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)

I'm working class. Brought up in a family where my dad worked two jobs and my mum had to choose between bread and new nappy liners each week.

Absolutely no sense of entitlement. During covid I worked solidly for a whole year and had 0 days off. I was teaching in 3 classrooms simultaneously, teaching to 3 different groups of children online and having creating home packs for those who had no internet and for which internet was impossible (very rural/families on spring water not mains).

I worked when off with covid because as you say taking a day off makes things unmanageable. It isn't a sense of entitlement to want safe working environments and fair pay which is legal.

By the time I finished at Easter I was working up to 1am each day and back on it at 4am. So no no sense of entitlement at all. Just graft. You are pissed that teachers are fighting for better pay and better working conditions as both are currently illegal. For you to call that a sense of entitlement for wanting legal and safe environments means you are in the wrong job. You are not understanding safeguarding if that is your attitude which is basic in your job and shocking you call someone wanting safeguarding as being entitled.

Working for less than NMW is not safeguarding. It is exploitative. Also working well above the legal working hours is also not safe. I was working well over 100 hours a week earlier this year. How is that safe?

Would you get in a taxi with a driver who has done 100 hours of driving already that week? I doubt it because it would be unsafe.

Agreed. I teach in a special school. I am bitten, scratched, hit, kicked, bitten or grabbed every single day. Anything that isn't nailed down is a potential missile. If I'm not being attacked myself, I'm trying to protect the children in my class from being hurt by their peers or themselves. On top of this, I am, of course, expected to actually teach.
I am paid the princely sum of £2769 a year on top of my salary for teaching in SEN.

I then go home and plan, assess, complete endless reports for numerous outside agencies, paperwork that is required for EHCPs, referrals, I could go on and on.

Having said all this, what I'd love more than anything is for TAs to be paid SIGNIFICANTLY more. My TAs are absolute angels. I could not do my job without them. They are subject to the exact same conditions as I am during the school day and yet they are paid an absolute pittance.
It's fucking scandalous.

The first school I worked in (primary) required highlighting the LO (whether met , partially met or not), a pink positive comment, a green need to improve/extra challenge /question comment (which then had to be answered by the pupil and then marked again) for every child in every single lesson. That was on top of picking up actual mistakes/misconceptions in the work. It was fucking ridiculous and they just kept adding more crap .

Teachers are currently on 49K.

Secondary - if head a small department ~54-6K

Large department head/Head of Year/SENCO ~ 60-65K.

Assistant HT in ~ in 70-75K,

Deputy HT ~80-85K

Headteacher - usually up to 120K+

For a school, let's say with 1600 kids.

Look at TES adverts.

I think they need to look at workloads more than pay. I don't know any teachers struggling for money as such but a lot who are drowning in stress and work.
I don't think it's a job you go into for money. Ofc they should be paid fairly but I think a plan to make the job better would go far for retention. Maybe a push to employ more teachers or more TAs

This is multi complex!

Teachers are contracted for 29.7 hours or something ridiculous a week. Thai is teaching time.

Everyone knows that teaching times with PPA which is just a morning usually.

On top of that there is marking, report writing more planning and then anything else that comes under being a teacher related to social care needs etc.

Their hours are often double that a week. So effectively that halves their weekly pay.

Then there’s the fact the salary is worked out based on a teaching year of 40 weeks. Added on is holiday.

So effectively although salaried and paid 12 months of the year the pay reflects the fact that there are about 6 weeks they don’t work.

Except they do work over those 6 weeks because how the hell else are they going to get everything done?

Added to this the pay rise is to be funded for the first 1% from the existing budgets that don’t actually cover costs either.

Add on top of that that somehow the profession has required more and more degree level study but is still considered a vocation. People don’t see a vocation as needing to attract the money the jobs worth.

So here we have part of the triad of necessary professions to keep an economy running - the education safety and wellbeing of young people - being treated as not important and not paying enough to attract the best people or retain bloody wonderful experienced teachers - and joined up too can figure out what the hell is going wrong with this country.

schools and healthcare needs far more respect and incentives and when we get those right I believe the rest will fall into place.

Im not a teacher. But I take my hats off to anyone who is and stand by them for everything they are fighting for and hope they get what they deserve.

Not sure it’s about hours at this stage. People don’t want to be teachers as it’s not easy. During Covid we were told we were a bunch of lazy wasters who should leave if we didn’t like being squished into rooms with 30 kids. So v v many did. We now don’t have enough teachers. Ask your kids how many classes are taken by supply or a TA (I live TAs but this is not what they are paid for).

Want people who want to teach ? You’re going to have to make the job attractive by paying more.

PS week before half term I had a chair thrown at me, broke up 2 fights and was called the C word a few times. Standard working week now.

Maybe in a large secondary in inner London....

But back in reality:

M6 Teacher: £43,000
Head of an average primary starting at: £55,000

TLRs barely exist. Primary cannot afford to pay UPS. Pushing out experienced teachers because they are unaffordable is a very, very real issue.

£49k is top of the upper teacher pay scale which can take 10+ years to reach - why would you use that to describe 'current teacher pay'?

It's worth looking at tax carefully. Much of the difference between 0.8 FTE and full time disappears into extra tax. Of course it does knacker your pension to work less than full time so that's worth considering (I have other pension/retirement provision additional to TPS). Could be worth a session with an advisor like Wesleyan to work out what's best for you personally. Too many teachers burn out due to the hours.

I don't have the energy in my 50s to do 60 plus hour weeks for months at a time anyway, so it's a moot point for me!

Because that person wants to pretend that all teachers are on that to paint a picture of decent wages. This person doesn't tell of those on 49k being vulnerable and often subjected to harassment and bullying and 'action plans' because of their wages which all teachers know what that means.

I feel for you Mizu. At the end of my main career for various reasons I took a lecturer role in an FE college. I really liked working with the kids and they told me they loved my course and the management liked it too. But I left after five years when I realised only the management got promotions, payrises and also weirdly were allowed to take holidays in term time. Clearly nothing was ever going to change/improve for me when I asked my line manager. One colleague had been there over 15 years w/o a payrise. He was even earning less than me!. No one is mugging me off. That was 3 years ago. I'm so much happier. Haven't looked back. If everyone went on strike they'd have to raise salaries, but a lot of teachers won't. That's on them. The various goverments know this and take advantage.

I got to the top of the payscale quickly. 7 years I think. Also moved to jobs in Central London where there's a higher pay scale.

The issue is that in real terms all the pay is 20-25% lower than in 2010. Plus the flexibility isn't there whereas other professional jobs have changed radically with the advent of WFH.

Younger colleagues really struggle with housing.

Plus as a other poster said, progression requires management roles which can take hundreds of extra hours a month for only a little more pay. Also (sorry to say this) most senior teachers have zero management training and HR are conspicuous by their absence, making the whole thing unreasonably difficult!

My LinkedIn is full of recruiters trying to tempt me to the Middle East, by the way.

FE and secondary schools are funded from different government departments. Hence the different pay structures.

Does that make sense? No. But it's the reason.

And do you think your paid enough for your role?

This. People who aren't teachers don't realise this. I retrained as a teacher and for my first few weeks I was dead on my feet because it was just so exhausting being on all of the time. In my old job (an office role) I worked 9-5 and felt fine by the end of the day but by 3pm I'm wrung out. There's also the emotional side of the job that you take home with you - worrying about certain pupils- which you can't switch off from. I spend the first few days of the holiday just decompressing.

I used to work in a private school and the teachers had a pay freeze. I left last year, so I’m not sure if it’s still in place.

We would joke that the school was like a revolving door because of their recruitment and retention issues. It wouldn’t surprise me if other schools had the same issue.

MN is full of posts where schools haven’t provided appropriate support to SEN kids, or pastoral issues like bullying have not been properly addressed, or basically outlining where tons of children have fallen through ‘the net’.

15 years of budget cuts have meant pastoral and support teams have been decimated. At my large (2000) secondary we used to have 3 pastoral staff for each year group, tight tutor team, pastoral SLT, FT school councillor, FT school nurse. Last 2 jobs vanished entirely over those 15 years, pastoral team cut from 18 to 3 (who were teachers, so having a teaching timetable as well as their pastoral role). TAs halved, LAs made it more and more impossible to get funding for SEN (as they also faced budget cuts). As schools desperately tried to balance budgets, there was more and more reliance on teachers at the bottom of the pay scale - traditionally new teachers would be learning for years from the more experienced staff, but there are so few experienced staff anymore. People in management roles were hugely skilled and experienced teachers (remember your head and deputy from when you went to school? Were they ever in their 20s??), but these days there’s so few older staff that less experiences staff are the only ones available to take on management roles. Cuts to all social services and increased poverty, plus the issues from lockdowns, has meant that school children have more needs than ever (toiletting, sharing, language, socialising, undiagnosed SEN) and our schools are less equipped to deal with them than ever. It’s made working in a school a nightmare for many. Teachers are leaving in droves, and schools can’t recruit, so our kids are being taught by non specialist and non qualified staff. Behaviour in class is so poor that it’s difficult to teach anyone, and there’s no support left in school to deal with that. I made the decision to leave, like a lot of other teachers. They could double the salary and that wouldn’t be enough to get me back.

That's simply not true. You're quoting the top of the pay scale ranges.

Google is not hard to use

Where does the cash come from? Is the outlined rise fully funded and costed within current budgets? If not then there shouldn’t be a rise. Teachers have better pensions than most people I know, if we are finding it hard to attract teachers to the profession that is a different issue.

Pensions are a myth. Old TPS was v good. New TPS is rubbish. And not going to attract new teachers.

Want teachers ? You’ll have to pay them NOW, not when they are 70+.

It's not fully funded.

We do not have enough teachers.

You brought up Covid.
You brought up being a comparison
And you had a sly dig about "real responsibility.

Now your whinging about getting a response that you don't like.

So why did you bother if you only wanted responses that you approved of?