.

England
Teachers Salary - Starting £28,000 & M4 £33,850 ((M4 rising to £39,655 with inner London weighting)
House Price average £313,073 England (North East 162K, SE £402K London £542K)
On average, houses are 11 x starting salary and 9 x M4 salary
Ha ha ha ha if you are in London (13.5 x M4 salary) or South East (12 x M4)
NE teachers are possibly OK a few years later at 4.8 x M4 salary

Average salary in England in 2022 was £33K
North East £29.5K
SE £34.5K
London £42K

Don't be a teacher unless you are in the NE/somewhere cheap to live. How the fuck any London school recruits and retains staff is beyond me.

And, BTW, I am not a teacher. I just went down this rabbit hole as DD was talking of becoming a teacher post-degree....and having gone down said rabbit hole I am not sure I would recommend an extra 9K+ debt to do so. I don't really want her to move to Scotland (we are on the SW).

You are wrong. See PPs

I do get it, in fact I used to be a teacher and I left, so I do know how utterly shit it is.

I get that you do not have the capacity to go for promotion with so much on your plate - but the fact is that somebody does, somebody ‘finds’ that capacity, for the sake of more power and money in their pocket, and too often as we know, it’s the smooth bullshitty ones who climb that slippery pole.

And for that reason, I just don’t think that more pay is the answer. I felt very well paid as a teacher, and as I said earlier my friends who remain in teaching continue to have good pay. I didn’t leave because of the pay, I left because the conditions were horrible for me and horrible for the children. Even a 10K pay rise wouldn’t have kept me in that job.

The people a payrise will attract though are people who are in it for the money, not for the children. By not investing properly in the system and just bribing people into a shitty stressful job, schools will get graduates who teach for 3 years for the sake of a decent starting salary and bragging rights (like is already happening with Teach First) and then bugger off to better things. We won’t get the experience, the passion and compassion that children need in their teachers.

Raising pay is not the answer, they just need to invest schools properly so that the job isn’t so fucking horrible any more.

Scrapping OFSTED would be an excellent start.

God, never let yourself go down a rabbit hole. It will make you fucking furious.

In 1979 an MP earned £9450. If you do the inflation thing (CPI inflation website) that equates to £55K today. But no. They earn £85K.

1978 teacher earned £6K (mid point grade M4 I think in 1978 from Hansard link above). CPI inflationy thingy website - should be £40K. Not £33K.

The Tories really do fucking suck.

And yes, as PP said, the values of this country's government are way off.

Teachers have never been paid on a par with doctors. What nonsense.

@Kazzyhoward can only tell you what DDs friends have been offered. Maybe they are all top 4 firms, I have no idea as no v little about accountants. One of my other DDs friends has been offered £85,000 at a bank !!!!

And doctors and teachers start on virtually the same salary. If the £30,000 starting salary for teachers comes in, then they will earn more than F1s. These are likely the first doctors you will see at night if you have any issue on a ward. Including heart attacks. Not saying teachers earn too much (35 hour week 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂), but doctors and nurses are paid rubbish too. Pay erosion is a massive issue,

It's v v simple. Supply of staff is drying up for these jobs, so you need to pay them more. Unless you want your kids taught by cover staff.

@Kazzyhoward @MasterBeth

@Kazzyhoward @MasterBeth

Depends where you live. Teaching and TA roles here are one of the more favoured jobs as they pay well.

Jobs here that require a degree are usually £21k - so even a TA salary is "doable" in our region especially if you have children and term time only.

E.g local authority recently advertised for a data analyst requiring 5 years experience and a degree. £21500 was the salary!

Another example; Seasalt HQ advertised a role that was also £21k

OR you can opt to be a TA for NMW and pay £0 for holiday clubs.

That link doesn't say teachers earned the same as doctors though

Yes, you're not comparing like with like.

No, but they were both in the top 5% of earners......
Entire groups have completely disappeared from the ranks of upper earners. In 1975, further education lecturers and teachers together made up almost one in 10 of the top 5 per cent of earners

Are you saying doctors would not also have been in that top 5%? If you agree - then yes, both teachers and doctors were in the top 5 % of earners.

All the lower-paid manual and blue collar work that brought down the average pay has been automated now.

New jobs are created in tech… but tech pays well. So jobs that used to be at or above the median in terms of salary are now slipping down the ranks.

Meanwhile a lot of would-be blue collar workers are on benefits because it doesn't pay to work any more.

It suits the wealthiest in society for the taxpayer to support the poor, meanwhile their jobs are automated and salary retained to line the pockets of the rich.

Anyway, I’m getting lead off on a tangent.

Fuck the Tories basically.

I'd like good teachers paid a fortune

And bad teachers to see the consequences

I find this debate so difficult because without performance related pay, I can try and establish what I actually think about it by looking at the 10's/100's of teachers I have come across and say "god yes, they should be paid more because they are brilliant" and "hell no, they shouldn't even be a teacher"

Performance related pay would sort this mess out

@ImaynotliketheEducationSecretary

It includes lecturers? 1 in 10 isn't that many and it still doesn't say theh earned the same

If you're arguing teachers pay has fallen behind doctors by a large amount since the 70s, then yes that is true

But its not the same as they once earned the same

The issue is not bad teachers.

The issues is not enough teachers.

Good teachers therefore cannot do a good job because they do not have the resources to perform as they would wish.

So they leave.

Performance related pay solves nothing.

Very few professionals who work in the public sector are paid well. The media helps keep their wages down by comparing public sector graduate salaries with average workers' wages for example and proclaiming them to be overpaid as it is politically expedient to do so.

Introduction of performance related pay won't help recruit the teachers we need to cover the growing shortfall in numbers. In fact, given that you and so many others seem to want such pay measures to be instituted to penalise teachers it is likely to make the recruitment and retention crisis worse.

When I calculate the salary I need to be competitive to move jobs, I include benefits I'm getting in my current position - so in my most recent move, I was losing 2 days' holiday plus going from a 5% to a 3% employers' pension contribution.

No one ever mentions holiday pay and pension contributions (23.68%) when they're comparing teachers' salaries (as well as other public sector) to others'.

I'd imagine more good people would come into the profession if there was performance related pay

There is nothing more demotivating at work than not having an opportunity to be rewarded for exceptional work.

The whole 'equal pay' and 'pay grades' will never create a happy system because you can have massive loafers and talented people being paid the same - it is ludicrous. Nice idea, but the reality is humans need to be able to be rewarded for their distinction between them and others.

Research published today showing 1 in 3 teachers are skipping meals due to poverty and many have to take on an evening job just to survive.

We have performance related pay, it was introduced by Michael Gove.

If you don't want shit teachers right now, there's a massive problem. The choice is often between a shit teacher and no teacher.

Your kid has a shit teacher? Tough, there isn't a better one waiting in the wings to take over.

Schools don't want to hire shit teachers, for a start they create a massive workload in dealing with complaints. But someone needs to be stood in front of that class.

Fully agree. We also need the ability to pay teachers more in more expensive areas, rather than the national pay bargaining scales etc that pay similar amounts to teachers living in very different areas. Around here, a run down Northern town, teachers are amongst the higher earners and earning well over local average wages. In more expensive areas, they'll be earning less than local average, and that's the problem!

Guardian Article here https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/01/number-graduates-teacher-training-england-catastrophic-level says *The Department for Education’s initial teacher training figures show that just under 29,000 graduates have signed up this year, a 20% fall compared with 36,000 last year, and far below the 40,000 trainees registered during the pandemic in 2020-21.

But the figures are far worse for secondary school recruitment, where they are at just 59% of the DfE’s annual target, well below the 79% reached last year. It means the government has missed its own targets in nine of the past 10 years.*

So, if you want to recruit and keep your best <insert job here>, but not enough people are applying....what do you do..?

Just keep offering the same salary and conditions? Or offer 0.03% one off payment... plus a way below inflation pay rise. Which widens the gap between you and your Scottish colleagues (who do not also have 40K of tuition fees to pay off).

So to run some numbers:

£28k paid for 39 working weeks is £717 per working week (vs £603 for someone with 5.6 weeks' holiday). Employer pension contributions are £6,630. An employee on £28k with a 3% employer pension contribution gets £840, and works an additional 8 weeks for the same pay.

If a teacher worked for 46.4 weeks on the same weekly rate, plus their employer pension, they'd be on £39,943, which seems pretty good for a starting salary to me? I know there are also employee contributions, but ultimately, that goes to the employee in order to have a comfortable retirement, it's not money they don't see eventually (albeit I admit they may prefer to see it upfront when attempting to buy a house!). Also, on a starting salary of £28k, this is 7.4% vs 5% for another employee, so not that different.

I know this is a blunt tool, and I'm not suggesting teachers don't have a tough time of it - I think they do - but I'm not sure people are looking at the full picture.

The maternity package isn’t that good. My cousin (medical sales) had a baby at the same time as me and was paid in full for 9 months then got to keep all her holiday and add it on to her leave. I (teacher) got full pay for 2 weeks then it decreased on a sliding scale. I also lost all holiday (statutory amount). And just in case people have forgotten, teachers are not paid for the majority of their holiday - it is essentially unpaid leave. Your salary is just split over the 12 months.