Once you have completed your work and submitted your time sheet (these are often now on-line and need you to confirm the days/hours you have worked: keep a diary of where you have worked and the rate you agreed to work for), then you should get paid.

Check Your Pay

Once you have worked for an agency for a period of time, you will get used to how much pay you should receive each week/month, dependent on the number of days you have worked. Most agencies pay wages weekly but some agencies, especially if you work directly with a school and are paid through the council, will pay you monthly.

Also, if you view your payslips through a company portal, do download your payslips each week onto your own computer. There have been instances of payslips suddenly disappearing from company portals when there is a dispute about a particular payslip.

Direct/Umbrella Company Pay

If you work directly with a school or through a local authority supply pool, then the wages you are quoted by your employer will be your gross pay: before income tax, National Insurance (NI) contributions and pension are removed. At the start of the tax year, you will be allocated a personal tax allowance (2020/21 = £12,500) which you can earn before paying tax. Most employers will spread this amount over the whole year, so that the benefit is uniform over the whole year. However, as a supply educator, you may not know which agency you will be working for the most at the start of the year. For this reason, you are able to split your personal tax allowance between as many employers as you think you will work for. Contact the HMRC either by phone (0300 200 3300 or Textphone 0300 200 3319 for people who are deaf or hearing or speech impaired) or using their Digital Assistant and split your income tax coding between the employers you think you will work for the most (HMRC usually recommend a max. of 2/3 employers, which is sensible). You can change this at any time during the financial year for any of the tax allowance that has not yet been used.

If you work through an agency, then you can ask to be paid ‘directly’ by the agency. They should have a payroll system for paying their office staff and if you ask to be paid directly by the agency, then they should offer that option to you. Getting paid directly by an agency means that you would be paid in exactly the same way as if you were paid by the local authority, with only income tax, employee’s National Insurance (NI) contributions and pension deducted from your pay.

A number of supply agencies will suggest that you may like to be paid through an umbrella or pay roll company. They may even offer you an incentive, an extra £10 or £20 a day uplift in your pay, to use the umbrella company. Though this may seem, initially, a good way to be paid (increasing your weekly wage by £50-£100). The downside, however, is that there are extra deductions from your pay: some umbrella companies deduct a charge for processing your pay, they remove Employer’s NI as well as Employee’s NI and some even remove the Apprenticeship Levy as well. All told, these extra deductions come out to around 20% extra being removed from your wages per day. Thus, if you were paid an extra £20 a day for using an umbrella company, then you will probably not get the same pay you would have received if paid directly. If the increase however was only £10 a day, then you will definitely be getting less pay in your bank once all of the deductions have been removed. So, best of all, say no to being paid through an umbrella company.

To find out more about the difference in take home pay, please read Pay Through Umbrella Companies – A Comparison With Direct Pay

Holiday Pay

On the play slip with some agencies, you will see a deduction called holiday pay. This is a deduction which is removed each week and can build up, week on week, to a lump sump which you claim back during the holidays (Christmas, Easter and Summer). However, though some agencies pay the money to you automatically, there are other agencies where you have only a narrow window of opportunity to claim back your holiday pay: if you don’t claim it in time, the money then belongs to the agency.

However, if you do not want your agency to deduct part of your wages in this way, all you have to do is say so. If you say you do not want the holiday pay to be deducted, then the agency has to pay you your full wage without any deductions except for tax and pension.

Pension

In the past, many workers missed out on valuable pension benefits because their employer didn’t offer them a pension or they didn’t apply to join their company’s pension scheme.

Automatic enrolment changed this. It makes it compulsory for employers to automatically enrol their eligible workers into a pension scheme. The employer must also pay money into the scheme. 

The earnings threshold is £10,000 per year, but you will be assessed for eligibility at each pay period. The earnings threshold will be pro-rated, meaning the actual earnings threshold amount will differ if you are paid monthly or weekly. As you are assessed for eligibility at each pay period, you may find that you are automatically enrolled if your earnings increase – if only for a short period.

For example, if you are paid monthly, you will be deemed to meet the earnings threshold if your monthly earnings reach at least £833. If you are paid weekly, you will be deemed to meet the earnings threshold if your weekly earnings reach at least £192.

4% of your qualifying earnings are matched by 3% from your employer which is added to by 1% from the government to make a grand total of 8% contribution towards your pension. This all sounds good but you have to make sure that every agency enrols you into a scheme and that all your agencies pay into the same scheme (Now and Nest are the two most popular with the agencies). This however pales into insignificance when compared with the Teachers Pension Scheme, which agencies don’t sign up to: though the employee contribution is higher at 7.4%, the employers contribution is significantly higher at 23.68%, making the total contribution of 31.08%, significantly higher than the 8% of the schemes for supply teachers.

Agency Workers Regulations (AWR)

Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) legislation was introduced in 2010 to give zero hours workers some guaranteed rights from day one of working in a new assignment and enhanced rights after 12 weeks, the most significant of which is parity pay with someone doing the same job in the same school. The legislation was adapted specifically for supply teachers in 2014 (see here), so that breaks such as school holidays only pause, rather than reset, the process.

In the most simple cases, if you were on a long term placement, once you have been at the school for 12 weeks, then you would qualify to be paid what you would be paid if employed full time by the school. The qualifying weeks do not have to be full weeks of work: one hour worked at the school will be enough to qualify that specific week. At 12 weeks, your agency should increase your pay to the correct level of parity pay. The agency when you go for interview should ask where you are on the teachers main pay scale, for any evidence to prove that (letter from school where you were last fully employed) and what schools you have been working at already (as you may have started the qualifying period already). Some teachers already take evidence proving their scale point to interviews, just so there is no misunderstanding. Some agencies pay AWR when it is highlighted that the 12 week qualifying period has been completed by the teacher, but other agencies with give every reason not to pay AWR parity pay: from ‘you don’t do planning’ to ‘you don’t have your own form group’ to ‘AWR doesn’t apply to you.’ All of these are just excuses not to pay you your legally entitled wages.

Avoiding paying AWR parity pay is counter to government legislation and there is now a fine of up to £20,000 for trying to avoid paying AWR parity wages. Should this happen, get in contact with your local union representative immediately. Sometimes, a placement may mysteriously come to an end at the 11 or 12 week mark. Again, this is either the agency or the school trying to avoid their AWR obligations. Again, get your local union representative involved immediately, get yourself reinstated in the job and being paid to scale.

When we say paid to scale, what do we mean? In England and Wales, there is a common negotiated pay scale, the main pay scale (MPS) which is negotiated and recommended by the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB). Following the recent pay rise, the pay scales are as follows:

The daily rate is calculated by dividing the annual pay by 195 days, the number of days in the schools year (192 working days and 3 Inset days). These daily rates are what you should be paid when paid to scale after 12 weeks. This is the amount paid to teachers would work directly with council run schools (mainly Primary schools these days). Academies can apply their own pay scale, but often follow the national scales so that teachers don’t take a pay cut when moving to their school from a council run school.

The 12 week qualifying period does not have to be with the same school: only with the same ‘hirer’. With council run schools, the council is the hirer. With academies, the academy trust is the hirer. It is therefore possible to complete the AWR qualifying 12 week period with a number of different schools in the same council or the same Multi-Academy Trust (MAT). And those weeks do not have to be consecutive: so long as there is not a break of more than 6 weeks, in term-time, between working days, then the qualifying period continues. School holidays merely pause the process: so your 12 week qualifying period could be split over the summer holidays, 6 weeks before and 6 weeks after.

If you are already in a long term placement and completed the qualifying period a while ago or if you don’t want to ‘rock the boat’ with the school at the 12 week point, then you can claim back any unpaid parity pay at the end of your work placement through the ACAS Early Conciliation Scheme. The scheme is designed to solve any employment disputes: they are very used to processing AWR claims. You will have 3 months (minus 1 day) after your final day of work at the school to put in your claim. It is always best to get your local union officer involved as soon as possible, as there are a number of steps that need to be completed before submitting a claim. There have been so many claims in recent months that many agencies will then to pay the amount requested as soon as you submit it.

How much could an AWR claim be for? For example:

As you can see, the amount you can claim soon escalates. Remember, this is unpaid wages which you are legally entitled to. Very often, when teachers phone their agency or (better still) submit the first email of an AWR claim, the agency will make an initial offer of around 10-20% of the claim (which for Steve would be around £300 to £600). Though this will seem like a good result, the teacher is entitled to the whole of this money and the agency doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on: so if you make a claim (even through your union), hold out for the full amount as it is the money you should have been paid in the first place. Organisations such as the National Supply Teacher Network have helped teachers to submit many AWR claims, so do not feel you have to go through the process alone.

The Network has an AWR guide and also a standard letters on this website which you can either use yourself or with your local union district officer to submit your claim.