Unpaid Overtime Anyone?

What a lot of people don’t realise is that a teacher only gets paid for the time that they could be in the classroom. That would be from about 9am to about 3.30pm, minus the lunch break of 45 minutes or so (we don’t get paid for that). We are paid a good hourly rate for those five and three quarter hours, depending on how long you’ve been doing the job and what pay scale you’re on, will be around £30 per hour. But in order to do the job properly a teacher has to work extra hours.

Now there’s no point grumbling about the pay if you are a teacher. The salary is very well advertised as it is for all public services (although nurses do have every right to moan about their salary), so if you don’t like the wages, do something else! One should expect to do a little unpaid overtime as a teacher for the following reasons:

·         You get loads of holiday.

·         The working hours are pretty short, so stop complaining.

·         If you want to keep your job, then you’re going to have to do it.

How many non-teachers would opt to perform unpaid overtime though? Very few would be my guess. The trouble is that the time a teacher is expected to work outside of school hours is growing enormously. Extra classes have to be put on either before or after school, or at lunch time where you could be paid for it (roughly half the hourly rate you get for classroom time), assuming you regularly get 15 students or more, which isn’t ever going to happen because they’d rather be outside with their mates. Who can blame them? So would I.

When I first started teaching I was getting in at 7.30am and leaving at around 5pm. I was also taking marking home with me. This was partly because I was inexperienced and didn’t have a bank of resources built up over the years. I currently work about the same hours, but now don’t normally have to take marking home because I can fit most stuff in the time I’m at school.

I still have to do things at home – mostly IT based as the computers at school run on gerbil power and you could do a passable copy of the Bayeux Tapestry in the time it takes to load a webpage, assuming that site hasn’t been banned on a whim that week.

I’m not saying I mind putting in the extra time (unpaid), but when people say that I’ve got it easy, maybe they should give it a go. Teachers need the long holidays to recover from the term times! Let’s be honest, there would be a lot of teachers who’d be doing something else if it weren’t for the holidays.

The trouble is that this time we used to put in outside of curriculum time is now being taken up by extra lessons or revision sessions that have become almost obligatory for teachers. Time is therefore being taken away from teachers for planning, when at the same time the powers within teaching want to see “fun” activities in lessons, and “fun” activities take a lot of planning.

The numbers don’t add up I’m afraid.