Bog-standard (i.e. without extra responsibilities or pay points) full-time classroom teachers in the UK are expected to work 1265 hours per year, over 195 working days. This is the oft-quoted "Directed Time" which makes my knuckles itch every time it's quoted at me. Lets see how that pans out for a working day...
- 1265 / 195 = 6.48717... hours per day. Lets say it's 6.5: this rounding works in favour of those who think teachers don't do enough work.
So 6.5 hours would be a working day of, say, 08:30 to 15:00, right?
Hang on, that doesn't actually allow my teaching hours to fit in! My lunch hour can't be included, so my day must actually last from 08:00 to 15:30, with an unpaid hour off in the middle for lunch.
That sounds like an awesome working day to me! An 8am start, and rolling off home at half past three! Wow! No wonder people who don't teach delight in telling me how lazy and overpaid I am! But how often does this actually happen? In reality, I tend to work through my lunch hour, so there's an extra hour I'm working for free right there. Just to stay on the side of the anti-teacher lobby, I'll assume it's only half an hour extra I'm doing every day- I may not be representative of all teachers, so I'm happy to under-estimate.
- So we're on a 7 hour working day- still not bad. I don't begrudge giving a free half hour if it's worth it.
But finishing at 15:30? Come on... Who actually manages to do that? I certainly don't. On a good day, if I've cut a few corners, I'll get out at 4:30, but on most days it's closer to 5:30- those books won't mark themselves! So another extra hour per day at least. Hell, I'll be generous to the anti-teachers again, and say it's only half an hour.
- 7 1/2 hour working day? Still can't complain.
I am a little concerned that I'm still working an hour more every day than those who make the rules say I am - and more importantly, are paying me for. How does this work out over the course of a year? That's easy to work out: 1 hour a day over 195 days, that's... [counts on fingers] 195 hours extra free work per year.
But wait! I almost forgot the weekly meeting! These are, according to the literature, part of directed time and not voluntary, so that's an extra hour per week (on the frankly absurd assumption that it doesn't overrun). An extra hour per working week works out at another 39 hours per year.
- We're on 234 unpaid hours now...
Oops! There's something else: parents' evenings! I'll be ludicrously conservative again and assume that none of us teach any sixth form, and that the parents' evenings stay within their 2 hour set time, in which case that makes 5 * 2 = 10 more hours:
- 244 hours without any extra cash to show for them.
Then there's the open evening...
- 248 hours.
To put this into perspective, 248 hours works out as just over 7 working weeks (based on the prescribed 6.5 hours per day) of free time given by most teachers from sheer good will.
I haven't included the extra revision sessions, after school clubs, sports fixtures, extra-curricular tuition and marking and planning time spent outside of any of the above discussed hours, and I've underestimated most of the above situations, so the actual figure is a lot more for, I would guess, most teachers.
So how much is this worth?
A teacher working at M4 for on the main pay scale will earn £27,104* for the 2010-1011 academic year:
- 27,104 / 1265 = £21.42 per hour (again, rounded down to err on the side of the anti-teachers)
Over 248 hours, this would be:
- £21.42 * 248 = £5312.16
In conclusion...
Feel absolutely, completely free to ditch my salary and pay me for the hours I actually work: I'd be just shy of 20% better off. Conservatively speaking.
And, in the spirit of the post referenced at the beginning of this one...
Many people see teachers as glorified babysitters, so lets just pay teachers minimum wage to do this job: £5.93 per child, per hour, for five hours (children are actually in school for at least 6 hours a day, so I'm being conservative again...):
- £5.93 * 5 = £29.65 per child, per day (this is actually very agreeable compared to daycare rates)
Most of my classes are between 20-30 students strong, so lets pretend each has only 20:
- £29.65 * 20 = £593 per day
And lets keep it at 195 days per year:
- £593 * 195 = £115,635 per teacher, per year.
...
I'll take it.
I want your comments:
Particularly:
Teachers:
- What are your actual average working hours? When do you start in the morning? When do you go home? How many hours, on average, do you do at home in the evenings?
Non-teachers:
- How many hours do you work per year, on average? What does your hourly wage work out as (and what job do you do)?
- If you're commenting to let us know how cushty teaching is, please include a realistic reason as to why you're not doing it!
* This is for teachers outside of London and fringe areas.
Brilliant! I too saw the original US post, and was hoping someone less mathematically-challenged than I would have a go at the UK position.
ReplyDeleteSo: all we have to do now is persuade Osborne and Gove to release the funds, and we're minted! ;)
Thank you for doing this, I too saw the original that you posted earlier today and wondered what the UK figures would be like. I get to school between 7 and 7:30 each morning and very rarely leave before 6 in the evening by the time I've finished all my bits and pieces. Then I spend roughly an hour making resources etc. for the next day when I get home.
ReplyDeleteI think people will never really understand the effort and time investments teachers make unless they have been one.
Brilliant post, thank you!
Harriet
I probably work 60 hours per week term time and another 20 hours per week in my holidays.
ReplyDeleteWork never goes away when you are a teacher, it is always hovering at the back of your mind.
Nice job - I also had a go at the calculation, using the model the original post used, of hours of 'babysitting' provided. It just upset me.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to remember the source, but a nice analogy is that 'full-time' in the UK is usually taken to be 50 weeks of between 35 and 40 hours per week. Teachers, on the other hand, might only 'work' 39 weeks of the year - but we're *incredibly* lucky if each of those weeks is only 50 hours.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to put it in real terms: I'm on half term. Since I 'finished' on Friday evening, I've prepared for, been to and blogged about a TeachMeet (TMM11, was good), marked one set of ISAs and one set of folders, planned a week's lessons and still have one set of ISAs left. Conservatively 18 hours.
Let's see. In at 8am every day except Friday (when I usually manage to leave it until 8.30am). Monday and every other Wednesday I can leave at 5pm (only because I have a private tutee at 5.30pm) - the other Wednesdays it's usually nearer 7pm. Tuesday I leave at 9pm, Thursday I leave at 6pm. And if I try really really hard I can leave on Friday at 5.30pm. With the exception of Tuesdays, I work through my lunch.
ReplyDeleteThat works out at exactly 50 hours a week. And as your other commenters have said, that doesn't include the work during the holidays, the coming in to work in half-term during your pre-booked holiday because your line manager won't let you get paid for any work you do outside of term time, the enrolment and interviewing that I do (the joys of FE) and the extra pastoral care I do for students including spending an entire Sunday assisting a girl who was facing eviction from her home (all above board safeguarding-wise).
Would I change my career? No - I've been in industry, I've been in a boring office job, I've never found anything as damn rewarding as teaching. Would it be nice if management had a spine? Sure. Would it make the exhaustion a little easier to cope with if we didn't have smug consultants telling us we're overpaid and underworked? Damn straight.
Can Jamie Oliver take his "dream school" and p1ss off back to La-La-Land where he can fantasise that any "sleb" off the street can do a better job than those of us who've trained for years to do this? Please.
I did once work out exactly how many hours I do, including clubs, report writing, meetings, marking, planning etc.
ReplyDeleteIt worked out to a 40 hour week for 48 weeks of the year with 4 weeks holiday when you averaged it all out. So, the same hours as most other jobs, except with the work crammed crazily into 38 weeks of the year with extended times to lie comatose and recover.
We are *expected* to be at school from 8am to 4pm. We have 42 mins (don't ask) as a lunch break (I have potential sanction lunch duty twice a week) I have an After School Club, Whole Staff Meeting and a Team Meeting each week after school ( all go on past 4 pm, some til 5 pm) Add to that actually getting into school at 7.30ish am and planning at home. I guess 60 hours pw term time and perhaps 20 in hols except for the 4 weeks I keep free in the summer. It would not be so bad if it was consistent but add in Parents Eves and mini and full Report writing as well as test marking... that's when it hurts.
ReplyDeleteI am a special case in that I am contracted to work 2 days a week and as such I am "officially" working 11.5hrs a week! hahaha!
ReplyDeleteIn reality I arrive at 8 and leave about 4.45pm, earlier than many, due to child care issues. However this knocks on more to my evenings and "off days". I will work an average of 2 or 3 hours on the evenings before I work, and spend at least another full day on planning, assessment etc. I could easily spend more time than this, and do when needs must.
Despite working 0.4 of a week I have responsibilities for maths and music in my school (YES, a core subject done by a part timer, and NO, that doesn't mean I get more money!)
The irony of all this was when I needed to apply for working tax credit, I was in danger of not getting it due to the rule that you have to work more than 18 hours a week! Luckily they realised what a joke that was!
Thanks for all your comments, folks! It's good to know it's not just me! In truth, I do as little as possible- my car is often one of the last to turn up in the car park in the morning, and often towards the middle with regards to leaving in the evening- and still I work far more hours than I'm told I do.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I'm quoted "twelve sixty-five" as yet another meeting is shoehorned in, I see red. I wouldn't mind, but having extra work piled on top of what I'm already supposed to do just because someone who's completely clueless thinks it's actually possible to get away with doing less than 1265 hours a year as a teacher makes me a bit grumpy.
My pay slip states that I do 27.5 hours of work a week- this makes me laugh, in a bitter kind of way. I have totted up my actual hours and found out that, on this basis, my weekly hours are done before I leave the site on Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday are worked entirely for free.
So you take your work home with you / and take extra time to do work. Are you kidding me? When I was a TEMP I gave up my lunch hour to do work. I think it's hilarious that some teachers actually think they're the only ones who take their work home with them (it's not like you're marking MA essays either).
ReplyDeleteSo really, teachers, apart from having to deal with unruly children (which should not be looked down upon, a massive problem), are not that different from some other workers in both the private and public sector. The only difference, of course, is it's difficult to fire a teacher who doesn't perform, and you've got a superior pension to private sector workers (who pay your salary) .. oh and the holidays (you mark etc during the holidays? so what? others work during their holidays, and have less holiday to enjoy).
I don't want to sound like I'm attacking your well-argued post, but I think some teachers need to get some prospective. Some teachers are hard done by, some are under appreciated, some get great results for no reward. And some teachers are useless and deserve the sack, and it's not a minority.
Hi Poosh, thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteIf you'd be willing to take a few minutes to re-read my post you'll probably find that I'm actually agreeing with you, at least in what seems to be the focus of your comment: "teachers [...] are not that different from other workers." Bingo! That's EXACTLY what I'm saying.
I'm regularly told by people who have never even tried to be teachers that we've got it easy. This post is outlining my belief (having worked in teaching and in other jobs) that we don't have an easier time of it than everyone else.
My secondary point, which you don't seem to agree with, is that people who haven't done the job shouldn't knock it. How could someone who has never been a teacher possibly know what we do, day in, day out? I wouldn't dare mouth off about how simple catching crims must be, or running a bank, for the simple reason that I've never tried it.
I re-read your post and I think I am misreading what you've written somewhat. The correction is appreciated. I do have friends who are teachers, and most of them are graduates who have given up what they really wanted to do and fallen back on teaching as a 'safe' bet with a strong pension.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem is the differences and variety from school to school and teacher to teacher. A lot of schools fail their pupils and it's the teachers fault, whereas a lot of other schools fail because of the pupils themselves and their parents failings as parents. And so on and so forth. It's hard to express yourself without bogging everything down in qualifications.
I think it's a fallacy so suggest "you can't comment on x without working as x". In fact, if you want to be precise, a lot of the claims you make as a teacher is specific only to your school and the particular pupils you have, during the specific years you worked. Your experience can differ immensely to any number of other schools. And there's the question of honesty, merely working at a school does not mean you tell the truth about your experiences (please don't take that as an attack on you, it's just a general logical point, it applies to everything).
If we can only talk about what we've directly experienced, then we can hardly talk about anything. You can logically infer - without experience - that running a company is a very difficult task, and you can infer it is much harder being a doctor than a nurse (if this were not the case we would have a far larger pool of doctors to draw from, etc). If I personally experienced being a teacher, I may have worked at a rather good school where no problems arose, or a horrible school with violence - my personal experience gives limited reliable insight. Only by drawing on large amounts of information from different sources can anyone come to understand what it is to "be a teacher" in a precise way.
That being said, you have a point that it's hard not to know the basics about what a teacher does, without being a teacher yourself. Marking, for example, and the time it consumes. This can all be logically grasped if people just thought about what teachers do, and what is implied by their job.
I just want to add to Teakay's last comment by saying that when people think the out of hours work teachers do is "marking" then it just shows your ignorance. This last week I have spent my evenings evaluating the performance of other teachers in my subject area, assessing the level of children's work across the whole school, writing reports on areas of improvement and weakness, and deciding on the next steps to drive my school forward.
ReplyDeleteI am an ordinary primary school classteacher, and this is what all teachers have to do. This is in parallel to the ongoing nightly tasks of planning lessons, creating resources, and yes MARKING!
Teachers do NOT want to say they work harder than private sector workers, but we do get SICK when we work DAMN hard and get the endless rant of "short days and long holidays" thrown at us.
Teaching is a multi faceted job which is more than controlling unruly kids and marking their efforts. We are managers, area leaders, staff trainers.
All we ask is that people STOP UNDERMINING US!