Gender pay gap in schools

[CaptainHarville]

I've just looked up my school and also the academy chain taking us over.

Figures from both were interesting. Has anyone been involved in the calculations?

My secondary school shows that the lowest paid quartile are mostly female and as you move up through the quartiles the proportion of women drops. In the top quartile women make up 50%.

Women's median hourly rate is around 30% lower.

But the academy my school is being taken over by has more women in each quartile than men and the percentage of women increases the higher up the quartiles you and by far greater percentage of women in the highest paid quartile (95%) but yet women's median hourly rate is 39% lower.

It's so depressing! I'll get onto the headteacher about it but no doubt will get nothing back as he's probably pretty happy with his white, middle aged male senior staff. We currently have one female teacher on SLT.

How does your school perform?

Have you got a link?
There are no women in SLT in my small school. But still enough for 4 males to be in it! I'd say 50:50 for HODs.

Ha, that would help. Its this website here. But I think your school or academy has to have more than 250 employees. Teaching unions don't perform well either.

gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk

Mine is higher ed but is 18%. It’s the same old story of women in lower paid jobs.

To be honest I’m not sure how one company can fix it when it’s a society wide issue. And a biological one in a way. Because women have babies and take time out. And when young women are planning their careers I think they take this into account. Although that shouldn’t affect their career as much as it seems to.

I think education has a problem because of the expectations that staff will work whatever hours necessary. We used to voluntarily run after school revision sessions for GCSE classes. This is now just expected. Just as we're also expected to mark work multiple times despite no additional time for it.

I work three days a week and that easily works out at 35 hours a week by the time I've done everything. There are also expectations that if you're there you do whatever. So while working part time I'm expected to do parents evening if that's on a day I work so all of them. I'm expected to attend every meeting. I'm expected to be observed as often as full time staff.

I'm going to challenge this.

My school is not on there but a lot of the local MATs are and the figures are shameful. Much worse than the ones you cite...

The pay gap at a nearby trust is 48% with 11% of the higher paid roles going to women. I think my instincts that these are boys' networks is not just unfounded suspicion there!

I think the SLT issue may arise from people often appointing people in their own mirror image, and form unconscious bias.

My school has 10 SLT , two are female (one is part time). There are four heads of year, all male and all with female assistants (the two female HOYs of old are no longer in post : what does this communicate to students!?)). We have HoFs and there are two females out of 7, one in the arts and the other English faculty (again a decrease from past years). The numbers only rise when you get to HoD level. A lot of staff at my school say they are concerned. we are due to advertise for a new head soon and people in discussion always say 'he'! I think our paygap would be as bad as you can get.

I hope I don't out myself with this but we recently had a round of SLT appointments at my place. In the end six people were appointed out of 8 applicants (this was two more roles than had been advertised). Guess what the difference was between the 6 who got SLT roles and the two (highly competent imo) who didn't??

And not all women take big career breaks to have children and/or go part time ...

Think about the lowest quartile of paid jobs in your school. Reception/office staff, catering, teaching assistants - in my experience they are predominately women.

The easiest way to reduce the median pay gap would be to ensure that new employees into these jobs are men. Is that really doing women a favour? My experience of women in those roles is not that they are forced into those roles.

SLT gender bias is a whole other ball game. But doesn’t seem to be a massive issue at the OP’s school.

We actually have a lot (relatively speaking ) of male TAs and cleaners, oddly enough. We had a male SENCo, quite known for liking to appoint young , male TAs as role models. we also have more male cover teachers than female. On the whole, we are rather a male environment (apart from in some predictable depts.!)

Interestingly, in admin, our IT support is paid a lot more than our secretarial and admin support and our librarian. Our data analyst is paid more than many teachers. Market forces, I guess but he gets a role on SLT, too. (I actually forgot about him in my calculations above!).

I think the worst thing we do in our schools is have a dominance of male team leaders, leading female teams.

I agree this is not entirely like OP's school though!

The easiest way to reduce the median pay gap would actually be to pay TAs and office staff more, surely? And the word 'forced' is relative. there are all sorts of reasons why a woman with a degree and a range of skills might choose to work part time as a TA, many cultural, historical and institutional.