This is the penultimate post in my series: 11 Reasons I’m Quitting teaching.
The penultimate reason I’m quitting teaching is my 12% real terms pay cut since 2010 and the deterioration of my working conditions.
Wage increases for teachers have been capped at 1% since 2010, and if we factor in average annual inflation, this means that I (along with most other public sector workers) have suffered a 12% real terms pay cut since 2010. In cold hard cash this means that I’m about £5000 a year, or around £400/ month worse of today than I was back in 2010 (I think I’d reached to top of my payscale by then). (Source: NUT). According to a recent Guardian report, teachers' salaries are now the lowest in Europe.
The additional 14% cut to further education
On top of this pay cut, there has been a further 15% cut in the Further Education budget (schools have been protected), which has lead to a further deterioration in my working conditions, illustrated quite clearly by this summary of the data produced by the IFS:
To put it in specific terms this has meant the following changes in my college since 2011/12:
- An average class size of 18 increasing to an average class size of 22. 18 is bad enough. TBH 16 is about the maximum I can cope with - if I set some kind of ‘brief writing task’ - I can face going round in the class and quickly looking at 16 pieces of work, with 18 it’s a push, with 22 - sometimes I just can’t face it so I don’t bother.
- An increasing in student numbers in the college as a whole - so that the college is now very overcrowded and, IMO, a wretched environment in which to work. This is because funding is on a per student basis, and the SLT has described increasing student numbers as ‘critical’ to avoiding job losses.
- An increase in the teacher attrition rate - or to put it another way, most of my friends have left! Many people in a financial and social position to be able to do so has retired early (See below) which is in line with the reduction in older teacher numbers…teaching is no country for old men!
- An increasing reliance on Unqualified and Newly Qualified Teachers - I’ve personally been involved in training 4 trainee sociology teachers in my 10 years as HOD - actually I’ve been very lucky in that they’ve all been great and not that much work, but it is extra work, and it’s basically a function of economic necessity rather than us doing it out of the goodness of our hearts: you can basically get two NQTs for my salary.
- A watering down of support services - linked to the above because we’ve had to rely on ‘dredging’ to keep student numbers up, i.e. bringing in more students with poor school records and more issues (historically we’ve gate-kept many of them out) and so as a result there’s less support for the ‘typical’ student, meaning more work for the staff.
The sad thing is that my college has managed all of these challenges much better than most other colleges, which are facing serious budgetary shortfall, and possible teacher rendancies!
What to do?
For the record I have fully supported all industrial action undertaken by the unions on this matter, but for me personally (because of the other 10 reasons I can’t stand teaching any more) I’ve evolved an indivdualised solution…. I now earn a base income of just over £1K/ month and growing from simply blogging and selling sociology resources. Once I add in private tuition, and maybe pushing trolleys in Sainsburys on a Sunday, I should be sorted.
P.S. I've @sndbox-alpha'd this in the tags as I understand there's an education theme going on! May as well have a crack!