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 left my SENCO role in 2021 - at the top of the upper pay scale with the highest TLR payment - and the most I was ever paid was £47k. Salaries must have rocketed. I still wouldn’t go back.

@MangoLassie they haven’t. Still pretty bad for the hours, responsibility and general shit. TLRs so rare these days.

Not £60k for a SENCo then - I thought not.

Well it needs to costed out, and money raised from taxes of all band earners, if that’s what everyone wants - everyone must pay. Let’s see what Reeve’s Autumn budget brings. Keir Starmer promised 6,500 teachers using the 1.7 billion raised in private school VAT, where are we with that? Anyone know how much has been raised so far and also how many teachers they’ve recruited, to start in October when the funds should be ready for distribution?

@MangoLassie I wish 😂

It must be very stressful teaching exam year classes.

I am not on £49k!!!!!

Also a part time teacher will only ever get paid the senco rate (or a TLR if they are lucky enough to get one) pro rated - so if you work 0.6 you only get 60% of the senco allowance, even if you have full responsibility for the role. It is one of the issues mentioned in the most recent pay review.

Added to that, many primaries don't pay classroom teachers above M6.

How many years teaching? When you're UPS 3 you will be!

I'm UPS 1

It is true for the upper range, yes.
I am a DHT. This is my school payscale - large academy..
Our senco is an AHT, which is fairly common.

It’s not easy to get UPS3. A lot of schools just won’t put you on it.

You can't extrapolate all schools from your school.

And has been said here several times, many schools don't put anyone on the upper range.

I get this, but do you do all of the extras that school teachers do? (I am asking as I don’t know, I’m not trying to be funny). I am in to supervise groups before 8am, I teach, do break and lunch duties, supervise extra curricular activities in the afternoons, meet with parents regularly, form time, assembly time. I suspect in an fe college that you have smaller classes, and that you just teach. Possibly have 1:1s ever so often. I’m not saying it’s right, but I have essentially had a pay cut of £10k in recent years and I have taken on a TLR. Luckily I was part time before the cut so I still feel better off.

A lot of schools have also split the pay grades further
MPS 1
MPS 1 a
MPS 1 b
MPS 1 c
MPS 2
MPS 2 a Etc.
all the way up the scale.

So there are now essentially 36 pay levels.

Absolutely a supply / demand issue.

A day using worksheets that are not marked. Or more down time. These two lines have killed me. I don’t mean to sound rude but you sound like you work in a school from the 1990s.

Do you work overseas or in an academy?

Would love to know what your school policy looks like where you are using worksheets and having downtime.

I’ll try some downtime in my A level classes tomorrow. And some unmarked worksheets 😂😂

Me too. And year 11. They have an exam on Friday but maybe we should just have a bit of downtime.

We have employed a few supply from FE lately and it is obvious that they haven't previously done a lot of the additional tasks. Having a tutor group is quite a significant chunk of work, for instance, especially if they're year 12/13.

@queenofthebongo yes, parts of your post are true I guess - my classes are 18 or 19 students and they are, as I said before, a joy to teach. Also, it is quite flexible so I could leave one day at 3:30 for example and work longer the next.

I also have around 100 students a week and not 300 as a pp has said. I do teach higher levels so there is a considerable amount of marking involved but this is not necessarily every week.

However, there is so much other stuff to do and that’s the often unmanageable part. We seem to have done away with our admin team slowly but surely so now do all admin ourselves - that can mean anything from contacting learners to creating spreadsheets and using reports systems. Then we interview weekly for new students as we infill into classes throughout the year!

And then there are the targets, the individual learning plans, everything has to be evidenced for funding - there a lot of paperwork.

We also do all the enrolment in August (we have to be back at work 3rd week of August) for around 650 students and continue this throughout the year.

Everyone in my team does an evening class so one day a week most of us are at work 12 hours so the next morning can be hard.

We definitely don’t just teach. But I think I probably have less of a workload than secondary but 30 years of teaching does make it easier generally 😁

Common in secondaries. Not uncommon for a primary senco to be on something like M3. Many primaries cycle through sencos because the pay is buttons.

A classroom teacher starts on ~30K now and is on a scale that goes up to ~49K - UPS 3. As some some other posters have stated, it appears not all schools agree to UPS.

All other responsibilities in school are paid additional with a 'TLR' of varying amounts (and time given via a lighter timetable) eg Head of Chemistry, Head of Year, maybe head of KS3 Maths. Thie TLR value awarded can vary considetably between schools for the same role.

Senior leaders are on a 'leadership scale' having usually spent years in a middle management role, then gained promotion. Again, depending on the size of the school and job description, this can vary for the same post. Eg one school may advertise a DHT with L21-25, another may offer L18-22.

My classes are mostly 30+. A levels this year are 26/27. I teach 350+ students a fortnight.

To go onto UPS you usually have to do extra stuff these days. On top of your usual job. No extra time given.

Teachers currently start on £30k and move up the spine annually until they hit M6 which is £43,607. Seems fine. You can start teaching when you're in your early 20s and be on £43,607 by the time you hit 30. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee you'll move to the Upper Pay Scale (UPS) - that depends school policy. Similarly, even once on UPS there are different policies about how fast you can progress within that Upper Pay Scale, with many schools saying only moving up once every two years. Point being, not very many teachers are on UPS3.

I'm a secondary school teacher. The two best teachers I've ever known were both stuck at M6 (see above, school policy). Both of them had 20+ years experience. Both of them put in 60 hour weeks and worked through holidays. Both had training responsibilities for new teachers (which you don't get paid for). In other words, they earn a £couple above the minimum wage.

The problem is that we have a clause in our contracts that states 'and any other reasonable additional duties.' As another poster has mentioned, with the collapse of all other services, and the police taking a very hands off approach to any criminal offence committed on school property, these additional duties can get pretty wild.

You're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either you let the kids go under, or you put in the hours.

And just for reference and regarding teaching support staff. Yes their pay is awful, but they do get to arrive later than teachers and leave at the end of the school day.