...to think teachers DO get paid over the holidays?

[MasterBeth]

It doesn't make sense to me.

Some people say teachers don't get paid over the holidays. They are paid, they say, for 40 weeks, but their money is aggregated over 52 weeks and paid monthly.

What does that even mean? How is it (practically) any different to being paid (less per week) for 52 weeks?

And yet a lot of schools in Cornwall are struggling to recruit teachers...

Average salaries are only part of the picture. You also need to look at housing costs, how easy it is to find that housing, cost of commuting etc.

Leaving aside whether holidays are paid or not, I think we can be confident that if teachers contracts were changed so that they needed to be available for work for more than 195 days, there would be a bigger retention crisis than there is now.

A lot of teachers work insanely long hours marking and prepping and speaking to worried parents and running after school clubs and performances and parent-teacher meetings and staff meetings after a day's teaching from 8am to 4pm. So the long holidays partly allow for toiL. And most teachers spend a proportion of the holidays prepping and planning. those who don't are very established and deserve to be on a higher pay grade anyway, so it evens out. They are still underpaid, undervalued and under respected in our feckless greedy society.

@MasterBeth but do you go into work during those 4 weeks of holiday ? I'm here now in my unpaid holiday, as otherwise their won't be any lessons next week. They don't prepare themselves unfortunately.
Not saying I work harder than snot other job, but am saying I don't have a cushion little number with loads of holiday.

Well, a teacher on 3 days a week would still get 65 days a year holiday, same as a teacher working 5 days a week... (Minus the prep, etc)

So they can if they want an nobody complains.

Yes, obviously I know it would be impossible for part-time teachers to get part-time holiday, I was just using that as an example of swings/roundabouts in teaching versus other professions!

Not a teacher, I’m school office. I get paid for 39 weeks of work per annum. Those 39 weeks are fixed dates - I can’t request any time off during term time (no BIL not even for your fourth wedding). My yearly pay is divided by twelve so yes, I get paid DURING the holidays but not FOR the holidays.

But they aren’t 65 days paid holiday?

Teachers aren’t paid for the holidays, but they do get a certain amount of paid holiday. Presumably a part time teacher only gets the pro rated holiday pay?

This is really confusing me! I see what you are saying, but I just don’t think it means part time teachers are so much better off?!

Not if they are a LA maintained school - there are fixed pay bands and woe betide the school that messes with them.

There is clearly a significant legal difference between a teacher’s employment contract and a more standard employment contract, or teachers would not keep bringing this up. The fact is, if you are entitled to less holiday pay than the number of days you are not physically expected to work and this is not your choice but written into your contract, and you have no choice over the timing of those unpaid days, because you are not allowed to take them off in term time, then you are not being facetious to point out you are not paid for the whole year - unlike someone who is contracted to work all year and gets an annual paid holiday entitlement and may, at the employer’s discretion, if they ask for it, get unpaid holiday when they want it. I’m sure someone who had just negotiated some unpaid holiday would not be happy if they then found themselves having to work over that time in order to deal with their workload.

It’s lucky that people who don’t care what the legal implications of different employment contract terms and conditions might be in terms of paid holiday entitlement, pensions, working well in excess of contracted hours, etc, have nothing whatsoever to do with negotiating fair employment terms and conditions for workers and protecting their rights, as if they were, we’d probably still be at the level of development of sending children out to work at age 7, working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, and not having any paid holiday entitlement.

You should still get paid some paid holidays though? Prob about 4/5 weeks.

Of course they do- well they get a yearly/monthly salary (assuming they're not self-employed) and they still get that over the summer.

There's also a lot of summer schools etc, work they can get over the summer if they want it.

What %-age of schools are still LA maintained. Aren't most Academies now?

The August pay is paying the employee the 20% of wages that have been held back through the year. Other roles in other sectors based upon an hourly contract usually receive pay for what they have actually done each month - which can be problematic if those businesses were closed for 1-2 weeks every couple of months, as they'd see a drop in income.

Somebody on the equivalent hourly rate but employed full time, year round without compulsory closure periods would receive significantly more each month.

It depends on the LA. Where I used to work (Tory controlled Shire county) we were down to a handful of small primaries still maintained. Now in a Labour controlled London Borough, academies are the minority even for secondaries.

I'm not talking about pay though, I'm talking about part-time teachers benefiting from extra time off work, comparatively. Theoretically a teacher could work one day a week and still have 65 days holiday a year.

My original comment was in response to the PP who stated that teachers lose out by not accumulating annual leave when they go on maternity leave. I suggested that if they returned part-time, they would gain in comparison to the non-teacher by not having pro-rated annual leave. Swings and roundabouts!!

There is clearly a significant legal difference between a teacher’s employment contract and a more standard employment contract, or teachers would not keep bringing this up.

I wish someone would tell me what it is, then!

The fact is, if you are entitled to less holiday pay than the number of days you are not physically expected to work and this is not your choice but written into your contract, and you have no choice over the timing of those unpaid days, because you are not allowed to take them off in term time, then you are not being facetious to point out you are not paid for the whole year - unlike someone who is contracted to work all year and gets an annual paid holiday entitlement and may, at the employer’s discretion, if they ask for it, get unpaid holiday when they want it.

And I wish I was clever enough to understand this very long sentence.

But teachers aren't paid an hourly rate, they are paid an annual salary.

Well that's BS too. TAs work 39 weeks a year and get 12 monthly payments just like teachers.

Well over half are still LA here.

Hmmm, my County Council wage slip actually breaks my salary down into hourly pay too. So the people paying me are breaking it down into an hourly wage. Of course, the hourly wage is only multiplied by the 1265 I'm contracted to work. When you calculate what we as teachers actually work, the hourly rate falls significantly.

If a teacher works an extra day (for example, a part timer working an extra inset day) do they get paid 1/365 or 1/195 or something else? What does this tell us about what they are and aren’t paid for?

Teachers do not get paid over the holidays. They get paid for their teaching weeks plus 5 weeks of holiday or so like everyone else.

What they do 'get' to do is instead of taking all the money they would have earned each week is to have a percentage deducted and paid out at a later time to cover the non-paid weeks.

@Sunnydays41 if a part time teacher worked 1 day a week, they would get the equivalent of 13 weeks holiday the same as all teachers. They are only paid 1 day a week. A non teacher who worked one day a week may get the equivalent of 4 weeks holiday also only paid one day a week. It may only be 4 days but you are not going to book fours days in the same week as you are not contacted to work those days. To book a weeks holiday you would only need to use one day. I don’t think there is any advantage there.

Does anyone know what the purpose of breaking this into an hourly rate is?