On Thursday 16th May we held our first meeting to begin mapping pay and conditions for TEFL workers across London and we had an excellent turnout with truly inspiring speeches from Hugh Dellar and our friends at the British Council in Taiwan. Everyone who came filled out our survey, and we will soon be launching our map of pay and conditions in London. The idea is to have a tool where teachers can compare their school with others and either go and work in a better school or stay and demand more from their existing employer, armed with the knowledge of what other places are paying. Here are some key things we’ve learnt so far:
- Pay varies from £12.50 to £29.36 per teaching hour across schools
- The median wage is £18.75
- No school so far pays for planning or admin time, so the real wages range from £6.50(!) to £23.00, with an average of £16.50/hr
- Some schools pay for meetings and CPD, but many don’t
- When asked what the biggest issues were at their school, the most common responses were low pay and lack of paid planning and admin, summed up by one teacher as “we should be paid for all the hours we work, not just contact time”
We need responses from as many different schools as we can get to make this data the best it can be, so if you weren’t at the event then go ahead and fill out our online survey here. And if you were at the event but you have some union-curious workmates who couldn’t be there, then feel free to fill it out again with them as a way to get you all thinking and talking about the issues at your school and across the industry as a whole. Especially with the more open-ended questions, it might be interesting to see what issues they raise and to think about how the union could support you all.
If you choose to use this information to demand pay that reflects the work you actually do, then join the growing raft of TEFL workers who are already fighting for this by reaching out to us at [email protected] for the wealth of support and experience the union can offer.
Some of the things we’ve got going on are:
Training
As mentioned in the meeting, the IWW offers two main training sessions:
- Workplace organising, focusing on talking to your workmates about workplace issues and raising those issues with management
- Union representative training, which is more legalistic and allows you to accompany workmates and fellow union members in formal meetings with management
Delegate meetings
We will soon be setting up delegate meetings where active union members from schools around London can meet on a regular basis (most likely monthly). The aim of these meetings will be to coordinate action across the city.
Helping out
And as always, there are lots of ways that you can get involved in the union if you want. These include:
- Helping out with social media
- Helping with leafleting
- Articles for the website (ie. ‘My pay v. my expenses’)
- Submitting articles for the ‘Labour English’ section of our website
- Helping plan future social events
- Coming to a Tuesday working group to generally help out with union tasks
Our ultimate aim is to raise standards across the industry so that TEFL can finally be seen as real teaching. The TEFL industry takes its workers for granted at best and treats us appallingly at worst, but schools simply wouldn’t exist without their teachers other staff who make the whole industry tick. We are the most important part of this industry and we deserve pay and conditions that reflect this.
So if you need help with an issue at work, and/or want to get involved in raising standards across the industry, fill out the survey and contact us at [email protected].