Would-be teachers may be seduced by the long summer holidays and the absence of a 9am to 5pm humdrum existence, yet new figures released today show that teachers and lecturers typically do more than 11 hours unpaid work every week, writes Rebecca Smithers.
Staff teaching in schools, colleges and universities who do unpaid overtime would work for free until March 22 if they did all their extra hours at the start of the year, the TUC said. And if they were paid an hourly rate for that overtime their salaries would be bumped up by another £9,937 a year.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "No-one says we should turn into a nation of clock watchers, or never put in extra time when there's a sudden crisis or sudden rush. But full-time staff in the UK work the longest hours in Europe, and are the most likely to do unpaid overtime."
The average unpaid overtime across the UK workforce as a whole has fallen by six minutes in the last year. But teachers and lecturers have told the government's 60,000 strong Labour Force Survey that they do an average of 11 hours 36 minutes unpaid work a week - the same as last year.
The survey was carried out before the national workforce agreement between the government and unions which is expected to cut teachers' workload.
The TUC has designated this Friday "Work Your Proper Hours Day" and is urging workers to take a proper lunch break and go home on time - teachers included.
Surprise surprise, the Department for Education and Skills took issue with the figures It said: "A survey by the School Teachers Review Body, following implementation of measures to cut administrative tasks and limit cover supervision, showed that working hours actually decreased for teachers in the last year.
And this year, teachers have been guaranteed 10% of their time free to plan, prepare and assess their lessons." If 11 hours a week is an average, that means there are plenty of teachers doing more than that.
Are you one of them? If so, we'd like to know...
