Stating that people do not enter a profession for the money is actually an invidious argument. We seem to hear this about teaching, nursing...any profession where people supposedly do it for the love of it.
One of the reasons that teaching wages are a bit better in Scotland is that the professional associations here no longer accept that argument.
Feel free to argue that people can change profession but don't tell them that they should be doing any job out of enjoyment. Love/enjoyment doesn't pay the bills.
So far as all the "free time" in teaching is concerned - that very much depends on your subject and/or post. If I hear that youngsters are thinking of becoming teachers, then I tell them to avoid certain jobs.
The last time that I did a bit of supply teaching, I spent a great deal of my own time - including "holiday periods" developing work for my classes. That was my choice, but it would have been impossible to prepare the pupils for exams otherwise.
There are some subjects where the same amount of work isn't required. For example, most of the Scottish maths teachers that I know use schemes of work provided by Teejay publishing. (Kudos to the two teachers who had the foresight to set up that company. I should imagine that they have made a good living out of it.)
So far as money is concerned, normally the only way to make good money in teaching is to climb the promotion ladder. The irony is that the higher up the ladder you go, the further you are away from teaching.
In Scotland, at least, various attempts have been made to reward good classroom teachers in order to encourage them to stay in the profession: there was firstly the Senior Teacher scheme and then the Chartered Teacher scheme.
Both were eventually abolished because the Local Authorities didn't want to pay the wages.
Apparently, only around 11% of the Scottish teaching workforce is male - and yet (particularly in Secondary) promoted posts seem to be skewed towards men. This is particularly striking when you look at secondary headships.
Thinking about it, a large number of the classroom teachers that I know are women who stay in the profession because - even if you're spending your holidays developing schemes of work* - you can be at home with your children during the holidays. [No, I have no children of my own.] If they're married to another teacher, it tends to be that their spouse is in a promoted post with good money.
I can also think of some men who made it in the Chartered Teacher scheme before it closed.
Most of the married women teachers that I know are not married to other teachers, however. If you're in a school where the majority of women are married to men on a very good salary, I guess that it can give you a different view of your job and lifestyle.
As I've said above, I was married to a teacher. It would have been nice to have had a bit more money but I suppose that it was possibly different for us in that we both came from working class backgrounds.
I'm not trying to do a replay of the Yorkshireman sketch, but my husband's dad was an estate gardener living in a tied cottage. My husband variously worked in forestry (and lived in a bothy), was in the army (and lived in barracks), returned to forestry on a big esate (and lived in a tied cottage) and then returned to education as a mature student because the 'only advancement was in dead men's shoes'.
His parents had been ambitious for him, but had been advised by a headmaster that he could 'not see [DH] in a desk job', so he'd left school at 15 with no qualifications.
In my case, my mother had been a housekeeper and then factory worker; my father was a coalminer. I'm lucky that they supported my ambition to go to university. I'd hopes of going into a different line of work, but Dad reached retirement age and was talking of staying in the pit if I took the advanced qualification that I would have required so I took a year's teacher training instead for the sake of starting work sooner. (I did apply for retail management training, but was told that I was overqualified because I had an honours degree.)
The point that I'm trying to make is that I'm not wealthy but - in my case - comparison tells me that I'm better off than I was as a child or teenager. My dad owned a one bedroom flat with an inside toilet, but that was taken away from him via compulsory purchase at a ludicrously low price and I spent my teenage years in a council house.
I can imagine, however, that someone brought up in a middle class household would expect a better lifestyle as an adult.
In fact, when it comes to "comparison being the thief of joy", I see umpteen threads on here where posters complain that their [presumably middle class parents] had a much better standard of living than middle class people are now able to enjoy.
So...I'm not complaining about my lot but I can tell you that it's going to be increasingly difficult to persuade teaching staff to stay in a job where they're told to expect to be sworn at and violence in the classroom is a growing problem. I know people who have done the maths, have worked out the smallest amount that they need to live on and - as soon as their kids have finished university - have quit. I know people who are now driving patient transport, doing delivery jobs, etc.
I would not return to the classroom.
*I do not envy the amount of forward planning expected of Scottish primary teachers.