As the academic year 2021/22 draws to a close, all of us at Teacher Tapp HQ, would like to wish you all a wonderful summer holiday 👏
1. End-of-Year Antics!
Attending an assembly was the most popular activity across primary and secondary (62%).
But what activities were primary teachers most likely to do for their students?
Aside from assemblies, 55% of you allowed your students to watch a film and 44% of you planned a colouring activity. Hopefully, that freed you up to clear out your desk drawers, or was it the extra breaktime (46%) that did that? 🙊
How does this compare to secondary?
Well… 44% of you planned quizzes and 25% allowed your students to watch a film.
If you’re wondering which subject teachers were watching films, it was most likely English (39%) and languages (35%) teachers.
End-of-year ‘pranks’ by students are more prevalent in private secondary schools (9%) compared to state-funded secondaries (3%). We’ve not asked this before so we’ll check in again next year to see if there’s any change.
Leavers Parties and Proms
Quick thing: Proms are back to normal! 🥳
As many of you had proms and leavers parties this year as in 2019 (78%). Given lifted restrictions, you were also much more likely to use external venues compared to last year. Almost back to normal on one thing at least, phew!
2. Pay
The government recently released the proposed pay rises for teachers.
Inflation is expected to reach 11% so how do the proposed pay rises stack up?
They were a little complicated so for simplicity, we calculated the average percentage increase for ECTs, main scale and UPS teachers and asked about each one separately.
Almost half of you felt that an 8% average pay rise for ECTs was fair. This would take the starting teacher salary closer to the golden target of £30,000 which is available in other industries for graduating students.
What about main scale and UPS teachers?
Less than a third of you felt that a 6.4% pay rise for main scale teachers was fair, while only one fifth of you felt that a 5% pay rise for UPS teachers was fair.
We analysed the results based on seniority to check whether you felt more strongly about your own pay scale than that of other colleagues. You didn’t, there was no correlation between responses, you are clearly looking at the bigger picture on this one!
Pay rises for support staff have just been announced, we’ll continue to look into how the proposed pay rises affect school budgets and get your views on it. Watch this space 👀
How popular is undertaking any work, in addition to teaching, over the summer?
14% of primary teachers and 17% of secondary teachers with fewer than five years experience are undertaking paid work over the summer.
The trend for primary and secondary is that the more teaching experience you have, the less likely you are to be doing paid work over the summer.
Although, secondary teachers with over twenty years experience, are more likely to work over summer (13%) than their experienced primary counterparts (5%).
Since 2018, more of you are doing paid work each summer. (Except in 2020, obvs).
We’ll ask again next year to see if this is a growing trend…
3. Prime Minister
Would teachers prefer Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss to become Prime Minister?
Some of you explained on Twitter that you couldn’t bring yourself to choose between either, which goes some way to explaining the relatively high number of ‘not relevant / cannot answer’ responses (26%).
For those of you who did vote, let’s see how the politicians faired…
51% of you would prefer to see Rishi Sunak become PM and 23% would prefer Liz Truss.
Sunak tends to be more centrist than Liz Truss, but has been historically less interested in education. A Prime Minister who is less interested might give us all a rest at least.
We analysed the results by seniority and found as you move up through seniority levels you’re less likely to prefer Truss to take the PM role.
Immediately after the 2019 election, you told us who you voted for. We compared the results to the PM preference findings and found that Sunak is the favourite among all teachers, even those who usually vote Labour.
Finally… we know you love the daily read, so here are the ones from last week
The most read tip from the past week was: 5 teaching and learning studies that we’ve read (or re-read) this year
Here are the universal reads for your reference:
- How to look after yourself in hot weather
- Self-care and celebrating the school year
- Student activism – Why not make it a learning opportunity?
- On disadvantage
Here are the primary-only reads for your reference:
Here are the secondary-only reads for your reference:
