I am about to begin teaching some tutorials and I was wondering if it is common practice to only pay for the teaching per hour of teaching tutorials? or does anyone else get paid for the preparation work? As I will only be getting paid for the actual practice and I do not think this is normal practice?

Hi, the payment for prep should be included in the per hour payment. That is, instead of paying for prep, they expect that you will have had to prepare the class, and will add extra on to your hourly rate commensurately.
If you are being paid over £15 ph for a seminar / demonstration, then the prep payment is included (roughly)

hi,
at my uni the payment for class teaching is organised differently at every department. some departments pay just the actual contact hour, others pay for preparation and marking of formative work as well. some pay around £40 per hour, others around £16 per hour (inculding holiday pay). it really depends and there is no standard apart from the standard the department sets.
i am quite lucky in that i am paid £38 per hour for the actual class hour, plus £16 per hour for the office hour, plus £16 per hour for 1-2 hours of preparation/marking per week. obviously preparation and marking takes LOTS longer than that (especially marking) but some of that extra work is compensated by the high pay for the class hour.

my desk neighbour teaches in a different department and she gets £32/hour for the class hours and nothing else, although she marks assessed exercises every week.

so what i am saying is, usually your department decides how it is going to be. if you want to change that you will have to get some other teachers together and go on strike or something. work out a new "standard" deal with your department. problem is, there are usually plenty of PhD students who WILL teach for that low pay so why should they pay more?

My department pays me for contact time only

Yeah mine too - but at €60 per hour I kinda think that's fair enough!

That is a lot of money! In my dept it is only around £18 per hour and as I said there is none extra for preparation for the law seminars which requires a lot of reading on my part.

Does anyone think that this is fair or should I try and get this changed and how would I go about it when I meet the head of dept to sort out the details soon???

hey M, my high pay is a result of PhD students a couple of years ago protesting against the low wages. i don't know what exactly they did but they got together and argued for better conditions.
i think if you are the only one in your situation, it is all up to you and your bargaining. you could argue "whereas the department wants to get the teaching I offer without too many costs, it also has an interest in me, being a PhD student, finishing my PhD quickly. now if I teach and still have to work a lot on other things in order to finance my studies, I will not be able to focus on my PhD at all, and the department will have to bear the consequences of being downgraded for its low PhD students success. Therefore, I argue, teaching pay should be at least enough so that I can reduce some of my other work in order to still be able to get on with my PhD."

if, however, there are other PhD students teaching, you could get together and get organised. you could argue something like "the department wants to offer its PhD students the opportunity to gain teaching experience. if however the pay is very low, this opportunity is only really available to students who are funded already and teach as a "hobby". students who work to earn their living cannot teach unless they can then reduce their other workload, or they will be unsuccessful in their PhD. so, to create equal chances for all students, the pay should be raised"
I think it is important that you get together with other PhD students for this!
You could also argue that the quality of your teaching is bound not to improve by being rewarded such a low pay. So if the department is interested in raising its teaching quality it should start by paying its teachers better!