AIBU to be confused about how teachers' salaries are paid?

[Mayflower282]

My friend is a teacher and I said to her the other day something along the lines of “I miss that long stretch of freedom in the summer”…she replied annoyed that “teachers are still working during the summer, prepping for next year etc, and we don’t get paid for the time off”…I’m confused by this. For example a teacher job advertised as £30k, they get 30k split over the 12 months right? Or do they only get £30k equivalent for the actual weeks they are working and this is split over the 12 months?

For the ease of complications I’ve not included tax, NI etc:

YABU - teachers only get paid for what they work, eg £30k equivalent for only 40 weeks split over the year (£30,000/52 weeks =£576 per week, and then 576*40/12 =£1,923 per month

YANBU - teacher gets £30k spilt over the year, £2500 per month

Unless you live in their house with them and can confirm they don't mark books late into evening or plan lessons all weekend, how can you possibly say that they don't do that kind of overtime?

Teachers are contracted to work 1265 hours over 195 days. So a teacher on £35k a year is being paid £27.66 an hour. If you then include 6 weeks holiday pay that would bring the rate down to £24 an hour. Most teachers on average work an additional 10 hours per week over their contracted hours plus at least 1 day per week in the school holidays. So now we’re talking around £20 per hour pay.
the average hourly rate for a cleaner in my area is £20 an hour,

What a shame that you think you’re paid well for what you are expected to do,

Only if your view of full time is based on a very standard 52 weeks type of job and not in annualised hours type of work which is common in many industries. Lots of people do things like work on an oil rig or a boat and do stuff like 4 weeks on 4 weeks off but there not the idea they are part time. Its not pro rata because its not part time - they just squash there hours up. Teaching is like that in a way. They have a very unusual contract structure.

Also I often think the argument around holidays is akin to arguing whether a standard 9-5 week day person is paid for the weekends or not. The monthly pay goes over the weekends. Often 8 days worth. Are they paid over the weekends or for the weekends.

I can see them decorating their front rooms and woodworking in their garage with the door open directly opposite us. They have only been there a few months.

I've always thought this, the 'we aren't paid for the school holidays' line doesnt stack up so well alongside 'teaching salaries are poor' because if those salaries are for only 195 days per year then actually they are pretty good salaries as most full time jobs people have to work more like over 250 days a year (taking off holiday entitlements.

If teaching salaries are for a part time job of only 0.8 fte (which is what 195/250ish roughly equates to) then they are pretty decent

What, you see them all evening every evening and all weekend? You need to get out a bit!

I think OP has her answer.

This thread (as usual) will be completely derailed with how easy teachers have it rather than an answer to the question.

Right, so you have no idea what extra work they do outside of the classroom.

Without the holidays I think there might be very few of us left in the profession though. Never being able to choose a day's holiday comes with its own consequences. I'm not complaining: I have willingly chosen it. I do earn the least of all my friends but I live my job and not all of them do.

Let's pretend that teachers only work the hours they are paid for (1265).

The average classroom teacher earns £40k.

That's £31ph.

Over 37 hrs a week, 52 weeks a year, that's £60k.

Is £60k a great salary for the mid-level of a career that requires 4 years of university level education?

Your last point is exactly it, @Passingthrough123 People are SO insistent that teaching is not hard, and the workload is not huge, and the holidays make up for everything. The evidence to the contrary is that many teachers are leaving. When people’s kids are taught by multiple supply and non-specialist cover teachers over the course of a year, because schools can’t recruit (this is happening right now), then they will have something really genuine to get in a stew about. What then? Will they still be bleating about ‘other jobs are worse’ or ‘the holidays’? What does the endless slagging of teachers prove or achieve? Nothing. In fact it drives more teachers away.

These threads tend to always go the same way. A thread starts with an ‘innocent’ question about teachers’ pay or conditions with lots of reasonable replies and then when it’s pointed out that teachers work over the 1265/195, you get non-teachers saying something along the lines of, ‘well, everyone does, teachers just think they work harder than everyone else’ when nobody has said that.

I think teaching is also one of those jobs which people often comment on, eg saying they are lazy, workshy, only work 9-3, always trying to close the schools, don’t understand the real world, just want to fine parents for having holidays etc etc, which is grating and leads to teachers defending themselves. They then get accused of moaning!

I think if your profession was continually bitched about by the press, across social media, even by your own government, you’d probably try to defend it as well.

I’ve pretty much given up defending it now as I have left completely. Even those amazing holidays weren’t enough to keep me in the job.

Or you could argue that's a part-time salary for a job that's full-time-and-a-half when you factor in all the unpaid hours teachers do.

That may be your interpretation but not mine and not theirs. They are my neighbours and I do talk to them. They said it was really good being able to start at 4 on the decorating.
I come from a family of teachers. Parents, sister etc. My parents always complained about doing extra work of which they did very little. Times have changed but many many jobs require extra work.

I didn't realise that salaries in Scotland were much higher until I read this thread and looked it up. We start newly qualified on 43k and progress to 55k within 5 years. I am guessing many posters are in other parts of the UK so it's quite a different scenario when worked out this way. I've never looked at it like that. That's interesting.

Of course you do. Why is it every time that a poster is challenged about sharing misinformation about teachers, they suddenly whip out an army of close relatives who just happen to be teachers too? Every time! 😂

I'd say it's a very good salary - certainly not one that in isolation could be stated to be a poor salary. Whether the conditions of that particular job mean that many teachers don't believe that it's sufficient remuneration is a different matter; but as salaries go, it's a very, very good one.

Loads of us have degrees and don't earn anything like that amount. Plenty of jobs that don't really even need a degree will still demand one, but won't actually pay concomitant with it.

I was a teacher for over three decades before retiring. The problem with teachers pay is while on the surface it looks a good salary it doesn’t take account of the overtime hours teachers have to do just to do their job. As the years progressed this became more and more of an issue as schools, which actually means the teachers, were and are expected to do more and more.

An example of this:
For the first twenty five years of my career a speech and language therapist would come into school weekly and provide targeted speech and language therapy to this children who needed it. This worked well and the children made good progress.

A few years before I retired this was withdrawn by the council LEA (to save money) and replaced with school staff - teachers and TAs - giving speech and language sessions. How did this work? Well at the beginning of each term the S&L therapist would come in for tow days and assess the children and then give us the plan to teach the S&L sessions for the coming term (usually via Talk Boost or Nuffield). This meant either the teacher or TA having to take out children for small group or individual S&L sessions. It takes up so much time and energy to do this. To check the resources, assess the pupil, decide nest steps, talk to parents etc. This was all done by a qualified S&L therapist before but is now done by unqualified teachers and TAs who have had three INSET sessions about teaching S&L. The actual therapist goto university to qualify as a S&L therapist. How does this help the children.

I could go on about children with other additional needs and how the teachers and TAs are expected to plan for, monitor, assess and make progress when in the past other professionals came into school and did this. It has all fallen to school staff in the name of cutting costs. Parents truly have no idea what school is like now for the adults working in them unless they have school staff in their families and see it firsthand.

The paperwork for SEND is mainly completed by the class teacher, the planning, the assessment, the meetings, the research of topics (how can you teach The Saxons unless you have researched it) the preparation of resources, the marking…….. I could go on.

I worked 50/60 weeks in term time and prepped in the holidays. If you are moving classrooms and year groups then a minimum of two of the six weeks summer holiday are gone on sorting and preparation.

Teaching as a career is not something I would recommend to anyone now, it is just too much and that is why people are leaving after a few years teaching. You can earn the same money and still have a life in another job.

The pay doesn’t reflect the amount of hours needed just to keep your head above water.

So @Yetone , do you honestly believe all the teachers who say they are struggling or collapsing under the workload, many of whom are leaving the profession as a result, are just wrong? Why would they say it? Why would they leave, if it wasn’t their lived experience? What, actually, is your point?

I should give up trying to defend the profession too. I'm not even a teacher! But my partner is a dedicated one and it really grinds my gears when teachers are disparaged for daring to point out that they don't get paid for holidays and that there are lots of cons to the job. Honestly, the best thing he can do is join the exodus and then I can sit back and enjoy the same MN members who delight in slagging off teachers now starting threads like "My kid's school's science dept has only one teacher because they can't fill the posts" or "My kid's class is being taught by a constant stream of supplies" or "My kid is now one of 40 in a class" because I know it's largely the fault of parents like them that teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

Well my parents and sister were both teachers. Sorry.

If you say so!

But if this is the case why haven’t they all left ?

I have a normal job now, after 5 years of annualised hours contracts. Ive never been a teacher.

I work 225 days a year as I get 104 weekend days, 8 bank holidays and 28 days annual leave. Which is fairly standard for a professional role. So its 195 / 225 which is more 0.87 FTE. (If you believe its a pro rata role and not a full time contract structured differently)