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

It's silly to compare an employed role with a self-employed one.

The cleaner will have many unavoidable costs of doing her job that she has to meet herself from her income - the same/equivalent ones of which an employee's employer will cover as standard, independently of their actual salary.

Also, don't forget job security. A cleaner may have 12 clients and receive 12 phone calls in one day telling her that she's no longer needed/they can no longer afford her, reducing her future income instantly to zero. What employed professional job can you think of where you would ever run that risk?

Teachers are paid a salary
Support staff are paid pro rata
Both are paid on a monthly basis
To be support staff sucks as the actual pay is so much lower than what is advertised
I work term-time only and am top of my scale so will never earn more than that and pay never keeps up with inflation
This is why you find many support staff are female with caring responsibilities
We need term time only so put up with poor wages

I haven’t left because I adore the job. I do a lot of unpaid overtime (yes, I actually do). But, for me, the pros outweigh the cons.

I do know that if it wasn’t for the holidays, I wouldn’t be able to cope with the burnout and I would leave. For the same reason, I could never work as a doctor, nurse or social worker, as I think the inflexibility and burnout would be as bad/worse but without the holidays. I couldn’t do it.

What you’re saying is, not all teachers are burning out. Yep, I would agree with that. The fact is, however, that a worrying number of teachers are burning out and are leaving. Your point of view seems rigid, in not accepting that this is a very real problem that is literally damaging kids’ education as we speak.

Support staff are heroes and woefully underpaid. You deserve so much more.

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.

This is the key. There was a point some years ago where almost every morning I'd wake to my clock radio to hear schools and teachers being slagged off by some government minister. I think that period was when parental support for schools and teachers started to deteriorate. Education student became the hot topic, the press joined in, and suddenly the job became more difficult.

I know nothing about the jobs my friend do, so I don't spout opinions on them or tell them that they have it easier/harder/whatever.
But everyone seems to think they know what a teachers job is, and they (understandably to a degree) feel invested in what schools and teachers are doing. And with the advent of social media, we had to see a while load of misinformed criticism. It's really hard to read this stuff and not defend oneself.

Loads have, loads are planning to, loads are off sick.

Others stay because they are trapped by the salary or huge mortgage payments, others feel trapped by the holidays.

Some are in better situations than others-like their boss, work close to home, don’t have family commitments so are willing to give more hours to the job, so don’t feel like they are always failing.

People are all different.

Your ‘lucky’ friend is likely to only be paid for the teaching hours of 32.5 hours a week plus a generous half an hour unpaid lunch - this would put her directed in school time as roughly 8:30-3:30 each day.

She’s likely to get into school at the very latest 8am, as any later wouldn’t give her the time to be as organised as you say she is. So 2.5 hours per week before school. Then you say she finishes at 5:30pm each day? So 2 hours per day after school is another 10 hours a week.

So potentially your friend is working a minimum of 50 unpaid hours per month. Is that ‘reasonable duties’ outside of her working hours. I’m not sure we should envy her because she’s not doing even more unpaid labour during her holidays. And I bet she is - you just don’t see it.

Your last point is the most crucial of all IMO. When people jump to slag off teachers and discount the fact that so many are leaving the profession due to reaching their limit with the working conditions and expectations, don't they realise it's their child's education that will consequently suffer? That the teacher recruitment and retention crisis is very real, and if it continues on the same trajectory, in ten years or so, while pupil numbers rise by an expected 20%, fewer teachers mean class sizes will have to increase, more unqualified staff will need to be used and certain subjects at secondary level will have be dropped. And that's just on the same trajectory. If the Govt goes ahead with plans to offer more mainstream provision to SEN pupils and that current teachers will train up to take on an increased specialist workload, even more will leave.

100% this. Very rarely works past 5.30pm @Ionlymakejokestodistractmyself ? That’s at least 9.5 hours if she gets in at the latest reasonable time, possibly with 30 mins break (but probably has to do duty, detentions, deal with upset kids or lost locker keys in that time). That’s 45 hours a week. My contract is (unbelievably) for 32.5h/week. By your own ‘evidence’ of her manageable work life, you’ve proved that your friend works quite a lot of unpaid overtime.

Yep, and then people will be slagging off schools and teachers even more because their child isn’t taught by a consistent subject specialist, or their needs not met because their teacher doesn’t know them.

When that happens I shall take great delight in pointing out that they brought it on their own children by making all the teachers who've left the profession feel so disregarded and belittled that they had enough. I might even bookmark some of these threads as a reminder!

There are so many variables in teaching though - what you teach, who you teach, the culture of the school, the Head, what the support staff look like.
I worked HR for several years for a trust and teachers work load is very variable. Some are working tons of hours outside of school and honestly some aren’t. Being a DT or PE teacher and being an English teacher is very different. I had a maths teacher who was very happy as almost all their homework had gone online, they encouraged peer marking in class, she had data to analyse, but her marking now was minimal. Most of her lesson plans were set by a very enthusiastic maths director to be standardised. The same wouldn’t be true in English who would still have masses of work in and out of school.
So does one teacher get paid lots more than the other?

I think the best change they could make just now is increasing the quantity and quality of support staff. It’s very easy to cut those staff and keep their wages/hours down so you won’t attract what you need. I had TAs leave to be supermarket pickers because the hours/money was better. One school had appointed an 18 school leaver and was having her do ‘behaviour intervention’ work, she just couldn’t have the experience/skills to deal with that. She left after a few weeks.
If you let teachers just teach and staff the other issues it would work much better to start with.

No, my views are not as hard as I have come across. I was pretty upset by people calling me a liar. However, I do know that all teachers don’t work these hours but some do. There are so many jobs that require people to do extra hours. One of my children is a GP and nobody would believe the extra hours that they put in. My child only works part time because otherwise they would probably have to work for a lot of the weekend. They often leave work at 8.
As I said, my parents were both teachers and we often went camping for most of the summer holidays. My father taught special needs ( then called ESN (classed below 70 IQ)). My mother taught needlework and other than marking exam papers once a year, put in no extra time. My sister was a primary teacher but gave up after having children. I always remember her having lots of free time when she was teaching. I do remember constant moaning about the job from my parents. They weren’t great parents either. I know times have changed but they have for everyone. I think there is burn out in a lot of jobs.

You cannot compare the teaching your parents apparently did to modern teaching. It has changed beyond belief.

^ This is spot on!

Even a shift worker in a factory gets extra money for working irregular hours.

For secondary school teaching, typically you work 10 to 11 hours per one day you work. So a full time teacher will work 50 to 60 hours in term time. Then there is always work to be done in holidays too. That's very irregular hours!

And then there's the fact you get sworn at and spoken to appallingly by pupils sometimes, not to mention the abuse you get from some parents who think their child can do no wrong...

Teaching is a tough job that no one does for the money, as the money isn't that great given the stress the job can entail.

I spent 10 years working in a high stress engineering job which was much easier than teaching in terms of mental load.

But... saying that, I do know of some teachers that are in it for the holidays, and do the absolute minimum. Thankfully this is a minority though.

Yes, I said this. Jobs have changed for lots of people too. Hence my children doing lots of unpaid overtime.

No one gets paid for their holiday. That's why you can get accrued leave paid back when you leave a job part way through the holiday year.

But if you consider that they aren't getting paid for holidays they get an absolutely whopping starting salary. An nqt gets 30k for 39 weeks a year so £154 a day. A part 2 architect (same level as nqt) might get 27k for 48 weeks a year £113 a day. Both of those roles will be doing masses of over time. The teachers will get paid to do their cpd but the architects will be expected to do it in their own time.

I know lots of teachers and used to be one, no one works throughout all their holidays maybe a day or two at the end of each holiday. I think personally teachers are wrong to complain about pay and should be agitating for smaller class sizes to reduce their marking workload to fit into ppa time and reduce the day to day stress of managing so many children.

I don't doubt your daughter works lots of unpaid hours. Many GPs do.

But that's not really the point being made. Nobody is saying teachers are the only profession that works beyond their contracted hours or that they work harder than everyone else. If GPs' contracted hours also don't reflect the reality of the job, then exactly the same argument applies to them. It's not a competition over who has it worse.
Acknowledging the workload in one profession doesn't diminish the workload in another.

If you were a teacher, why did you leave the profession?

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Teachers' unions/teachers already campaign for smaller class sizes and reduced workload alongside better pay.

Of course teachers are paid for holidays. Their holiday entitlement is the same as anyone else's - it just has to be taken during the school holidays.

Teachers have to be available for work on 195 days of the year - 190 days teaching and 5 days inset. In that time, they can be directed to work for 1265 hours.

Teachers also have a clause in their contract/ conditions of employment which states that they must work outside of/in addition to the 1265 hours in order to complete their duties ie planning, marking etc

Teachers are paid a salary which is divided into 12 monthly installments.

Teachers are not working unpaid hours. They are fulfilling the part of their conditions of employment which requires them to work outside the 1265

Teachers get holiday pay on top of the 39 weeks though - I think it's 4 weeks plus bank holidays - so let's say 5 weeks - so in your examples the teacher would still get more than the architect but there would be a less dramatic difference.

Salary is based on 46 weeks per year, we are paid for holidays but not 6 weeks in summer. In the old days, this meant we didn’t get a pay cheque in August, but it changed to make it so the monthly payments were less but paid every month for 12 months. This has been the norm for so long now. But essentially, whatever the salary is, it would be 6 weeks higher if it weren’t a teaching job.

Yes, its approaching double what average incomes are in the uk excluding the south east (teachers in inner and outer london are on dufferent payscales too). Loads and loads of degree educated people who've then done career specific training on top are only earning 40k, 45k.

I think teachers imagine loads of people are on huge 80k,100k salaries. They are not. The average salary data for the UK tells a very different story, its a really small proportion of uk workers earning big salaries and the vast majority are on between 25 and 39k.