To think this is an unacceptable wage?

[Youthiswastedontheyoung]

I'm a qualified teacher with 21 years' experience who has just started supply so flexibility with a poorly husband and three kids of my own.
Just did a full day supply (8.30-3.30) and came out with £112 net.
Hubby thinks decent wage, I think piss-take!
Opinions please!

Uni degrees don't really mean much with regards to salary.

Employers just see that everyone has a Uni degree these days.

Dunno what a degree has to do with it.
I have two. I'm a quid above minimum wage. That's how much the job I'm currently in pays.

I think its crap, particularly now when the COL is so high. Wages have just not kept up with prices. 10 years ago I'd have said you were doing ok on that money. Now, not so much.

However, as usual its a race to the bottom on here. And we squabble over a few pounds while the billionaires get richer.

You seem to think remuneration should increase for every year of experience. At some point you just get to “very experienced” level and stay there (unless you take on extra responsibilities /leadership). A teacher with eg 14 years’ experience is really no less able than someone with 30 years, all other things being equal.

IDK why everyone is breaking this into hourly rates when that's a useless way of quanitfying whether a teacher is paid fairly or not because you literally can't do a 12 hour shift as a teacher in a classroom. 🤔

@QueenCamilla What's your job?

£16ph after tax is very reasonable. Not megabucks, but not to be sniffed at.

Saying it's not much more than £5 over minimum wage is not correct and misleading. The minimum wage is the gross pay, not the net pay.

Your gross hourly rate is - with some quick mental maths - about £20ph The minimum wage is £11.44.

No one’s forcing you to take or stay in the job. If you don’t like it. Find something else.

Yeah degrees don't affect salaries at all. In a lot of jobs.

Even say in teaching where you have to have a degree to do the job. They're not going to give any teacher more money because she has a degree. All teachers have degrees.

It is low considering your experience and qualifications, but it doesn't surprise me as most well known London agencies pay £13/14 including tax and holiday pay for nursery nurses and qualified nannies with around 20 years experience

Or a "normal" working year.

Then I definitely don’t think that’s a fair wage. The point of locum / agency is you get a higher daily / weekly take home rate because of the insecurity of the job. You get paid more to cover the gaps in work you might experience and because you don’t have any of the benefits of permanent jobs. If I worked as a locum (social worker) I would take home £1,500 extra per month (based on a mid-range hourly rate) but that would be across a whole year without any time off, so if you take into account time off, private pension contributions etc I would still be better off as locum - as long as I could get regular work fairly locally

@ihaterain2024 Not sure those are equivalent jobs.

Op is (wrongly) comparing her (net) hourly rate to minimum wage (gross).

The thing is, teachers often become deskilled doing supply. No one's fault but, when you're not class based, aren't there for regular CPD or don't have the consistency of expectations your professional development suffers and skills you don't regularly use are lost. Education and pedagogical practice changes so quickly, it's easy to get left behind.

Which is why day to day is paid at a lower rate. And also why the rate goes up during a long term placement.

Ultimately, if you're teaching someone else's unfamiliar lessons for a day, in an unfamiliar environment with an unfamiliar cohort, your 21 years of experience don't actually count for a whole lot.

You'll be a whole lot better than an ECT but you won't be as good a teacher on day to day as you would in your own class.

Being supply means you get flexibility which is something many people take a lower wage for as flexibility in a job is a good perk to have. Also finishing at 330pm is a massive perk for most working people.
The wage is above average, not brilliant but a job is more than just the money.

It does seem low compared with locuming as a social worker tbh but I suppose it’s supply and demand

It's not £16/hr though, is it?

Assuming you paid 20% tax and 12% NIC, and half an hour was an unpaid lunchbreak, it's actually more like £25/hr.

If you didn't like the hourly rate, why did you accept the work? I assume you knew the rate in advance.

If the £1400pcm is also net that means you get £172 gross for a day's work in your permanent position as compared to £140 gross for supply.

Do you not think the additional work you are supposed to put in for your permanent role in terms of planning, preparing, results analysis, relationship-building and reporting is worth an extra £32 per day? Given that for supply work you just have to turn up and there's no expectation to care before or after?

Seems reasonable to me.

You knew the pay when you signed up to take the work from the agency. You can hardly whinge about it now, totally unreasonable.

You also knew the pay when you decided to be a teacher. You keep mentioning years of experience but we all know you don’t get paid more just for being older, you get paid more for doing harder or more specialist roles.

.

No we don't. Law - like a lot of sectors - has become a lot less lucrative over the past couple of decades. Outside of corporate law and outside of London, it's quite rare to find a partner earning six figures these days and those lower salaries cascade downwards. Even in corporate law newly qualified solicitors in the regions often struggle to break the £40k mark on qualification.

As a rule of thumb, a reasonably experienced (say 10 years PQE) private client solicitor in the regions will be on somewhere between £50-60k with little opportunity to earn more. Family solicitors a little less.

My understanding is that very experienced teachers who are heads of year or have some other additional responsibilities can reach a similar salary at the top end but it probably takes them a fair bit longer. However, they take slightly less time to train (in theory they could do a primary teaching degree and one year as a trainee compared to needing a degree, the SQE and two years training) so maybe this is fair (although to be honest, both professions are not for the workshy!)

I suspect the problem for supply teachers is that they only get paid the basic salary which is quite low. Teachers rely on a lot of top up incomes for their added responsibilities in the school, which supply teachers won't get.

£1400 take home is around £18500 a year gross. Presumably there’s some pension on top but you’re looking at around £40k gross for the full time equivalent of your permanent job.

£140 gross per day for supply is the equivalent of about £26500 for the 190 teaching days per year. But a lot less responsibility in supply than perm teaching.

I’m sure £140 was what top scale supply teachers were paid when I worked in Local Authority HR in the late 1990s. Who were you working with?

Ah I see.

Does supply wages change depending on your teaching experience or is it a flat rate for everyone?