Was wondering if working in non-teaching roles in government schools is a great option? Teachers need marking outside of working hours, weekends and school holidays but I reckon non-teachers such as administrators, librarian, speech therapist, psychologist have no such constraints and would probably enjoy the paid holidays. What other perks are there?
Any thoughts on that?
Im a support staff/ teacher aide in a government school in Victoria. Yes, we also receive the paid holidays but our salaries are not that comparable to a teacher.
Here's the link of our pay rates.
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/hrweb/employcond/Pages/salar…
You might notice that the last update was in November last year. That is because the union is in negotiation with the government regarding the new bargaining agreement for pay salaries and awards.
Basically, and education support staff starts at 40k+ per year while a teacher's starting salary starts at 58k per/annum
What about workloads? I often hear that teachers are stressed and needing to bring work home. Are support staff the same?
Apart from paid holidays any other perks? Employer contribution is low I supposed?
One of the things I think you will find is that ES positions (support staff) are often on contract positions and might not be employed for all 52 weeks of the year. There are a very broad range of staff employed under the category ES, and conditions will be significantly different.
The kitchen assistant in the Food Technology area has an entirely different range of stressors than somebody leading the school Wellbeing team (psychologist) or the maintenance staff or the front office staff. I don't think you can easily make a blanket statement about stress levels. I know our wellbeing team work incredibly hard with an extraordinarily large proportion of our school population needing assistance and intervention. They would certainly take work home. The office staff sometimes have to deal with very ugly parents and/or very sensitive issues and whilst they might be able to walk out the door at the end of the day, they would often carry those experiences with them. In Victoria, Speech pathologists etc are employed as Student Support Service Officers and are usually used by schools on a visiting basis - so their experiences would be different again.
Perks of working in a school environment is that you are working with young people and that is both challenging and immensely rewarding! Actual working conditions eg office, resources etc will vary on a case by case basis. Schools are so different from other workplaces out there in the "real world" so if you are coming from another setting you are in for an eye opener!
Very well said :)
you might find that more and more libarians are qaulified teachers in schools these days because ES staff dont have the ability to surpervise the same qty of students as a libarian does - ES libarians basically have to have a teacher around otherwise (unless they are cert 3 in childcare - dont quote me, but i think it only allows supervision of upto 10 students). some school do away with libarians altogether and just get the class room teacher to surpervise there own sessions.
psychologist are in a similar boat - there is a fair few with double degree (teachering and psychology).
another area thats doing alright is maintence - especially given that a lot of schools are getting older and older and require more TLC due to the lack of up keep when previously needed.
administrators often work on school holidays without pay to catch up. administration staff on the other hand are basically 8-4.
All the feedback are insightful!
Sounds like administration staff has the perks minus the after hours work. What about professional development and progression for those in administration? Would they get less in paid training and development since they are only working behind the scene?
the paid training and development general goes with the responsabilities of the positions. if you look at the PDF link posted earlier you will see the scales. general ES-1 level there is only general training because most of the work is catergorised as supervised and guided but they have to complete some many hours of PD.
the ES levels cause great amount of agnst because the schools dont like shifting people up to pay them more but they will hand you some of the responsabilities and work from a higher levels as long as it remains a minority part of your job. it also depends wether your primary or secondary school as well. the current school i work at the admin staff have to also operate sick bay and they are dealing with anything between 30-50 cases a day.
as far as progression goes, well its very difficult in the public school sector. e.g. some people get into the business managers role may be after 5-10 years if they are lucky enough, some wait a long long time even if there really good. problem you get is some of these people hang around way beyond there 'use by' date and the admin assistance end up running the place for half the wage.
best thing to do is go talk to some of these people working in these positions - its not the 'bed of roses' some people may think it is and it gets amplified by the culture of some of these schools.
Teachers are the only employees who get the breaks between school terms paid. Admin staff and all non teaching staff do not receive such perks - if the paid holidays are what you are referring to as "perks". Schools have an EBA that allows them to set up contracts that can employ non-teaching staff for 52 weeks of the year but only pay them the equivalent amount of the four school terms. For instance, a salary can be calculated @ 40 weeks plus proportion of annual leave (so it isn't the full 20 days a year) and can be paid over 52 weeks a year. This assists people to manage their money and bills. The other alternative is that the school terms are worked and then the school holidays are taken as leave without pay. Non-teaching staff usually work 38 hours a week during the weeks that they work - so 7.6 hours per day. Staff in Independent schools often work harder than state schools - they might have marginally better behaved students and they may have more equipment. But remember that parents pay fees to the school and consequently parents' expectations are high about what their "little Johnny" is receiving over and above normal schooling. They expect high academic results; lots of sports and extra curricular events; and the school to change "little Johnny's" feral behaviours - because the parents have no idea how he got to become a little shxxx.
Most independent schools have a very low budget for Professional Development for non-teaching staff. It's not a case of working behind the scenes - it is more that they recruit for skills of that job, and they don't see the necessity to upskill someone if the job requires fairly low level tasks to support teacher's. The actual roles don't change that much in a school and there is very limited career progression in a non-teaching role in a school. So you'd be very disappointed if you were planning on working your way up to become a Principal. It ain't going to happen because you need a teaching qualification as a minimum and several years teaching experience in front of a class before you could climb that very competitive ladder. And Business Managers Position Descriptions have the essential criteria of a Degree in Accounting and often are employed externally to fill that need.
Schools are a very surreal environments in that they often have people working there who have gone from school up to Year 12; then to uni (another educational environment); and back into a school/education environment. Almost like "Cradle to Grave" situation. They've not had any real world experience to give a different perspective on life. I've known of schools that didn't assist teachers and non-teaching staff to transition and learn computers in the early days of schools being required to get up to speed but not spend any money on training or computers. Instead they relied on people to have their own computers at home and could teach themselves - but of course often their students knew more than they did. Students and the world are very different now. But there are schools around who have a certain culture and way of working that could literally be transported back to the 1960's and it would be as if they were in a time warp and nothing had changed.
Government School salaries are set by State departments - so each State will be a little different. From what I've seen Teaching staff have a lot of bands & room for progression in their salary, whereas non-teaching staff are restricted to just a few classifications.
Might be a good job for a few years, but not something for the long term. Depends what you are after.
Also, not sure if admin/non-teaching staff get the big paid holiday period that teachers receive.