UK Teachers are amongst the best paid and have the fewest hours in the classroom

[Arisbottle]

The story is not quite as simple as the headline would suggest but food for thought.

article from Daily Mail

same report covered in a very different way in the Guardian

Yet on a different link, when there was the Gove wanting children in class, it turned out that English children often are doing far more hours than children in other developed countries.

Where do you get the jobs with only 684 hours teaching ?

By my maths, 5hrs a day x 38 weeks a year, less 10%PPA = 855hours, so £32.55 for an hour's teaching.

Clearly teachers only teach, no planning, prep, marking, report writing, duties, parents evenings, standardisations, endless justifying of results, meetings, training courses. Or is that free?

Erm, PPA is part of the job, not time off. i

Backforgood , you are not expecting the fail to actually report facts are you? Or to have done any research bar contacting Gove's minions

Yes they seem to be only including contact time and of course that is the tip of the iceberg .

I do think it is good to stress that actually teachers pay is quite good.

The Telegraph reports on the front page of their website that UK teachers get paid more to do less

I'm on our pay committee - we've just had to establish one as a consequence of going Cackademy/Gove getting rid of teachers' pay & conditions guidelines.

We calculated current hourly pay based on 1265 hours at £17 for an NQT, & £29 for someone on UPS3.

That's before tax obviously & assuming one only does the contracted hours, which isn't the case for any teacher I know.

(Not whinging about teacher pay - I'm happy with mine. Other elements of my working conditions, not so much.)

Someone on the comments made an excellent point and I wont pretend its mine

"No mention of comparative living costs or average wages in each country. I wonder what a graph comparing the average wages of shelf stackers, bankers or bin collectors across the world would look like?"

We live in one of the most expensive countries in the world what the hell to they want to pay professionals plus there is no mention of the insane amount of work that teachers do at home.

Good point piggy.

I know Sleepyhoglet - as is all the planning and marking and tracking and report writing and researching and preparing things, and all other waste of time stuff we regularly have to do, but this article is only about teaching hours and they even managed to get that wrong.

Since when have the popular press been interested in presenting just facts though ?

In one thread the teachers go on about how they don't hand out homework. In this thread the teachers go on about how much marking they do at home. .

There isn't actually a direct correlation between homework = marking.

1. A large proportion of homework is online exercises, marked by a computer, or self/peer marked in the next lesson, or reading, or research.

2. Trust me, it takes me a fairly silly number of hours at home to get through a couple of hundred exercise books full of classwork, & at least one set of GCSE controlled assessments/exam practices, each week.

Obviously it depends on subject - I teach English, & our marking load is probably as heavy as it gets; but if I stopped setting homework tomorrow I'd not only get a right bollocking from my HOD, I'd also totally fail to eliminate or even significantly reduce my homework.

Nearly all the teachers I know work over and above what is actually expected of them.

And London (where I happen to know teachers) is one of the most expensive places in the world.

If they are paid well - so they damn well should be. I entrust them with my children for huge chunks of time, and expect them to educate, support, discipline, nurture and like them.

Not a lot of jobs more important than that, IMVHO.

Most of teachers work at home doesn't really come from homework though. Class work and assessments to mark, lessons to prep and plan, reports to write, and all the other paperwork and trackers, etc. is the bulk. Homework is just a small part of their out of school work ime.

At the end of the day it's one of those jobs that everyone who doesn't do it thinks they know what the job actually entails. Those who do realise think teachers are underpaid, as a generalisation.

However, Daily Mail???? Really???

I'm a teacher; I teach because I like my subject and I like being able to shape young minds (in a good way!!). I'm not motivated by money especially, but I do think it's a job that warrants a respectable salary. I am happy with what I get. I am not happy with forced academization, being observed all the time as if I'm not trusted to do my job properly, being made to sign up to fads and vogues and then seeing them fall by the wayside two years later, and the fact that nobody appreciates how hard teachers work. But if I could have more money or more respect (from students, parents, senior managers who tend to be climbers of the greasy pole with * for brains)... I'd take the respect any day.

I would take the money

HabbaDabbaDoo

In one thread the teachers go on about how they don't hand out homework. In this thread the teachers go on about how much marking they do at home.

Sooo - your dc don't do work in class that gets marked? Tests? Coursework? Not all marking is homework.

Meh. I didn't think teachers were badly paid for what they did. And then dh became one..

I was interested, so I just looked up French school hours. They have a 4 day week with Wednesdays off, and 19 weeks holiday. Even if a teacher teaches 6 hours a day every day that a French school is in session, that only makes 792 hours. How on earth did the article arrive at 936 hours teaching time?

OECD are the same people who did the report re teaching hours for developed countries, which clearly showed the Uk as having more teaching hours than many other countries, including some of those Gove wants us to be replicating.

Forgive me, just seen that the article relates to primary teachers so no coursework to be marked!

I wonder what the figure would look like for "Hours spent teaching + dealing with ridiculous red tape and bureaucracy" v pay, as opposed to simply teaching hours v pay?

Where did they get 684 hours from if 855 is a full teaching load? Are they including headteachers and others with really light teaching loads to bring down the average?

And I really can't figure out the French teaching more hours on a 4 day week with way more holidays.