Tag Archives: work

How much holiday do teachers have?

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According to the DfE’s Teacher recruitment website

Holidays

You’ll get more days holiday than people in many other professions. In school, full-time teachers work 195 days per year.

For comparison, you’d work 227 days per year (on average) if you worked full time in an office.

Teaching salaries and benefits | Get Into Teaching (education.gov.uk)

So, it is permissible according to the government, to never be in school when the pupils are not present except for the five compulsory days required. Those days were originally known as ‘Baker Days’ after the Secretary of State that mandated their requirement.

Of course, the DfE site doesn’t say anything about the length of the school day, and the marking and preparation time spent in the evenings, at weekends, and during the alleged holiday period that make up a teacher’s typical working day.

A more useful analyses of the working year might add the following days – assuming the five days pupils are not present account for all the days immediately pre and post the three terms of the year – to the 195 total.

Two hours a day during term-time on marking and preparation and meetings outside a working day of a period between eight am until four pm would add more than a day a week to the total taking it from 195 days (DfE number) by adding an extra 38 days a year meaning the working year would then be 233 days a year compared with the DfE calculation of 227 as an average for an office worker of an unspecified grade. Now, make that an average of three hours a day – probably not unreasonable for most weeks – and the total moves to around 250 days a year.

The length of the working day and the compensation for the length of the working day isn’t something mentioned on the DfE recruitment site. Find a teaching job with no planning – all done for you – and no marking needed outside of the school day – and there are still parents’ evening to attend that can add four days to the total – one half days for each year group plus one for the new intake, plus perhaps a couple of marketing evenings to showcase the school to potential pupils and their parents. Then there are after-school activities ranging from supervising the buses in the car park to accompanying teams to sports fixture, music and drama events and science competitions.

It is difficult to see how a teacher that wants to do their job properly can manage less than 227 days a year.

On top of this, most other workers have been gaining bank holidays over the years, whereas most additional days have fallen within existing school holidays, except for the Bank Holiday at the beginning of May each year. In 2017, the Labour Party suggested the need for four extra bank holidays Bank holidays for teachers? | John Howson (wordpress.com) that suggestion would not have benefitted teachers at all.

So, if told teachers have long holiday, and remember that the DfE says so, remind people that teachers work a form of employer-driven flexitime that means most teachers work longer on average than many other employees, although they do still have job security in most cases and there is the pension to consider.

Stick to the day job Vince

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Early in the 1990s I once spent three-days on a placement at what is now BMW’s Cowley works in Oxford, where the mini is produced. I was on a scheme was designed to help those of us in education, at all levels from the classroom to senior leaders in universities, understand more about how industry and commerce ticked. Indeed, there are still such schemes around today, most notably for school leaders.

It was, therefore interesting to read in today’s Independent newspaper that Business Secretary Vince Cable apparently had some unflattering remarks to say about secondary school teacher’s knowledge of life outside the schoolroom. During my Cowley visit what struck me forcibly was the lack of reciprocal knowledge on the part of those working in industry about what was happening in schools. For instance, many businesses have been caught out in recent years by the growth in the numbers of young people attending university, and have in some cases struggled to make better use of the extra knowledge and skills that graduates bring to the workplace compared with those that leave school after ‘A’ levels.

Still, where I do agree with the Business Secretary is that much more needs to be achieved on the careers education front. I suggested in a recent post that the large recruitment agencies might help with this task. I confess to chairing one of the education panels for the Recruitment Employers Confederation, so I am not a totally unbiased or objective observer. Nevertheless, far more than say the CBI or Institute of Directors, REC already has links with schools through the supply teacher market and could use its expertise in the wider employment scene to work with government on developing a new approach to careers education and work experience. The short section in ‘Tough Young Teachers’, shown recently on BBC3, was an interesting cameo of how a pupil benefitted from even an effectively developed placement in a high street opticians shop.

But, it is time to return to Mr Cable’s remarks. While it is true that the majority of graduates that apply for teaching are below 25 when they decide on a career in the classroom, there are a sizeable minority of career changes that have in most cases had experience of the workplace.

In 2012, the latest year data are available for, of the 55,000 or so graduate would-be teachers, and virtually all would-be secondary school teachers, nearly 20,000 were over the age of 25 when they applied for teacher training according to the figures produced by the GTTR arm of UCAS. In addition, there were around 5,000 direct entrants to teaching that year through the Graduate Training Programme that largely will have come from the wider workforce. This is before you consider any other teachers whose partners work outside education and can discuss the differences between the work of commerce and that of education over the dinner table.

Characterising teachers as ignorant of the world of commerce may have raised a laugh with Mr Cable’s audience, but it doesn’t really convey the whole picture of how schools and business interact. There is room for improvement, but it certainly won’t come about by creating mutual distrust and antipathy.