If you were to teach on this summer school, what would you expect to be paid?

[Entreprecurious]

Regular but name-changing mumsnetter here, in the process of setting up a new business: a summer school launching 2020.

I hope I'm allowed to ask about this kind of thing on here. If there's somewhere else I should be posting then apologies in advance and hopefully someone will come along and tell me!

Here goes, background as follows: I'm going to be recruiting some teachers to help run a summer school for non-English speakers in 2020. Details as follows:

• Students will be between 12 and 16.
• Teachers will do 3 hours formal teaching in the morning and then either an afternoon or evening slot of around 2 hours, probably helping to facilitate an activity led by someone else. I imagine there will be extra wraparound time so I guess a total up to 6 hours a day of work.
• Small class sizes (10 or under) in a nice location with single room accommodation and all food included for teachers.
• 13-day course with a training day the day before it starts

I want to recruit experienced teachers who are interested in additional work over the summer, or people with significant TEFL (and life) experience. And I want to pay them well/a generous market rate.

I've asked teacher friends but none have taught on anything like this, and I've also trawled lots of summer school recruitment websites but often you have to submit an application in order to find out pay and where figures are available they vary wildly! So, I wanted to canvas some opinion from teachers on here. What would you want to be paid? What rate would make you feel valued and good about taking on the job?

thank you in advance for your help

You should match what they earn in school.

I think it would be local tutor rate minus the daily food amount and a bit towards the accommodation.

£150 Would probably match around what most experienced teachers earn a day. Maybe a bit less if they were getting food and accommodation.

£180

Thanks for the responses. Really helpful.

@dreygrey - I guess that will be really variable depending on area/years of experience.

This is what a google search threw up on teacher's pay:
England (excluding London) and Wales - £23,720 to £35,008
London - £24,859 to £41,268 (fringes), £27,596 to £43,348 (outer), £29,664 to £47,751 (inner)

From what @cheesemumma and @savoycabbage say, it sounds like £2-2.3k plus food and accommodation for a 2-week course.

Anyone else?

I work on a direct supply contract, UPS3. I get paid about £37 per hour.

Meant to add, to give up 2 weeks of my holidays I’d want at least that if not more.

I’ve done a fair bit of work like this. The going rate for qualified and experienced teachers seems to be £750 per week, so £150 a day. That’s not taking into account food and accommodation.
You could get staff on a lot less - maybe those who have done a CELTA course and not much else - but they might not have the teaching expertise you need.

Thanks, both, for taking the time to answer - v helpful

There are some dreadful teachers teaching on courses like these - hilariously my teen (native English speaker who attends a German state school) has recently been on one with her school. The "teachers" were local university students with no TEFL or other teaching experience. Fine for DD, not very good for students actually trying to learn English... They were in ability sets from day 2 but mixed on day 1, the "teacher" told DD's day 1 group (which included French kids who couldn't answer "how old are you?" That they should learn the "phrase" "excuse me, when were you thinking you might serve our evening meal tonight?" to ask their host parents

Wonderful though a course staffed by experienced teachers with both a UK teaching qualification and TEFL experience would be, I can't see how you could compete financially when the courses using random university students are comparatively expensive for parents of the kids going on them (we paid 750€ for a 5 day school trip).

£120 for the 3 hour slot
£80 for the 2 hour slot

As a musician that's around my hourly tutor rate

I'm also a classroom teacher and wouldn't give up holiday time for less than this tbh

I worked for international summer schools for years and years, only one of those as a teacher though and I got £400 per week plus what you described above. We attended at 2 day training before the summer school began, 13 days is a long time! Unless I guess you're not hiring TEFL trained teachers, in which case they may need those 13 days as it's a very, very different ball game.

I don't agree with a PP that you should match what they would earn in schools if you are also providing food and accommodation.

It's a fab job, I really enjoyed it!

Also a former summer school tefl teacher - £400 a week (inclusive of holiday pay) with food and board was pretty standard about 4 years ago. Babbsco were the best I worked for cos we got paid that but didn’t have to do activities, just teaching for 3 hrs in the morning and planning.

If you want experienced tefl teachers/pgce trained teachers you’ll have to pay more as experienced tefl teachers can work on summer schools as DoS/ADoS or do academic English at universities for more money. Very rarely did I encounter ‘actual teachers’ on summer schools, it’s not worth it for most full time school tecahers I don’t think. Also, the massive bonus of having board and food paid is that you can save loads of money on rent, if you have a mortgage/committed spend in rent it’s not really as appealing so a higher day rate would make it worth while.

It’s quite a crowded field as well, summer schools. I agree with a PP that you would really struggle to finance a model where you pay up to 1k a week to your teachers, unfortunately.

So they teach in the morning then have to hang around until evening? You really need to pay them for the afternoon waiting time.

Check out summer boarding courses.com. I worked for them two years in a row and they were very generous and an excellent employer. They do exactly the same thing you are wanting to setup. Good luck! It sounds a fantastic venture!

I really appreciate all your answers - thank you.

In response to @pingudance and others who have queried whether the financial model will work paying teachers at that level. It will be harder to make a profit this way (and there is tonnes of competition, and cheaper options) but we will be offering something quite small-scale and bespoke. We'll be marketing to students in Asia and, for this kind of course, we'll be certainly within the normal price range. I should probably have clarified that accommodation will be within a university, and part of the appeal for the market I'm looking at will be the opportunity to have a 'student experience'

Increasingly I'm thinking this will be better suited to tutors / experienced CELTA teachers than regular teachers who are probably going to be too wiped out at the end of the school year to want to do a residential gig like this.

@student26 and @giraffemomma really glad to hear you enjoyed working for summer boarding courses

Re length of the course - it would need to be that long because they'll be travelling a long way for it, and it'll include a bunch of cultural trips and activities (so not just back-to-back lessons).

@tippexy well, it's a residential course and they'd be staying on-site (in a university city with lots to do) for the duration - so 13 days including a day off i.e. 6 + day off + 6. We'd operate a rota so that teachers were either doing morning teaching + afternoon workshop facilitating/supporting or morning teaching+evening activity facilitating/supporting. So, when they weren't teaching, time would be their own so to speak.

@Entreprecurious Ahh sorry I misread, I thought the training course for teachers was 13 days long!

I think it probably is better suited to TEFL trained teachers, partly due to the money and partly due to the nature of the teaching. That's not to say you wouldn't get some PGCE trained teachers, they just probably wouldn't be the market you were aiming at.

Yes I think this is very much a tefl set up, if your advertising for experienced tefl teachers keep a look for Delta qualified candidates and people who’ve done pre-sessional teaching at universities. I can’t tell from your posts how well acquainted you are with the world of tefl but the Delta is a serious ‘career tefl’ move, as would be an MA Tesol. I’d reckon maybe £600 + a week with food and board would attract such candidates and make them want to work for you over someone else. However if the course is only two weeks you might be at a disadvantage hiring as some teachers will be looking for a longer contract and/or will be looking for more senior positions. Often tefl teachers pretty much supplement the rest of their year’s salary with summer work/need somewhere to live so you absolutely blitz it through the summer for 6 weeks and then go back abroad.
Good Luck though, anyone who’s setting out not to exploit tefl teachers is immediately doing better than most!

Also if you browse the uk job adverts on tefl.com they are overwhelmingly for summer jobs right now - seen a couple of ‘senior teacher’ jobs for about £550 a week plus holiday pay, food and board. I’d also say that decent tefl teachers can be very loyal to certain companies because ‘better the devil you know’ (some are just an utter shambles) so you might have to tempt them away.