Everyone knows that a huge amount of the work that goes into teaching happens outside the classroom. In most areas of education, teachers are given paid preparation and admin time. This is rarely the case in TEFL and it’s certainly not the case for online teachers at the British Council. Below, our members at the BC tell us their *real* wage after that prep and admin time is taken into account.
We asked our members to do some ‘back of the envelope’ calculations about how much their real hourly wage is once they take all that unpaid admin and prep into account.
The numbers – while not surprising – are pretty shocking, with many members alleging a real rate of pay that’s below minimum wage.
One teacher reports that when the 10 minutes of prep and 10 minutes of report-writing are included in the £7.50 she’s paid for each 25-minute private lesson, her real wage drops from £15 an hour to £9.60 an hour. The UK minimum wage currently stands at £10.42 an hour.
Other teachers find it even worse, detailing in particular how bad the pay is for “Live25” lessons. “I need 20 minutes of prep for each 25-minute Live25 lesson. At £11 an hour, my real wage is approximately £6/hour.”
The same teacher detailed the other expenses that teachers are expected to bear, including electricity, high-quality internet (an additional £30 a month) and needing to buy a webcam when she was told the integrated camera in her laptop was at a “bad angle”.
One of our members detailed all the unpaid work that’s required to do the job:
“I’d say only about 10% of the lessons are made well enough that a teacher could open it a minute before class and teach it with no review. On top of this, there’s at least 15 minutes daily checking TEAMS. Add 30 minutes if teaching a closed group. Plus, reports that take several hours every 5 weeks.”
According to one teacher, for every 6 hours of teaching, they spend approximately 40-50 min downloading the required materials. And that’s on top of the prep and reports required before and after each individual lesson.
Other teachers wanted to stress the time that just goes into scheduling classes. This is a minimum of one hour a week, with one worker alleging that teachers “often lose a night’s sleep to try and schedule lessons a month in advance.”
Teachers in other countries tell a similar story.
A teacher in Canada reports that the pay is $27.05 for private lessons. With two lessons per hour, that requires an extra hour of prep, admin, report-writing. That $27.05 drops to $13.52. According to the same teacher, the real rate for group classes is $15.72 and for “Live25” classes is only $10.06. All this in a country where the minimum wage is $16.75.
Our union has made it a priority to hold the British Council to account. We’re fighting for proper contracts, honest employment practices, and pay that takes into account all the work that goes into the job. So if you work online for the BC – either as a teacher or examiner – then reach out! Drop us a line at [email protected].
If you don’t work at the BC but want to show your support, consider donating to Marina’s legal fund. An alleged whistleblower, Marina is being supported by the union. She lost her job after raising concerns that the scheduling system for online lessons was damaging teachers’ mental health.