Leaving pharma for teaching, what is the workload really like?

[MammyofTwoB]

I'm thinking of leaving my job (lab analyst at a pharma company) to become a teacher. I've thought about it for a while and been researching the funding and courses etc. I think I'd like to do primary age, or potentially science at secondary. Just wanted some current insider perspective on if they enjoy it and if the workload is too much as I've been reading some older threads and seen stats of people working 50+ hour weeks and bringing lots of work home with them! I'm quite an organisation plan oriented person so dno if that would make a difference!

We aren’t paid for all of those 13 weeks though. We get the same paid legal entitlement to 5.6 weeks holiday as other workers (which obviously has to be taken during set dates with no flexibility). We just get paid in 12 monthly payments over the year. And booking anything during school holidays is extortionately priced - I can’t afford to take my daughters away without my mother coming with us and kindly contributing heavily to the cost

Primary is insane. Secondary science is ok, remember it’s 3 subjects to GCSE though plus the specialist subject to A-level. Lesson planning most nights, lots of marking. It’s do-able. Prepare to hate it for a year or so until you get into the swing of it.
the school you work at will make or break you. Not all schools are created equal.
only do this if you have a personality and some ‘presence’ in a room. Otherwise the kids will be a nightmare.

Can you arrange a work shadow for a week in a school? Maybe offer to do a science Q&A as well?

Well said. It's getting on for 2 full time jobs in one week: one the intense performance whilst juggling 30 sets of learning and behavioural needs which leaves you physically and emotionally exhausted, then all the planning, marking and other paperwork around it. And then parents' needs on top of that!

I’ve several teachers in the family. Those who started years ago loved it, but now all have either left the profession always due to stress, or are no longer on chalk face.

I was a primary teacher too, then transferred to secondary. The experience depends so much on your head. Most heads are quite young these days as so many don’t want the stress of a headship. If your head protects you from the stress and the bullying it’s still a great job BUT - the children are far more challenging - ‘why should I do what you tell me? ‘ (this from a 6 year old). Then there are the parents. Almost every child now seems to have a parent - usually mum - telling you what to do - in detail - about their darling who almost always seems to have ADHD and ASD . I’ve lost count of the number of forms they bring in and want me to sign to help confirm this so they can get a bigger council house or a Motobility car (not joking - they openly tell me this). It always seems to be at 9.05 too, when they arrive late and you have a class of 36 sitting waiting for you.
But when teaching is good it’s fantastic. The reward of seeing a child who had been struggling suddenly ‘get it’ is overwhelming, as is helping a struggling parent. However as others have said it’s a vocation - you eat, sleep, think and dream teaching. You fall asleep mentally reviewing your plan for the next day, worrying about little x who is struggling, or how to support y through parental breakup. You can’t get a day off - even had to go in the day after my mum died - and was called back when en route to my cousins funeral, even though had written permission to go. I’m invariably in during most of the holidays too, sorting out various things, or working from home if not in school. Forget having a family life as it’s all consuming.
I love primary best but it’s really intensive. Secondary is better as you have a bit more time and are more subject based, but the marking can be a slog.
You really need to go in and see what it’s really like, both at primary and secondary.
Just remember we aren’t paid for the holidays - it’s just our annual salary is aggregated out so we still get a pay day. Also conditions of service have changed - especially with regard to pensions - no more final salary ones. Watch out for pensions if working in the private sector - a few of my friends who retired recently had a nasty shock at how small their pensions were as their schools weren’t in the Teachers Pension scheme. Best wishes with whatever you decide. Feel free to pm to ask any questions.

Post 16 depends on your setting … sixth form college and you have salaries and terms and conditions roughly the same as schools. FE college and you could be looking at a pay scale which ends in the mid £30ks and 35 days annual leave per year. Plus the expectation to teach evenings dependent on your speciality. It also brings with it challenges re behaviour and attendance. However if you can teach science you’ll be in demand! (Science teachers can get paid so much more in schools they’re hard to recruit in FE)

I'm a primary school teacher OP and it is very tough but rewarding. A lot of it is dependent on the school you're in, the management, the kids in front of you and the parents. I teach in NI and the work load though big seems a lot more manageable than England (from what I read on different forums/news articles). I've had times when just one child can make you dread going into work every day and then the next year you might have a lovely class and enjoy going into work again. There are so many constantly changing factors. I work a 4 day week which is a nice balance. One thing I will say is that is never boring and I have a laugh at some point every day. We have a lovely staff and good comraderi. In the classroom it is constant crowd control and juggling 10 things at once. You are constantly interrupted and if you've issues with vomit or pee it's not for you. 😂 The kids can be a nightmare but also amazing. I do enjoy my holidays (with my 2 kids) but like I said, I think NI has a better balance. I think someone suggested volunteering in a school before making any decisions which is a good idea.

@WonderingWanda what makes you think I might be a teacher? I never said it was a reasonable job, I said it was reasonably well remunerated, which it is.

I wouldn’t want to be a teacher, or in construction, or a myriad other jobs where the stress, hours, micro management and toxic culture makes people wonder why they do it - my point is only that there are many such jobs, and teaching is not unique.

I’m a lawyer, in the sort of firm where 12+ hour days and weekend work are common. We have all the stress, toxic culture, micro management etc of any job, but with the big advantage that we earn a lot of money.

Yes, so @SlipperyLizard you can’t advise the OP on teaching but you could suggest she changes career to be a lawyer as the pay is good, if that’s enough to outweigh the general job conditions.

I have been a teacher. The pay is reasonable. It’s not worth enough to counterbalance the other issues identified. I was top of my pay scale with additional responsibility pay and a Greater London weighting, but still not worth it. Hence why I am not a teacher anymore.

No one is saying that other jobs aren't equally stressful, hard, have a high workload or that there aren't worse jobs out there than teaching....and maybe your job is harder. Op doesn't care. Op didn't ask any of that. She asked teachers if they felt their workload was high. You cannot know what a teachers workload is. You have just come here to essentially put teachers back in their box and let them know that their concerns about their workload are totally invalid because ....you know....other jobs, your job, your husbands job!

First of all, it’s not 2 jobs in one week. Few work 80 hours! Managing workload and being organised are important attributes. Teachers do get great holidays and most take them. It’s obviously useful to keep childcare costs down. London - pay not amazing when composites to cost of living. Cheaper areas, it’s better than many jobs and lawyers in the sticks are not highly paid!

The OP is asking specifically about teaching, so why are all the teacher bashers wading in?

Those people saying “but other professions have long and stressful hours”, that’s all well and good, but having worked normal jobs and also been a teacher, I can tell you that there’s something absolutely mentally draining about dealing with a class of 30 people that change every hour (in the case of secondary) By the end of the day you have sometimes dealt with the needs of 150-180 young people… and all the challenges that brings- SEN, friendship issues spilling into learning time, meltdowns in class, bad behaviour, an unwell child who has just vomited on one of your desks, the kid who bursts into tears because their dog died last night.
And then the next class comes in and it starts all over again. As well as this, you are trying to educate these kids so that they leave your room with more knowledge than they arrived. And you have to be able to demonstrate this. You have to have work prepared for the lesson, work prepared for those who finish early, homework ready, stuff for the kid who missed last lesson, stuff for the kid who won’t be in for 2 weeks coz they are going into hospital… all while ensuring every child is listening and on task and helping those who are struggling. There’s 1 of you and 30 of them.

Break time you are on hall duty so no time for a toilet break. Lunchtime you have a detention to do and then you are manning the dinner line. No time to eat today but you might squeeze a wee in. Afternoon lessons and 2 kids decide to have a fight in the corridor outside your classroom so you deal with that and then you have to try and calm (and teach!) the 30 wild kids in your room who have witnessed it and got over excited.

End of the day you wanted to get some marking done, for those 150 kids, and plan for tomorrow, but you’ve got a whole staff CPD meeting until 5pm.
You also have to do the reports for year 8 and you teach the whole year group so that’s 250 reports that need doing by the end of the following week.
Tomorrow you’ve got one free lesson so you plan to do some reports then, but you arrive the next day and you are on cover for the maths teacher who is off, so that time has gone. You also teach another 100 kids today. Then you remember it’s year 7 parents evening on Thursday. You teach the year group so that’s a lot of parents you’ll be seeing.

OP, I wouldn’t go back to that profession for all the money in the world.

And it would make perfect sense for you to be on a thread asking ‘Leaving pharma for law, what’s the workload really like?’.

But to come on this thread to complain that teaching isn’t actually that hard (when you don’t do it) isn’t terribly useful to the OP.

50 hours a week is nothing! I was there when the school opened at 6.20am and the caretaker would kick me out at around 6.30pm... and I'd still be taking work home. I'd feel guilty "wasting" time by going out for dinner, or having a bath instead of a shower. It took over my life.

The pressure was immense, both from other members of staff and the parents (mainly the ones who had a habit of shouting at the teachers, because their child would NEVER do anything like that... even though, from the front of the classroom, wearing glasses, you'd seen them do it). Nothing that you do will ever be good enough. I got told off for teaching a Year 1 child to do column addition (she had asked me how to add 'big numbers', and maths was her thing), because, "She's not supposed to learn that until Year 3 at LEAST, and it will put her too far ahead". Oh, and farm words don't count in phonics. 'Sow' is not a word, apparently... it's a female pig, and the child came from a pig farm...

I had 45 children in my class at one point, because the school had a highly transient population (mostly refugees and asylum seekers who would be there one week, and shipped off to live in a different council the next), and was 'very good at dealing difficult children'. There was racism (even from the teachers, particularly towards the Gypsy and Traveller community), staff laughing at the children's names (OK, some were unusual, but perhaps normal in their culture), and snobbery about their families (it was in a poor area of one of the most deprived towns in the UK). You're balancing the needs of a whole spectrum of different children, from the ones who can't recognise the letters in their own name, to the ones who are reading Harry Potter in Y1... plus behaviour problems, EAL, SEN, one who's vomited all over the carpet, ones who have no interest in anything academic (and whose parents thought their child's appearance to be more important than helping them with their reading and things), one whose pet has died and they are inconsolable, some who are hungry because they don't get breakfast at home, parents who couldn't care less about their children's education, children from families where drugs and alcohol and illiteracy were rife, others who were in Care, one who is nervous but excited to be adopted, plus ones that reported abuse going on at home. All of the safeguarding training in the world does not prepare you for 5/6-year-olds describing sexual abuse (and more) in graphic detail. Also, your planning and organisation gets thrown out of the window when it comes to the Nativity play rehearsals, rehearsals for class assemblies, or other special events, which occur with alarming frequency. Then throw in World Book Day and every fancy dress event that you have to take part in.

I ended up buying a lot of things for my (primary) class, including phonics flash cards, fruit, underwear and socks. A chunk of your evenings and holidays will be taken up sorting out your classroom, organising and planning lessons and activities, and worrying about what sort of home some of the children in your class are going home to.

By the end of it, I wasn't sleeping, rarely ate, and was having issues managing my own personal hygiene. I had a nervous breakdown, left on sick leave, and swore that I'd never teach anyone anything, ever again. I'm really glad that I got out, although I do wonder what happened with some of the children in the end. Either way, I hope that things worked out well for them all.

Surely in many professional jobs 10/12 hour days are fairly standard
I do 8 to 6.30 as standard,plus weekend and evening work as required

@Motheranddaughter what kind of teaching do you do?

I work in pharma, started as a lab analyst (not anymore as I have moved up) my hours are 8-4:30. Anything over that is paid as overtime, which most days doesn’t occur tbh, depending on the time of day I get paid 1.5x my hourly rate or 2x hourly, however i am salaried.

Which ones? I know lots of professionals, most of them work 9-5. There's a handful of London lawyers who work long hours and are paid more than twice the wage of a Headteacher, and many times more than a classroom teacher. And also treated with respect.

As a governor of 3 schools,(not at the sand time) we didn’t expect anyone in at 6.30 am? To do what exactly? Something that should have been done at another time? Nor did anyone stay until 6.30 every day. The Heads work very hard and long hours but not the teachers to the extent described here. I do think scientific professionals don’t always work long hours but many other areas, finance, economists, management, lawyers, etc do, but not all the time!

Genuine question - for those people working 60+ hours in a week, what does a normal salary look like? In primary teaching, it’s almost impossible to exceed over £45k these days, even with 30 years experience.

I earn just over 50k and I’m nowhere near the top of my payscale. 4k bonus this year, fully paid private healthcare, 10% pension contribution from my employer. I do 39hours a week and anything over is paid overtime. Most weeks I do 2-4 hours overtime…because I WANT to not because I HAVE to! Last year I took home over 60k including overtime.

I was a Sales Manager in Pharmaceuticals for 10 years. Teaching was far busier and much harder work.

I switched to primary teaching full time at 40. I am now 60. I wouldn't say hours or stress is any more than previous job ( I worked in the sales in the city).
Love the job. Politics can be frustrating and some parents can be unreasonable but having worked on business for 20 years previously, its fine. The holidays are great ( if you manage your workload then you can avoid working during hols. I start very early in the morning and work thru lunch to make sure no work in evenings or weekends. Secondary school may be completely different story. It brings alot of satisfaction overall and I find the culture is much more family friendly in comparision to working for a large corp . Go for it.

This really isn't a good look for for someone that says that they were a governor.

The people giving examples that aren't teaching because teaching is not 'unique', stop posting. OP is literally asking about teaching.

Oh, and teaching is absolutely unique.