The plight of supply teachers

by Richard Knight, Sefton NUT

Defend pay and pensions! We want our lives back – cut workload and hours! The strike by NUT members on July 10th is a crucial part of the campaign to stop state education from fragmenting into chains of free schools and academies run by any old carpet salesman or dodgy second-hand car dealer. I have this recurring nightmare of Michael Gove permanently ensconced in a penthouse suite at the Department of Education, stroking his white cat and plotting the destruction of every state school in the land.

Spare a thought though for a group of teachers who have already had their pay and conditions destroyed by privatisation – that’s the 46,000 supply teachers. We’re the people that cover the classes when teachers are on courses or off sick. It’s a demanding job heading out to an unknown class in an unknown school, picking up the lesson plans, assessing the class, differentiating, working alongside teaching assistants, finding the staffroom, not sitting in the ‘wrong’ chair.

Over the last fifteen years 170 local authority supply teaching pools have been replaced by over 480 private supply teaching agencies, some of them competing in the race to the bottom: who can cut pay by the greatest amount? According to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions daily rates should vary from £110 for newly qualified teachers, up to £190 for the most experienced teachers, plus a contribution towards the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS). Private agencies pay anything from £70 to £130 per day. That’s if they’re not asking us to work and be paid as teaching assistants or Cover Supervisors. Some supply teachers will walk out of school with £30 for a full day’s teaching.

So where does the money that schools pay for supply teaching go? Capita is one of the largest supply teaching agencies, and in their 2013 Annual Report on directors’ remuneration (page 88) it cited Paul Pindar as receiving £390,000 in base salary, a £585,000 annual bonus, something called ‘long term incentives’ and other bits and bobs that finally give a total of £2,208,562 or roughly £6,000 per day. Then there’s Hays, with their Chief Executive Alastair Cox, who in 2013 received £199,000 in ‘pension benefits’. Note supply teachers working for private supply agencies are not allowed into the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (by way of contrast 62,000 teachers in private or independent schools are enrolled into the TPS).

Unfortunately most teacher unions have been slow to react to this assault on supply teachers’ pay. This isn’t unusual: most unions prioritise those members in permanent jobs who pay the highest union dues, the ‘precariat’ come some way down the pecking order. The first resolution calling for a supply teachers’ conference was passed at the 2007 NUT Conference, it was 2013 before the first conference was organised, mainly due to the determination of Angela Travis from Brighton NUT.

The 2014 NUT Supply Teachers’ Conference has called for a lobby of parliament during this October half term over pay and pensions. We are also proposing to pay a visit to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the organisation that supposedly ‘regulates’ private supply teaching agencies. We’re going to be asking Paul and Alistair a few questions…