Respect is due.

When I tell people I am a supply teacher, I automatically feel that the word ‘supply’ negates the respect that the word ‘teacher’, carries. For a start, some of the children I teach don’t even believe I’m a fully qualified teacher. “Miss, I didn’t know you were a proper teacher,”  a puzzled Year 9 student exclaimed, ”I thought you were, you know, someone who just needed a job for the day.” That sums up the plight of the daily supply teacher.

From one teacher to another.

There was another occasion, after the first lockdown, when a  Head of Year came into a Year 10 class I was taking and apologised to the students for them not having a ‘proper teacher’ for the day. I was livid “Excuse me!” I exclaimed, “I’m a fully-qualified English teacher, if you don’t mind.” She looked embarrassed and apologised profusely, admitting her mistake in front of the class, and rightly so.

Not another one.

Now here we are, finding ourselves in a second national lockdown, and supply teachers are finding themselves disrespected more than ever, this time by the government. Picture this! The nation has been thrown into a second lockdown and all schools are virtually closed down for the majority of students, for goodness knows how long.  The nation has been told that this will last, at least,  until the February half term. But there are now rumblings that it could be for much longer. Instantly, if you’re a daily supply teacher, your source of income is gone.

No furlough this time.

But you can be furloughed, surely, I hear you cry, just like during the first lockdown?

Unfortunately, for most of us, this is no longer an option, owing to the change in government furlough policy  back in August.  It is now the case that employers will have to foot the bill for national insurance and pension contributions of their workers. At the time of me writing this, the result of this was many  teaching agencies and umbrella companies deciding they couldn’t  afford to furlough their workers as they were making little to no money themselves.  Doing this was bound to leave them desperately out of pocket and could  end up destroying  their business.

How do we then survive?

One supply teacher, Emily,  explains “I get paid through an umbrella company as I am signed with more than three agencies. My umbrella company told me, even before this lockdown, that it would not be able to furlough me a second time round. This was because they had 1,800 on their books and would not be able to pay out for everyone.”

Another teacher, who prefers to remain anonymous, explains how she received a letter from her umbrella company, advising her to sign onto Universal Credit to receive all of £90 a week, if that. This is crazy, she thought. How was she to pay the mortgage, her bills and maintain her undergraduate child?

Why has the government allowed this to happen?

 This begs the question, are daily supply teachers, being punished for their itinerant working lifestyles, and if so why?

Why would the government fail to consider the livelihood of a group of professionals who were the main reasons why schools were kept open during the autumn term, when the rate of absentee teachers was at an all-time high? Due to illness, shielding or having to quarantine, permanent staff were dropping like flies and supply teachers were busier than ever.

We, as fully qualified professionals,  already have to put up with being paid way lower rates than our colleagues, who have permanent contracts. Why make us suffer even more?

What makes it worse is that many of us would have loved a permanent contract in September but because of the lockdown since March, a large amount of  staff teachers  who had planned to resign before the May cut off point, stayed put, not knowing what was going to happen next, and most schools, for the same reason, felt it safer to employ temporary supply staff rather than dish out permanent contracts. So here we find ourselves in a very sorry situation.

• What is to become of us?
• What are the unions doing to help us?
• Will this situation see a lot of supply teachers leave the teaching profession?
• What will schools do if there is a lack of supply teachers to call on?

The  two lockdowns have thrown light on a litany of serious issues relating to how supply teachers are treated.  There is no doubt in my mind that the teaching profession as a whole, seems to be grossly devalued and supply teachers are at the bottom of the pile.

Let’s  hope that once schools are up and running, the unions and the government will add ‘ the treatment of supply teachers’ on their list of issues that need to be given serious consideration, in an effort to improve the education system in this country.