Part-time teachers

[popsycal]

Bringing this over from another thread as I am hijacking too much and taking the thread off on an unintended tangent.

Part time teachers don't get paid to go into school on INSET days when they don't work. MOst do though, at their own expense, and are silently expected to by their bosses.

Most attend all parents' evening yet are only required to do so pro rata.

Part time teachers on the whole do AS MUCH AS as much work (pro rata) as their full time counterparts. In many cases, more for the hours that they do.

I have worked full time, 0.8 times and 0.4 time. I am by far a better teaching working reduced hours. And at the end of the day, it is your children who get the benefit.

Yes, there are issues of continuity. Part time staff spend their OWN TIME communicating, sharing information and planning together (just as full time staff do). Management should allow time in the school day to do this but, due because we teach during the school day, this rarely happens.

RANT OVER

ds also just started reception, and also had 2 teachers - a 4 day and a 1 day. TBH I think it would work better with a 3 and 2. But I totally support their rights to request and get this working pattern.
In other ways it works well, the 1 day teacher is actually in school for 2 days but teaches music to the other classes in this time, and when the 4 day teacher has been on courses during the day (2 so far) it has been the 1 day teacher who has covered them - which is MUCH better for them than supply.

Thanks scienceteacher and popyscal, helpful. I will look into my contract.

Teachers are paid a salary rather than by the hour. Like lawyers, doctors, accountants or any other educated professional, teachers work the hours required by the job rather than a set number of hours.

Schools exist to educate children. Contray to popular belief children have a right to education.

Head teachers do not have to offer part time working. All that the law means is that employees with children under 6 have a right to ask for part time working. There is no need for the request to be granted.

Reallytired. I doubt that anyone would go into teaching without the fact that schools exist to educate children in mind.

Teaching is a vocation in my mind rather than a job. If you were in it for just the hours or the holidays, you would not last five minutes.

However, teachers do have families too.

I agree with you that a child has a right to an education. However full time teacher does not always equal better teaching/ learning.

I work part time because of some fairly awful home circumstances. I work the hours that I know, as a professional, I can complete to the very best of my ability. The children in my care do not suffer as a result of my being a part time teacher.

They would suffer if I were strung out and over stressed.

and I'm typing this in between planning lessons

WEll said, MB. I work part time as, quite frankly, if I worked full time, your children would have a teacher who was dead on her feet, unable to keep up with marking, preparation, etc. As a part time teacher, I can give the best I can to the children. Which would you rather have.

Hugs to MB

I love PT teaching; I think it keeps me in the job as I certainly could not currently manage FT along with everything else.

The main benefit for me as a mother is that I can do all my prep during the week and keep weekends free for family time. All my friends who work FT say that they never squeeze everything into PPA and therefore still end up doing bits at the weekend.

Reallytired, I'm not sure what your point is. I know 2 female G.Ps who work P/T and neither ever go in on their days off as they say they always end up 'just seeing the one'. As you say, doctors as also professional but if the govenment suggested they do 5 extra days a year without pay I somehow doubt they'dfeel a professional obligation to do so. Would you?

It would also be very difficult to arrange childcare for 2 full days plus one hour on another day just to attend a staff meeting when the notes are typed up for you anyway.

I prefer to work full-time - obviously there is the extra pay, and I would fritter away any time at home if part-time.

I tend to work full 'office hours' - ie 7.30am - 5pm, and don't generally take marking home with me - with the before and after school time plus free lessons you get in secondary (I have 6/40 free). If I do work at home, it is usually researching stuff on the internet. I show a lot of Youtube clips, but it takes a lot of researching to find the quality ones.

I think one of the fab things about teaching is that you can, within reason, tailor your job to meet your requirements and have all the fab holidays too. You can also take a long career break and walk straight back into a job. Not many professional jobs can offer this - pay is rubbish though, but not many people teach just for the money.

I applied a year ago while I was on mat leave, but was turned down. I then worked a year fulltime and then the heads changed at my school. I reapplied and managed to get part time (well 0.8).

Although I've worked every day that I've been off, when ds is having a nap, and again at weekends.

Sometimes it seems the work never ends.

I love our part-time teachers! Our school has 6 part-time teachers (i.e. 3 sets of job-shares) and it works brilliantly. All 3 of my children have been taught by one or more of these twosomes and they have all been such lovely, professional people. I was really surprised the first parents' evening I went to when both teachers were there, I had expected only the teacher who worked that day to be there, but it really made the chat so much better and more fruitful. I don't know if our school pays them extra to go in on their days off.

If our head wasn't so flexible about this sort of thing we would have lost some excellent staff. As it is, all those who have gone on maternity leave in the last 7 or so years have returned to work part-time. As a parent I would rather our school kept such quality staff, and I would rather they had some home life with their young children too!

I work part time and my Head expects me to attend INSET but I don't get paid for them. It really annoys me as I have to pay for childcare so end up out of pocket. Also with parents evenings, when I have shared a class we have always done one evening each, on the days we work. We write notes during parent interviews and share them in our own time.

nutcracker and portonovo - your views as parents are so refreshing. And I agree. It keeps people in the professional - good teachers who love their job - who would otherwise have no choice but to leave. I LOVE my job but it was just not possible to continue to work full time. I fought tooth and nail to reduce my hours but fortunately (without wanting to sound full of myself) I am highly thought of in the school and had a position of responsibility for years so in the end, the head/governors decided it was better to have me at reduced hours than not at all.

When part time works well (which applies to the vast majority of the part time teachers that I know) the children in the school benefit immensely. My class often say they have 'two for the price of one'

"Reallytired, I'm not sure what your point is. I know 2 female G.Ps who work P/T and neither ever go in on their days off as they say they always end up 'just seeing the one'. As you say, doctors as also professional but if the govenment suggested they do 5 extra days a year without pay I somehow doubt they'dfeel a professional obligation to do so. Would you? "

Its not the same situation. How many people get to see the same GP when they go to the doctor? Unless you have a really serious medical problem you only see a GP a couple of times a year. No one in my family has seen our GP for well over a year. I expect he has forgotten who we are.

However the two teachers teach my son for about 10 to 12 hours each a week. Its a huge proportion of his education.

Seeing patients is only part of a GP's job. They have to keep up to date with the latest medical ideas and attend training.

Is it unfair to spend less money on training a part time person than a full time person. Surely an ambitious teacher would welcome the opportunity to attend training courses and enjoy professional development.

Nurses and most other health professionals have to do a minimum number of training days to keep their registration. At present part timers have to do the same amount of training as full timers. Is this unfair? Or is about making sure that health professionals do not make unsafe decisions.

Are teachers as professional as doctors or nurses? Or are they more similar to unskilled baby sitters who are paid by the hour. Personally I think teachers do a difficult job. Teachers need good quality professional development as much as any professional.

I want my son taught by dymanic teachers who are keen to improve their teaching and themselves. A good teacher should be prepared to learn from health professionals, parents or training courses.

oh gosh
and here is where I bite my tongue and toddle off.....

I think that teachers are professional, I consider myself to be one, I take my work very seriously indeed.

I spend time all year round reading about the laters moves in teaching.

I also teach other teachers for the specialist schools trust.

I also work part time. The two are not mutually exclusive.

However I work part time because I want to spend time with my family and in particular my husband, before he dies.

I've limited my work load because I'm a professional. My children don't suffer, far from it. In fact my sixth form understand exactly why I now work part time, and have accepted it in a very positive and adult manner.

ditto what MB said.

Especially the bit about being part time because I am a professional.

and there can also be also a distinction between being ambititious and wishing to be an excellent classroom teacher. I have no ambition outside improving my abilities withing the classroom, I've no drive to take on more paper work and admin, it isn't what I'm good at.

Like others on this thread my school has been kind enough to recognise that I'm a very good classroom practitioner. And they would rather me work part time, than go altogether.

You seem to mistake 'face time' for 'effective time'. The two are not always the same.

Well you can't have it both ways. You can't compare teaching to other professions and than say they're not the same thing.

Most teachers I know are keen to attend further training and many LEAs repeat training courses 2 or 3 times a year over different days in order to catch as many teachers as possible. You will find that the biggest percentage of training takes place on these days. Very few schools use all five INSET days to refresh and renew teachers skills. Usually the September one is used for school administration (diary dates, targets etc).

IME, I have learned far more and refreshed my teaching skills much better by having a student in my class. They bounce in, full of enthusiasm and I always learn from them as much as I teach them.

RT, I feel that you may very well have some reasonable concerns about the standard of teaching and care that your son had recieved.

But this, I feel , is down to the standard to teaching not the fact that his teacher is part time.

I teach very well part time, better, dare I say, than some of my full time collegues.

When I see a doctor, I don't care how often he/ she works.

And as for the part time aspect of teaching, most subjects can subdivided. My dd gets taught 'shape' by one maths teacher and 'number' by another, she is thriving on it.

cc, agree with you about the student thing. And many INSETs are IMHO, an utter waste of time!

I gave up teaching altogether because of exactly this. I supposedly did .6 but class-shared in a small village school with the head. Because he was head and had more on his plate his only contribution to the class was to take PE and assembly . The rest of the time he farmed his hours out to a supply teacher. This meant I was the only real class teacher and was 100% responsible for all class assemblies, displays, parents meetings, Christmas productions, report writing etc etc.

Even the weeks when I did the extra hours supply myself you never get paid the full time equivalent as supply teachers aren't paid for lunch hours.

It's a blardy con

That is so sad shimmy.

I know that I end up doing more than my prorata share. As long as I can do stuff at home I don't mind so much, and I can be with dh as I do so.

But I don't go to school on Fridays , because I don't get paid, and that is 'our' time together. Once he dies, I will go back to an 80% timetable.

I have gone PT and consequently lost my salaried status and get paid per minute! In one fell swoop I've halved my pay yet there is no way I do half a week's work!

I attend after school meeting pro rata (haven't yet missed one that I thought, "Bugger, wish I was at that one!") but do all parents evenings whichever day they fall on. However, they have moved the start time to straight after school so I can see that because of childcare issues, there are some I will struggle to make unless my hb comes up with the formula for time-travel whilst teaching bottom set year 10.

My pupils' exam results, since my going PT, are the best in the dept...