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 what you choose though, isn’t it? You can take the time off and then you don’t have to pay for childcare, or you can get a summer job and, like everyone else who has to work through holidays, pay for childcare/use summer clubs/rely on friends or relatives. Either way, it’s a win! You either don’t have to pay childcare, or you get a job that can cover childcare costs.

DH has a PhD (science) and know a few people similar who have tried to make the jump to teaching and it’s never worked out well. It’s right, being clever doesn’t make you a good teacher.
i think they would be better looking at other industries to find teachers - acting, military? I don’t think you need a degree to teach a particular subject, lots of teachers don’t have them in what they teach.

@AImportantMermaid As a non-teacher you can take your holidays whenever you feel like it...they can even be child-free!! You can perhaps even afford to take a holiday abroad in term-time! Even better, you can actually have a holiday in which you don't do any work.
Leaving teaching after 22 years in was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Not to quibble but GCSE marking is happening now, in term time. Final deadline is before the end of term.

I don’t understand why people teach when they clearly hate it so much. I mean, surely you knew all this before you went into the profession?

@AImportantMermaid Clearly you've never been a teacher! 😄
Furthermore, the job 22 years ago was nothing like the job it is now!!
Try teaching and get back to me.

I wondered why all the teachers in our children's school had their children in September and October, I'm not joking either. I would say nearly all were born in Christmas term.

Well, the pp you are responding to left teaching, so you’ve answered your own question. She left, along with many others.

Perhaps the question we as a society should be asking ourselves is, if so many people are finding teaching so untenable that they have to leave - despite the holidays which are, as you are at pains to point out, fantastic - - what is wrong with the system? Not the teachers, the system? Because there is a retention crisis and it is, right now, impacting kids education. I suspect you might not be so gleeful in your bashing of teachers when your kids are taught by constantly changing non-specialist supply teachers. Or rather, you’ll still be bashing teachers, but perhaps without the goady, ‘pull your socks up’ tone.

I actually work 195 days a year on a full time salary.

31 days of holiday (increased to this after 5 years of service.)
8 days of bank holiday
AWA which means I spread 10 days of work over 9 and therefore have every other Friday off, so another 26 days off.

Outside my 195 days, I don't even check my emails. My phone is switched off. My laptop stays in my work bag.

And no-one tells me how overpaid I am for being off 1/4 of the year. 😂

If we let teachers teach and other paid professionals do the other stuff and parents cut the entitlement, then our schools would be full of well motivated enthusiastic teachers who would educate our children. Never met a teacher who didn't like teaching. It's way they chose the profession.

Ive been teaching for about 14 years i don't know anyone who works over the summer, or any school hols is she SLT?

@MyLimeGuide Are you secondary or primary?

Hi @MyLimeGuide , my name is saraclara and I was a teacher who worked during the summer holidays. Let me introduce you to my DD and son in law; teachers who timetable two weeks of their five and a half week summer holiday, and at least two or three days of each other holiday, to work.

Now you 'know' three of us.

I work about 3 weeks out of the 13 weeks holiday. Still leaves me with twice as much as I got in a non-teaching career. I think the holidays are fantastic. But I think people’s resentment/jealousy of the holidays muddies their view of teachers overall.

You must work mad hours in term time. 1 week out of the 13 is INSET days so that leaves 2 weeks for all the long and mid term planning, any exam/test marking, prepping resources, and writing reports.

This is such a moot point. I work as admin staff in a school and I work full year, some of my admin colleagues work term time only so get their salary pro rata.

Every full time teacher gets their full time advertised salary despite being essentially term time only.

In my eyes, even if you work the odd week or so in the holidays or a few days in half term, the holidays are exceptional if you are a teacher.

My (state) school has longer school days, and more before/after school training than most. As a result swe only work 2 inset days and get the rest as time off, plus an extra couple of days due to the longer school days. So yes term times are intense, but I prefer it that way due to the extra time off.

I’m never markingexams or writing reports in holidays - our exams/assessments and data deadlines are all in term time. Again that makes term time crazy, but leaves the hols more free. So the work I do in the holidays is planning and resourcing - 3 weeks is just about enough for that. Having said that, I don’t have a leadership role. I expect I’d work more in the hols if I did.

Secondary

Exceptional, yes. Yet there is still a huge retention and recruitment crisis.

The teachers i have known will work hard to get it all done during term time so they can enjoy the holidays. But were all different i guess.

Surely the bottom line and the only thing of relevance is what it says on their P60 at the end of the year.

Yes - Whether it should work that way or not most professions demand overtime and are increasingly looking to get more work from the same staff or the same work from less. It feels like something we should be able to commiserate over across the board vs having to get into a debate about who has it hardest.

I have a lot of sympathy for having to deal with the challenging kids (& parents), the utter lack of flexibility and the endless curriculum changes that seem to be governed largely by education ministers wanting to show they are doing something. I can see why people decide to leave as while it isn’t a terribly paid job it also isn’t brilliantly paid and it’s got elements that really are pretty shit. It just annoys the heck out of me teaching friends won’t acknowledge that they get amazing holidays and how helpful that is in particular if they have kids. It doesn’t stop the bad bits of the job being bad but refusing to admit that’s a good bit is just silly.

The rules around industrial action mean that teachers are only allowed to take strike action about their own pay and conditions. We aren't allowed to choose any other battlegrounds to take industrial action over.

The major problem with teacher pay directives over the past few years is that the government haven't funded the pay increases they have settled on. This means that schools have to make cuts from other elements of the budget to pay salaries, which results in worsening conditions for students, and for everyone working in schools. Class sizes increase so that teachers can be made redundant to save money, TA positions are cut to save money, support for children is withdrawn because it can't be funded, children with additional needs are placed in situations where they can't cope and everybody's learning is disrupted, workload for everybody increases to unsustainable levels, and school buildings fall into disrepair. Teachers want schools to be properly funded so that children's needs can be met.

The point of strike action is to bring about change, and for voices to be heard there needs to be a noticeable impact on everyday schedules. A teacher strike on a Saturday wouldn't be noticed by the world at large, but would just leave us with our work to do (unnoticed) on a Sunday.

Primary school teachers frequently have to do a classroom swap at the end of the year- this entails moving furniture, moving all the books and resources, completely changing display boards, alongside doing any deep cleaning we want to happen. We can't safely do any of that with 30+ children in the room, so we spend the first week or two of the summer holidays doing it.

I think this is the sort of thing people mean when they ask why teachers don’t strike more over conditions rather than pay.

I struggle often to understand how teaching can be unionised and yet continue to end up doing this stuff while anyone at my work informed they were moving the office furniture over the weekend (while not having a union behind them) would just say no. I guess you feel pressure to do it if others will or if you’d feel like you were letting kids down but genuinely if you just said “no I’m not available to move classrooms in the summer holiday” what would happen? I presume you can’t be sacked or disciplined for not doing work that isn’t part of your employment contract?