Working hours for UK Teachers - Tutor Hunt Blog

Working hours for UK Teachers Working hours for UK Teachers amongst the longest hours in the world Working hours for UK Teachers amongst the longest hours in the worldSchoolsA recent study published by the Global Teacher Status Index shows that teachers in Britain are working more hours per week than nearly anywhere else in the world. The global study found that UK teachers work around 50.9 hours per week ? that`s more hours than teachers in any other country in the survey, with the exception of Singapore, Chile and New Zealand. The study also polled members of the public, asking them how long they thought the average teacher`s working week was. The results came back at 45.9 hours, showing that most people grossly underestimate the time teachers work. I know from experience that some teachers work far more than this - my partner is a teacher, and certainly spends more than 50 hours a week at her school; and then of course there is all the time she works at home, marking students` work and composing lesson plans. I also know socially many teachers who work throughout London, and they all calculated that they exceed 50 working hours a week. Many people would say this is not a particularly excessive amount: if you want to progress in your career you have to be willing to put the hours in. I`ve worked in telecommunications, and the financial sector, and there were some years where I`m certain I pushed past the 60 or 70 hours a week. It was hard work, certainly, but I was determined to progress, to climb the ranks, and to be financially rewarded. In teaching however, there really is an upper bound on what you can earn. Unless you become a head of a school, your pay`s capped at a boundary far lower than you would ever encounter in the private sector. Despite their relatively low pay the study actually revealed the British public significantly overestimate the starting salary of teachers, believing them to be earning around ?29,000, when in fact a newly qualified teacher generally only earns around ?24,000. Somewhat hearteningly the report also indicated that the public think the starting salary of teachers should be far higher: around ?31,000. Back in 2013 a similar poll showed that more than three quarters of the public were behind some form of performance related pay for teachers. Opinions seemed to have changed during the five year interim though, with only a third of those being polled in the new survey supporting this kind of variable pay scheme. Getting back to the topic of long working hours though - unless you live with a teacher, I really doubt anyone could comprehend the amount of work their job demands. My partner is a science teacher in a London secondary school. She`s at work every weekday for 7:30am, and rarely leaves before 5pm - this schedule in itself is not particularly onerous, but at least once a week there is some kind of extra activity, such as a parents evening, or some kind of meeting, which usually continue past 9pm. Added to this is the gargantuan amount of work that she does at home: planning, marking, lesson plans - this prodigious amount of paperwork (and our home is full of paper and files and textbooks) is attended to every evening, and for a large portion of the weekend. An obvious counter to the claim that teachers are grossly overworked is that they are compensated with a huge amount of holidays - typically around 13 weeks annually. No one can deny that this is a very generous amount of holiday le ave - but I can tell you that for a portion of every break, summer, Easter and Christmas, my partner spent a significant amount of time working at home. Many teachers complain that they spend as much time being in-school social workers, dealing with unruly pupils, as they do actually teaching. Only this week the department of education has pledged to assist schools in this area, promising that they will simplify the way teachers are required to log and record poor behaviour. I suspect that the teaching profession is becoming hampered by the same bureaucracy that the police force is suffering from: being required to create encyclopaedic logs of every incident, and every single misdemeanor, however large or small it is. The Department for Education have just published a report by the Workload Report Advisory Group, which cautions how teachers are at risk from `anxiety and burnout` due to the growing about of paperwork relating to pupils` behaviour. We rely on teachers to produce every new generation of employees - if we put them under too much pressure, if we obstruct their ability to actually teach, and fill their lesson time with excessive bureaucracy, we will be directly reducing the quality of education our future workforce will be receiving. 15 months ago0Add a Comment