Teachers top the list for unpaid overtime - Tutor Hunt Blog

Teachers top the list for unpaid overtime Teachers top the list for unpaid overtime Teachers top the list for unpaid overtimeSchoolsFor many years I was in the financial sector, working on average around 10 hours a day, often for six or seven days a week. It was a strenuous profession: too stressful to ever be truly dull, but never varied enough to be interesting. I definitely couldn`t complain to anyone about my laborious job though, for I was certainly well paid. I put in enough overtime every day to console me for my growing number of grey hairs, and there was always a holiday some time in the future to make it all seem worthwhile. Something I certainly could not imagine would have been not receiving remuneration for the overtime work I put in. If our manager had assembled the team, and said we were not going to be paid for all the extra hours we worked everyone in the office would have simply laughed - and if he had claimed sincerity, we would all have walked out. There was nothing atypical about our troupe of office workers - we were not recalcitrant or renegade in any way: we simply expected to be paid for the work we did. I worked for a number of different companies in the industry, and the attitude was the same throughout: workers deserve to be paid for the time they put in. It seems the teaching profession takes takes a rather different stance on these matters. New research carried out by The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has revealed that UK teachers work more than a whole day of unpaid overtime every week. Taken across the whole teaching sector this amounts to a stupendous 9 million hours of unpaid labour a week, or 462 million hours annually. These are truly unbelievable figures, which show teachers to be performing the most amount of unpaid work in any professional sector. When I first read the report conducted by the TUC, I was amazed that teachers work on average more than an extra day a week - but the truth even worse! Secondary teaches clock in 12.1 hours free hours a week, and primary teachers put in an extra 13 hours - closer to 2 whole days than one! Unfortunately it seems that it`s only the teachers, those at the front line in the education system, who are subject to these herculean unpaid shifts - the report suggested that other personnel in the school, admin staff, cleaners, on site nurses, aren`t putting in nearly as many extra hours. In fact the TUC has calculated that, spread over the whole teaching profession, all this amounts to 735,000 teachers working unpaid overtime every year. The TUC general secretary Frances O`Grady put the matter succinctly: `Teachers top the list for unpaid overtime,` `Our education system can`t be run off the back of free labour and goodwill. The government must tackle staff shortages and overwork by giving schools the resources they need. Ministers need to work with teaching unions to address the unacceptable workloads that are driving so many dedicated teachers out of the profession.` `With workload going up and real terms pay going down it is no surprise that we are facing such problems with recruiting new teachers and keeping the ones we`ve got.` I wonder how much pressure we can pile onto teachers, before we make the whole profession so stressful and taxing, that only those with the endurance and constitution of soldiers on leave from war zones will be able to endure it. Only last month the National Foundation for Educational Research released a report that said more teachers feel `worried` or `tense` or about their job than workers in other professions. The study found that 20 per cent of teachers feel tense and anxious about their job `most or all of the time,` compared to 13 percent reporting similar feelings in other professions. The report went on to tell us about the growing shortage of teachers, along with a rising number of new teachers leaving the profession. The solution to the recruitment crisis cannot be to make existing teachers work more than an extra day a week for no remuneration - this unpaid overtime will only cause more teachers to leave the profession, and so compound the problem of recruitment. Many would be quick to say that teachers get a very generous amount of holidays - about 13 weeks a year. If they are working 13 hours a week extra though, this amounts to around 9 weeks of unpaid overtime, bringing their holidays down to a more menial 4 weeks - and most teachers still have work to do during their breaks. 12 months ago0Add a Comment