Teacher pay

[Maddie05]

Seeing a lot online at the moment about teacher pay increases being unreasonable. I think teachers do a lot in society and a lot of what is expected of teachers appears to be out with their paid hours.

Am I being unreasonable to think they deserve a pay rise in like with inflation?
(FULL DISCLOSURE - I am not a teacher but I have children in a school and I volunteer on a PTA)

You don't just churn out the same lessons year after year. You have to differentiate your work according to the pupils in your class. In primary certainly, can't speak for secondary.

Show you have no idea of what goes on in a school in one post!

You aren't teaching the same kids each year so no you cannot just repeat them. Different sets of children have different needs.

Last year you might've taught kids how to count in 2s up to 50. This year you might have lots who could still be working on counting in 1s up to 20.

Also marking 4 year olds writing takes a lot of time. You have to learn to read phonetically and some words can take minutes to read because you just cannot figure out what they say.

As part of my role at the moment I do our after school club. Very few of the teaching staff have left before 5pm. Most are going to collect children from ASC and then carry on working when they are in bed.

Teacher here. The amount of extra work we have to do is ridiculous. Any pay rise won't solve the retention nor recruitment crisis.

Well thats why I'm asking

Absolutely this. It's half term and I've spent at least 2-3 hours everyday writing reports and planning for the next half term and trying to get ahead for September so I don't have to work all of the summer holidays. This is the side of teaching people don't see and think we work 9-3. I've even had friends (who have their own children in school) asking why I'm so stressed and working all the time as all we do I play everyday... Only year 6 teachers work hard!

Surely fighting for better working conditions would be more beneficial then a pay rise. What's the point in a pay rise if nothing changes and everyone is still unhappy. Most people wouldn't stay in a job that made them miserable no matter how much it paid

I think it was a question a lot of people have! I think I would assume teachers just churn out the same lessons every year had I not done the PTA for so long. My daughter is in a composite class as well and due to the numbers of children in the school classes change every year so my daughter has the same teacher 2 years in a row.

Reading this, pay seems like the smallest of worries.

Unfortunately most people have absolutely no idea of what teaching involves.
All they think of are 9 to 3 days and long holidays.

Not to mention buying stuff out of your own money

I agree re workload. The indiscipline gets to you too. If we could deal with this' much of the problems would be solved. Im leaving 5 years early.

In addition to what others have said about needing to differentiate according to the pupils in your classroom there are also external factors that affect this. I left teaching last year after 14 years (thankfully) but within an 8 year period there were 3 different incarnations of the GCSE in my subject. All of these were very different and involved pretty much entire curriculum rewrites! The first time this happened I was in my 20s and child free and (relatively) happy to work 4 weeks of the six week holidays unpaid to make a start on this (I got 2/12 modules completely written in that time!). The second time it happened I had two children under 3 and had no idea when I was supposed to completely rewrite a curriculum to match the new requirements of the exam!

My DH is a teacher. He feels his salary is reasonable and I agree

He works sensible hours, home by 5pm, never works at weekends or in school holidays

We're not in England. Perhaps it's different there

I'm on the verge of leaving teaching because the pay vs conditions don't balance - at all. I have 2 young children and am too burned out by my job to be a good parent. The days are long - and they are relentless - barely time to go to the toilet.

In the short term, I'm going PT - but unless the conditions change in education, I will be out within a couple of years. Many others are doing the same (and my demographic - women in their 30s - are leaving even more rapidly because it's just incompatible with a family) - lots of schools have gaps/vacancies or too many inexperienced teachers without sufficient mentors to learn from.

As others have said, the real issue is funding. I already spend £30-£50 per month on resources because my school has no budget. Unfunded pay rises will decimate school budgets even further - costing resources, TAs, opportunities, essential support, buildings that aren't falling down...

A pay rise in line with inflation over the last 15 years would be 20-25%!

Support staff pay should not be pro rata <gavel>

What do teachers actually get paid? There is a lot of different information online snd even looking at the official sources, there seems to be a lot of different 'types' of teacher, so it's kind.of hard to understand what your average classroom teacher makes.

The pay rise is not going to entice people to stay in the profession, even if schools can find their bit of the money. I’m very experienced and love my job but can’t see how new teachers cope.
I have literally just finished the 172 exam week maths papers I had to mark during the ‘holiday’ to ensure the pupils all get them back straight after half term. I will then be writing the 172 reports that go with them to feed back to parents. This won’t be happening in school hours as I’ll be straight back to teaching the classes, writing up behaviour related incidents and also planning lessons. Luckily maths isn’t as fast changing as say history or RS which require tonnes of rewriting on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure I average out at 55+ hours a week. Definitely getting just a bit more than minimum wage.

It’s also worth remembering what a big part of the role of any member of school staff child protection is. Even as a TA I spend a couple of hours a week recording things on our child protection system. We can’t just ignore something (rightly so!) we have to record it no matter how small it seems incase it helps build part of a bigger picture.

Pretty much, ive been a teacher for (too) many years and agree with this. Although I would welcome more pay as most people would, there are so many other issues that have a larger affect on attracting and more importantly retaining teachers that id prefer they address.

Imagine you were at parents’ evening and the teacher said your child does not understand what is being taught. Last year the class understood it so I am going to continue teaching it even though your child doesn’t understand it.
You would expect the teacher to teach your child not just deliver some educational material.

I’m an experienced teacher and the DSL at my secondary school.

My job is, essentially, impossible because all other agency (police, SS, CAMHS etc) thresholds are so high - due to their own underfunding- that 90% of responses are to bounce everything back to schools.

I’m also SLT, so very aware that recent pay rises are impossible because they’ve not been fully funded.

The education system is on a knife edge - we, and the services who orbit around us - need funding properly. It’s honestly close to collapse.

I don't think they can offer an amount of money that would make teaching sustainably attractive, instead they need to look at the job itself. I've been in the game for 16 years, and I just feel so tired and jaded with the behavioural issues that have become 'normal' in secondary schools. When I started teaching, it was big, shocking news if a pupil was verbally abusive but now it's commonplace. And I've never had to break up so many fights amongst teenage girls.
Also the constant pressure to deliver higher and higher results, being told that we're now making our targets more aspirational (which is fancy language for 'get everyone 1 grade higher please'), and having the blame solely with you for a poor result on coursework or exams. Plus having 33-35 in a classroom, with such a variety of complex needs that there is no way (EHCP or not) I can possibly meet them all.
I really don't fancy going back on Monday tbh!

As a teacher, I support the pay rises, but absolutely NOT unless they are fully funded.
The amount of times I have had to buy equipment or resources for my department is shocking, and every teacher in my school has done this at some point. Our school is in a big deficit because the funding just doesn’t cover things. So I would rather not have a pay rise if it means that the school can continue to scrape by, instead of more cutting corners everywhere and possible redundancies (where we don’t have any capacity to make them!!)

We have lost 3 SLT positions in the past two academic years who haven’t been replaced. Yet are still struggling. It’s nonsense.