Teachers given lie-ins and extra days off

[LaughingPig]

The Guardian is reporting today that state schools are offering perks in an attempt to attract and retain teachers. These include lie-ins, whereby teachers will start later one day a week, a day off each fortnight and even the chance to work from home.

Clearly there is an issue with getting enough high-quality teachers into the profession and keeping them there. However, I’m not sure how these initiatives will go down with taxpayers on the back of successive teachers’ strikes, schools closing for months during lockdown and now inflation-busting pay rises.

Would you be happy with your DC’s teacher arriving to school late after a relaxing lie-in or logging on from home?

YABU- teachers deserve lie-ins
YANBU- teachers should be in class teaching DC

Link

I can assure you teachers would very hard for their wage. Many other jobs offer flexible working, wfh and other attractive options as well as better pay, perks, bonuses etc for the private sector. Most “days off” or late starts/ early finishes that are being talked about now are teachers’ PPAs being timetabled to fall all on one day or at certain times so teachers can drop their own children off at school or collect them or spend their day marking at home. Your assumption is that teachers are lazy, not worth their pay and this part of the reason why we have a retention and recruitment crisis

In theory.

Have you seen the state of school budgets?

Maybe this is a Dfe bot after all.

Ffs teachers are not getting lie ins. It's the option to have PPA time at home. Teachers in my school get to work at 7.30am at the latest, I'm there at 7am and most of us are working until 6pm when we are kicked out. And taking our laptops home. This initiative gives teachers the chance to do their PPA at home, as in WORK at home.

@liquoricetorpedoes

Salaries are all published on the DfE website:

Qualified teacher salary
AreaMinimumMaximum
England (excluding London)
£31,650
£49,084
London fringe
£33,075
£50,471
Outer London
£36,413
£53,994
Inner London
£38,766
£60,092
Additional payments
You may also receive additional payments on top of your regular salary for taking on extra responsibilities.
This could be a one-off payment for a specific project, for example, creating a timetable.
Or it might be an extra responsibility attached to your job role, for example, being the head of department.
Depending on your responsibilities, you could earn up to an extra £16,553. Your school will determine how much you receive.

Career progression
Leading practitioner salary
Some schools also have a leading practitioner pay range for teachers with exemplary teaching skills who lead the improvement of teaching in their school.
What this will involve will depend on your school, but could include:

• coaching and mentoring other teachers, including trainees and early career teachers
• undertaking a national professional qualification (NPQ)
• supporting your school with plans to reduce workload

AreaMinimumMaximum England (excluding London) £50,025 £76,050 London fringe £51,403 £77,430 Outer London £53,994 £80,022 Inner London £59,478 £85,509

While I am retired now, there has not been any single carrot that could have tempted me back into an unstreamed secondary classroom ever. I did rather enjoy trying to teach unruly 14 year olds, because when it was good, it was so much fun because it was unpredictable. But when I was being rated on GCSE average pass rates, it was murderous.

It's horse after cart.
How about addressing student/teacher ratio and adequate support for special needs kids? That's just off the top of my head. Could some in the trenches weigh in?

Considering I have worked my weekly paid hours without fail by the end of Wednesday every week and then go on to do about 20 hours extra in work, this sounds nice. I left work at 7:30 today after 12 hours.

Flexibility is something that is so common in so many jobs. I don’t understand why people would accept this without blinking an eye in their wfh jobs but god forbid teachers want anything other than total rigidity! This isn’t something I’ll be campaigning or pushing for particularly but fuck me, it’s mental how much people begrudge teachers any level of work life balance.

A bit of an assumption! I highly doubt you work in a school and even if you do, you have no idea about what staff in other schools do.

I’ve just left teaching after 14 years (and I thank this thread for reminding me why as I was getting whimsical about missing the children and seeing their faces when they learnt something new earlier) and before I had my own children I used to arrive at 7.30 and the car park was half full. Once I started to do nursery drop off and arrived at 7.45, I struggled to find a space. Our school building closed at 6.30pm. I used to leave around 6pm and there were plenty of teacher cars left. The caretakers often used to bemoan that they had to go and start vacating the buildings at 6.15 so they had a chance of being able to lock up on time.

I missed out on so many memories with my own children and am forever grateful I took the decision to leave as I can spend time with my family rather than ferrying them to and from childcare and then to bed.

Meanwhile outside of London and the Fringe the max is £49k if you are willing to sacrifice your work life balance and family life.

Certainly not the case out of London- so it’s a bit disingenuous to keep saying 60k is the maximum for classroom teachers- not in the majority of the country it isn’t.

@Fatbottomgardener

Not true. All classroom teachers nationally have the opportunity to earn up to an additional £16k for additional responsibility. There is then the chance to earn over £76,000 outside London as a leading practitioner teacher.

Still think @LaughingPig has no idea about teachers even if her partner is the magnificent HT she claims.

still betting she is a journo or wasn’t accepted onto a PGCE course

Imagine for a moment you are never able to take your child to school or able to request time off to see any of their school shows. That you have missed friend's weddings because you have utterly no flexibility to take a day off here and there. That if you do request it will be unpaid. When a teacher takes a class on a week long residential trip they are on gorn24 hours /day forn7 days and there is no recompense such as overtime or time in lieu just a pat on the back, if that. That 'lie in' or 'skive off' as you see it, is actually called flexible working and a key part of the modern work place. It will also greatly improve good will and likely productivity. Being g able to go in a bit later increases my liklihood of offering an afterschool or lunchtime club, rather than being so burnt out I just want to go home. Most teachers will not just be skipping out the door but going home and planning nd prepping from home. Increasingly we do not have our on classrooms and so this allows a bit of flexibility to maybe do some errands then work into afternoons. Case in point due to a high risk pregnancy I have been allowed to come in 'later' 8.45am and I can leave in the afternoon if I am not teaching to WFH being able to WFH has actually meant I have worked on the days I left early for 5-6 extra hours on 3 days. I have given my employer and my pupils almost 16 extra unpaid hours. I have therfore gifted the taxpayer around £350 of free labour this week and that is likely to be the same next week nd the week after that .
Also stop walking past teacher's homes and peering in their windows that constitutes harrassment and a complete and utterly lack of boundaries .

I really doubt this will be the case... Also, a lot of teachers are hard-working parents too!!

But also using those tables a qualified teacher outside of London with 6 or 7 years service, working on the progression ladder of moving up a scale per year, will be on over £40k. Not exactly chump change is it.

Those things cost money schools haven’t got. This proposal, to allow some flexibility of where PPA time is taken, is cost free.

Your DH counting cars in a school car park and you obsessing over teacher's curtains being shut is utterly ridiculous. All you should care about is output.

As long as all lessons are covered and the education offered is of a good standard, what does it matter if teachers wfh or start later on a rota basis?

Most teachers do incredibly long hours and are underpaid for the workload and pressure they have. If introducing flexibility attracts more qualified candidates to the profession, this can only be a good thing.

But no, you crack on counting cars and watching curtains.

@ATenShun god you’re so right. I must go to the GP as I’m clearly hallucinating being in work for 11-12 hours every day…

Not many school have leading practitioner roles - no budget for them. Schools are desperately offloading UPS 3 and preferring to recruit ECT.

I am sure your DP has discussed the horrendous state of school budgets with you?

Don't be daft! Just because there is a pay scale doesn't mean that the vast majority of teachers earn anything like that! There are FIVE leading practitioners in my COUNTY and no one else has been appointed to that role in years, it went into abeyance as school budgets became increasingly stretched. And additional responsibility payments are also increasingly rare, only our key stage leaders receive a TLR and both are on less than £3000 a year!

@Fatbottomgardener I think we should all be grateful she’s nowhere near the education of anyone impressionable.

It’s supply and demand, surely? People don’t want to stay in teaching, so the govt needs to look at how a range of ways to try and retain qualified and experienced teachers.

Teaching is rapidly becoming an unattractive career prospect, I should know, I left teaching 6 years ago. Couldn’t be doing with the vile behaviour from children and parents, and wasn’t paid nearly enough to deal with that with a smile on my face day in day out. By all accounts it’s even worse now post-Covid.

Also, if I walked past my neighbour’s house in the morning and the curtains were drawn, I wouldn’t judge them or think badly of them, I’d either not give it a thought or, if I did, I’d assume they were working nights. Not my business anyway. So that was a bit of a weird point to make.

You make this extra £16k sound so easy to get.
Ive worked in my school 12 years and never known anyone to get nearly this much extra. I also have a lot of friends in other schools and not one person has ever come across that sort of additional money. I have a TLR for leading English, the biggest subject in a primary school (seeing as it is actually two subjects- reading and writing) and I get around an extra £3000. I also mentor ECTs and do a million other things/additional responsibilities but the extra is nowhere near £16k. Please don’t allow yourself to be fooled that this is normal and easy to come by for teachers.

Yes just keep on thinking we get paid “not exactly chump change” and have super long holidays. We will keep on leaving.

Well at least we know now you're not a serious poster. There's queues for all the printers in the school I'm in the most by 7:30. Two days a week there's departmental meetings til 4:30 (last lesson finishes at 3:05) and last night the rugby and netball games finished just before 5. The only day the teachers are hotfooting it out the door by 3:30 are Friday's and I certainly don't blame them for that.

SEN and safeguarding staff will be lucky to leave before 6 each night due to calls home and/or parental meetings.