To miss my teacher holidays

[Backinthedayeh]

Sort of inspired by a thread I’ve just read (that rhymes 😂)
I taught in a school for many many years and had around 9/10 blissful weeks off in the summer…fully paid! It was pure heaven.
I now have a different job working year round, normal hours and it’s so hard to adapt and be working full days in sweltering heat (live abroad) when it’s almost ingrained in me that summer is for messing about and no responsibilities..
Anyway…sigh

@Mushroo - I’m a teacher and I totally agree with you. It might be the case technically that you don’t get paid for the holidays but the outcome is the same. The holidays are a huge perk - not sure why people always minimise that. It’s swings and roundabouts- yes we have less flexibility but I get 17 weeks holiday per year, job security and a decent pension. I love it too.

Maybe it would make more sense if teachers’ salary were stated in the same way as TAs, as that would be quoted as £25k but you actually only get about £19k after unpaid holidays etc are taken off

Agree

I used to work in a school and I miss them too.

I'm surprised the time off was blissful and not partly taken up by preparation and other work.

At least you have the consolation of cheaper holidays and some at a time of your choosing.

Because it doesn't work like that.

You get salary for the year and are paid for 1265 hours of directed time (classes, parents evenings cpd etc) you then have to plan, mark, call parents and tidy etc on top of that.

M6 so Min 6 years experience is on £38,810
it is correct that holidays are not paid.

salary is paid as stated

Dont know about teachers, but as school admin its because i have already worked the hours in Sept to July that im being paid for. So basically i get less in the months i work than i would have as they even my pay out. I do have moment in the year where i think gosh i work so many hours how can i only earn x. Then in augist i remember its because they didnt pay me all those hours, they kept some back for august so my salary is even.

Teachers contracts are strange. I find it easiest to think of them as annualised hours, which msny other jobs have. So they work x number of hours a year, which is all bunched up and "holiday' is in many ways no different to weekends for ordinary office work.

I remember spending most of the Christmas and Easter holidays marking coursework. When I left teaching my holidays were my own and I could choose when to take them.

I think that working term time only had a LOT of benefits when you have children yourself. You don’t need childcare for most of the school holidays (some school holidays/insets are out of sync). So in that way it’s really great for parents.

There were a number of factors that drove me to leave once my own children were at school, though. One was the complete inflexibility of holidays. The summer holidays did it make up for the fact I had to miss taking my children to their first day of school, missed every sports day, every nativity, every play, every special assembly. And that I was ‘unavailable’ to my own kids evenings and weekends term time, because I was either still at work doing meetings/parents evenings/extra curricular/leading trips, or working at home doing marking/planning/reports. Someone said above that teachers have weekends. I definitely didn’t feel like that. If I planned my work really well all week and it was a quiet week (no parents evening/exams/reports), I might get a Saturday.

(I do know that there are other jobs like this - teachers aren’t alone - just saying it was definitely the case for me as a teacher, and now I’ve left, I have weekends back).

Teachers contracts are strange. Lots of teachers don’t quite understand them. They are paid for annual hours, 1265, plus the statutory 5.6 weeks holiday. This makes the hourly rate for the most experienced teacher on UPS3 £33 per hour gross.

Teachers don’t get paid for the rest of the school holidays (other than the 5.6 statutory that every worker is entitled to). They don’t get paid for undirected hours, for example marking and planning and running extra curricular activities or organising trips, or meeting parents (outside of the calendared parents evenings) or multi agency meetings or running revision lessons, or coming in for results day, or going in during holidays to clean/rearrange the classroom. There’s lots of ‘undirected’ hours that it says in the contract we must do to fulfil our professional duties, but we don’t get paid for.

I say ‘we’, but I’ve left. The unpaid holidays were not enough to compensate.