The Cost of Education 

It’s Thursday morning on the first week of term and I am sitting at home. I should be at school. I should be using my training, knowledge and expertise to give back to society by teaching the nation’s children. Why am I not in the classroom? The answer, it seems, is financial.

It is much cheaper to employ younger, less qualified – nay, unqualified staff to do what I have developed an expertise in.

Sunday night I send e-mails to the two agencies with whom I am registered to advise them of my availability – I am free all week and available to work. I don’t prepare my sandwiches or set out my clothes for work for Monday. (I always have to set out my clothes the night before work because I am far too drowsy at 7 a.m. to make any kind of choice). Monday is the first day back after half term holidays. I don’t expect any work (i) because I haven’t received any indication that I will be working from either of the agencies with whom I am registered and (ii) because it is a fresh term. Teachers haven’t had enough time in the classroom, since their week off, to get stressed enough to get ill enough to warrant a day off. I therefore don’t expect a last minute call in the morning. Most of my work is of the day-to-day sort and comes in as a phone-call first thing in the morning.

I nonetheless set my alarm, as I always do, just in case I receive the call. Despite imploring the agency staff on many occasions to phone me on my landline, they insist on calling on my mobile phone. I think it’s an age thing. The agencies are staffed almost universally by twenty-somethings.  No twenty-something in their right mind would consider calling somebody on a landline. This means that I have to make sure that my mobile is fully charged by my bedside, and that I have remembered to take it off silent after my day’s work the day before.

The call, unsurprisingly, doesn’t come. I always have a to-do list of things that need to be attended to should no work materialise. This saves me from going out of my mind with boredom and also means that I have a purpose in getting out of bed in the morning. The psychology of not knowing when I will next be working should perhaps be covered at a later date. The demoralising and depressing scenario of perpetual uncertainty and difficulty in planning needs a blog-posting of its own.

When I first started doing this job three years ago, I was kept full-time employed. I had some long term work, some short term and some day-to-day work. I never had a week where I worked fewer than four days. Nowadays, I would regard four days a week as good. I am also getting paid substantially less, pro rata, than I used to for each day that I work.

What has changed since three years ago? Well, a great deal. Firstly, many schools are now responsible for their own budget. This means that they seek to find ways of saving wherever they can. This includes employing only the most inexperienced staff. Lower down on the experience scale means lower down on the pay scale. They bring in supply staff for fractions of a day, rather than employing them for a full day. I often find myself being called in for several lessons rather than a full day. Same petrol, still not able to take on other work (if it were to come in) and same driving time.  Just less money.

More worryingly, new laws came into place that changed the barriers to non-qualified staff being in charge of a class. When I first started as a supply teacher, only qualified teaching staff were allowed to be left alone in a class full of pupils. Even student teachers had to always be supervised by a qualified teacher. This is no longer the case.

Two years ago a new category of classroom “professional” was invented, the “Cover Supervisor”. This is an unqualified person who is paid to sit in a classroom and effectively babysit whilst the class do the work that has been set for them by their regular teacher. They do not have the pedagogical training, they have no subject knowledge, are not skilled in classroom management, often give false information when asked questions by the pupils ... I could go on.

All schools now employ a number of cover supervisors as full time members of staff. They deploy them in classrooms where the regular teacher is off (and where supply staff like myself used to be engaged) and manage to cover most of their lessons in this way. They only bring in supply staff in exceptional circumstances, for instance where many members of staff are off at the same time or they particularly want a subject specialist to cover a certain area of the curriculum.

So wherein lies the real cost? It is in our children losing respect for the adults they encounter in the classroom and, by extension, the adults they encounter in society. It is in pupils who are not being taught by subject specialists - or even by educated people, in some instances. It is in pupils who are trained to just answer question from a book rather than engage in discussion, interaction and fulfilling experiential learning.

Yesterday I got a call to teach science in a nearby school on Friday. Before hanging up, she tells me that it is one of their “agreement schools”. What is this agreement school? Well the agreement is that they squeeze every last penny out of the professionals whom they employ. The school only pays a capped amount to the agency for each supply teacher they engage and they agree to only use this agency for all of their supply teacher needs. I am contractually not at liberty to disclose my daily rate. Suffice to say that what I shall be earning tomorrow is a pittance. If I were to be working full time, every day of the school year at this rate, my salary would be £17,550. It is two-thirds of my normal daily rate which, itself, has come down year on year due to being priced out of the market by youngsters who will work for half of what I am paid.

So, there you have it. I am being paid the salary of an unqualified and inexperienced person. Schools are prepared to compromise the education of their pupils for the sake of financial saving. Tomorrow, I shall be putting in a full day’s work (yes, a full 8 hours – from 7.30 a.m. until 3.30 p.m.) for little more than I would get paid per hour in any other profession.