AIBU? Working during annual holiday

[Oaktree1952]

Im a teacher and I’ve been contacted by three parents by email and “caught just to say” in town. I get teachers get really long holidays. I get the expectation that we plan and prepare the classroom during holidays. But should I be replying to parents or not. Do other £40k jobs respond to clients or other members of staff during their annual leave?

@Buggeroffboss

we can’t email teachers directly either - every communication has to go to a central office email

I am very sure they do - they work very long hours.

I am not really interested in directed hours and whether things are described as pro rated or not. Fact remains teachers get 40k for fewer days work per year than a "full time 40k job" in an office would be. Even with weekend and evening working it's probably not as many total hours in the year as a 40k office job.

It is very stressful and they should be paid more - and there are lots of other kinds of ways people structure jobs, like shifts and contracts. But it just isn't a "full time job at 40k" because there are genuinely fewer days worked in the year than a full time job with the usual annual leave. Even if you work til 10pm solid every night in term time.

It feels more like when someone goes down to 4 days/week and gets a slightly lower salary. Doesn't mean they don't work evenings and weekends as unpaid overtime as this is normal in all professional roles. But they are paid for fewer hours in the year and in fact do work fewer hours than the 5 day a week colleague. You don't compare their 40k salary with their colleague's 50k salary and say oh poor so and so they are paid less. They are not working the same hours, so you say well it's swings and roundabouts.

The teacher saying "on a 40k job I should not have to work in my holidays" - I was just saying well it's a 50k job comparably, and maybe a tiny bit you do.

I didn't say you shouldn't. I said it's unusual that parents don't have the teachers email address.

Their school email address, not their personal one. And like my work email address, it only gets checked in work hours!

I would say teachers work 50 hours a week in term time. Across 39 weeks of term per year that is 390 hours of overtime or about 10 weeks (assuming a 40 hour week). Then they work in the holidays too. I worked very hard in my office job but not as hard as that.

So 50 x 39 weeks is 1,950 hours. Divided by 48 weeks in a year, its about a 40 hour week. Divided by 44 weeks in a year, it's more like a 44 hour week.
The 48 or 44 weeks represents two reasonably ordinary years of an office job, one with a bit more, one with a bit less holiday per year.

So it is comparable to a 40k a year full time office job in terms of total hours. The problem is for a teacher those hours are very compressed into a gruelling term time. And the contact hours are very high energy and high skill, so I think they should be paid far far more!

The only point I'm making is that when I take a job I think 'how much do I have to work per year and how much money do I get per year'. I don't do that extra bit of martyrish point-making about how certain days are really my holidays or my directed hours or what have you so it seems somehow more egregious that I am working. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a comparable yearly salary divided by hours.

True for new teachers, but surely like any job you know what needs to be done after a few years and it all requires a lot less prep time, you'd hope so anyhow, certainly what I've witnessed with the teachers I know.

None of our staff respond to parent emails ever. They do not give out their emails.
In the holidays you would only recieve a message from school if there was an emergency like a fire in school.
Only the DSL on the holiday rota would respond to an emergency.
Everything else gets an automatic response.

And most definitely alot of people certainly not just teachers work in their personal time be it holiday or spare time.