To think there should be some reward for hard work?

Eloethan London Allowance brings the basic teachers' starting salary up to around £27 1/2 K.

I didn't know that Soutra and £27,000 is certainly better but not brilliant for the responsibility involved. A legal secretary, for instance, in central London earns in the region of £35,000, and works far fewer hours than a teacher.

Soutra the other thing to bear in mind is that in your first paid job after completing training whether it's as a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer or whatever, you are still learning ie still a trainee. So the pay isn't so bad and the very long hours are partly a result of your doing things for the first time and trying things out.

eloethan when I arrived in the UK in my early 50s, I took a job as a PA because I couldn't believe the salaries that were on offer to senior PAs,I earned more than my husband. I had never worked as one before, "transferable skills" and all that. My title was "Executive Assistant" but it was a PA job. I can't really say I worked particularly long hours, although my (female) boss had a way of pulling out a pile of urgent work at 5:15 on a Friday.

nightowl I think that you must console yourself that your daughter's job serves her, or rewards her, in ways that only she will know (and that are not related to income).

Nobody has young children for ever. I had several part time jobs when my children were small that were poorly paid and at a level not commensurate with my education or pre-children career level, but the non-monetary compensations were very flexible working and closeness to home. They also took me into industries and work I had no previous experience of, so that when I returned to work full time and resumed my career I had a nearly continuous work record and much wider experience to present to employers and was worth the poor pay.

You cannot have it all and the relative down time in my career was a small price to pay for having my children and being able to devote time and attention to them when they were young.

Is this a question of expectation? For example I never considered even applying for benefits. I accepted that this was the stage of life I was at when working in an NHS job at a junior level and with 2 children under 4. It was just the way life was. I could hope that one day I might earn more but it was as impossible then as it is now to predict how life would turn out. DH made redundant many times in the late 70s/early 80s as the country struggled but we somehow managed. We all did. I know I sound a right old bore but we didn't seem to expect as much then. No holidays (at all in the early days), ancient car for DH`s work, black & white TV etc etc. I too did further training because I loved my job and it was worth it in the end but no one could say it was easy or even predictable at the time.

Some interesting posts and I agree with many of the points made. I am pleased that my daughter has got a foot on the ladder of her chosen profession, at the school of her choice.

I take the point that she is still in training and I have never thought her starting salary was too bad (though some interesting points here about clerical pay Eloethan and others).

However, my original point was not about teachers' salaries, or expectations. It was simply that there seems to be no differential between what one can earn in an averagely paid job and what one can claim in benefits. Not a new point, I know, but one that slapped me in the face when I saw the reality in my daughter's life.

For the next few years - I have no idea how many - she and her husband (who is self-employed in his family's business) will see their income remain static as her salary rises and their corresponding benefits in the form of tax credits fall. Of course I don't want them to be claiming benefits for ever, but I would really like to live in a society where they earned enough to not need to claim benefits.

More importantly, dare I say it, I would like there to be some differential to make it worth her while to go out to work now, not to have to wait for that reward in ten years time. Not to mention the fact that she has a colossal student loan to pay off, which would not be the case if she had decided not to bother working at all. I still don't know the answer.

Night owl

Agree.

I think the most annoying thing about getting less than you could on benefits is the fact we all know you have to pay your taxes to provide for the welfare pot, fair enough, but the welfare figures rarely reflect that. Eg. to get £26.000 benefit you would need to earn £30.000 plus a year. When you hear somebody on welfare say 'It's my right to have it" it does make the blood boil a little. Yes it is but not when you have never attempted to work for a living and expect everybody else to pay for your lifestyle and you don't understand how much of a wage you would have to be earning to match your benefit payment.

Very difficult to get the right balance isn't it not only for government but for the individual when it is so easy to take benefits. As I said in my post my daughter is holding down a job but it can't be denied it would be so easy to take benefits and have an easier life.

durhamjen Are you saying this MP has received housing benefit of £120,000 for the house he lives in?

If you are not and you are commenting on the fact that he received rent for which his tenants claimed housing benefit then it is really none of anyone else's business. He could, of course, insist he only lets to people who are not receive HB. Would that salve your conscience?

I do think that the distance between contributions and benefits makes it feel as if something has been taken away.

If we had a system which was looked like an insurance - allowing you to draw in relation to your last salary for a finite period of time over a lifetime and including periods (limited) for parental leave (maternity included) unemployment and care leave you would be happy to return to work, storing up time when you could draw in the future.

As it is the government encourages the feeling that it is they who are giving you the money so it then feels like it is being taken away.

It's called National Insurance, Gracesgran. But people do not get money in relation to their previous salary. If you want that you have to pay for it yourself. NI gives you less than the minimum wage in JSA.

Link to the MP I was talking about.
www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/26/housing-east-london-estate-viability-affordability

there always has to be a cut off point for benefits or tax credits and where the cut off point is, there will be those just over that limit who will lose out. Its the same no matter what your income.

However I do understand that tax credits are paid to families who get less than 40k a year but if there are two earners if only one of them gets less than 40k they will still get tax credits. Therefore a couple can earn together 79k a year they will still get tax credits.

Quite frankly if I was on a joint income of 79k I would not bother asking for tax credits.

If my DD and her husband were on a joint income of 79k I wouldn't be complaining either etheltbags

I had no idea the cut off was so high, nor that there was the same anomaly as there is for Child Benefit re each earner vs family income. It seems to me the whole benefits system is so complicated and so unwieldy that there can never be fairness.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29398907

Gosh that is a lot to earn and still get benefits, I had no idea.

I would like to make the point (used to work in recruitment) that there may be secretaries earning £35k but there are also teachers earning that. Many companies now require a degree for senior secretaries who do a very difficult job sometimes. Let's not compare jobs unless we know all about them as it is so easy to think someone else has life easier than our own.

DS does a job he loves although it is not particularly well paid and no one in his company has had a rise for more than 7 years. They did get a bonus for one year which was 1% of salary. There are a lot of dedicated people outside the public sector too.

My figures were correct in nov. 20012.

I cannot believe that a couple on up to £79,000 could still get tax credits, are you sure that is correct etheltbags?
I know for a fact that young people in my family are in the situation of one earning under £40,000 and the other earning less than £10,000 and they get no tax credits.

Do you mean child benefit, which has never been means tested until recently?

The figures bring quoted on here are out of date. In the current tax year, a couple ( both working at least 16 hours a week), with two children and paying child care of £300 a week ( that's the max the government allows in the calculation) have a gross combined salary cut off above which no tax credits are paid of £60,000

But if they're not paying for child care the cut off point is only £35,000.
Which doesn't make sense to me.

(That's for a two-children family)

Yes Ana - me neither. Tax credits are fiendishly complicated but I can't grasp some of the thinking behind them.

I have to agree GrannyTwice and Ana that it is actually difficult to see what the Child Credits system is trying to achieve.

In one sense I can see what they might have been trying to do (their logic, not mine). It may be that they are aiming to pay benefits on an individual basis in the future, as they are going to with the new single tier pension.

If that was the case it might work if you could each claim for one child - that limits the family to two children you could claim for and then the combined income would not be so relevant. Perhaps that is where they are going ... but who knows?

That wouldn't work, though - what about single-parent families?

Do you mean where a parent has died Ana? I imagine you could deal with that situation. Otherwise I don't understand the single-parent families bit. Single adult households yes, but all children have two parents .

If a family has two parents who split up then I actually believe that parents should still, except in the case of abuse, jointly parent. If one parent has to have the children most of the time the CSA could adjust the payment to include some or all of the none domiciliary parents Tax Credit. If that parent was earning too much to get it before they split they will paying a higher child support amount.

In an ideal society, yes, Gracesgran. These days, family life can't always be so neatly organised, unfortunately. Sometimes the father is long-gone and can't be traced, or the mother won't name him.