Is it unusual for UK univerisities to give tuition waivers to teaching assistants?

Question

I've been checking the websites of different UK universities for teaching assistantship benefits. None of the websites I've visited so far disclose the specific benefits that TAs receive. So, I wonder if it is unusual for UK universities to waive the tuition fees of their TAs.

Answer 1

I have studied/worked at three different UK universities. I have never heard of tuition fees being waved for TAs. Usually TAs are paid an hourly rate in addition to any funding package/scholarship they may have. There are almost always restrictions on how many hours a graduate student can work at the university, the maximum amount of money you could make with these restrictions would be much lower than the tuition fees. It is also not guaranteed that you get a TA position

Answer 2

It's not unusual because it doesn't happen at all. I think you have a fundamental misconception of how funding and tuition for PhD students works in the UK compared to the the USA.

Firstly, if you are offered a PhD place in the UK, this should come with the costs of tuition covered and an annual tax free stipend (~£15,000). You never receive any money for tuition and you never directly pay tuition. That transaction goes on behind the scenes between your funding body (be that research council, department or PI) and your university. The stipend gets paid into your bank account every month like a salary. That's what you live on. It is completely unconnected to any teaching you may do.

Secondly, the concept of a "TA" does not really exist in the UK. It would be very unusual for a PhD student to teach a whole lecture or lecture course, as I understand happens in the US. The most I had to do as a PhD student was mark undergraduate coursework and exams, which took up a few hours of a single week, twice a year. Once I sat in the corner of a computer lab for a few hours helping the students with Python. That was it. The vast majority of my time was spent on research.

Doing this type of undergraduate marking and lab demonstrating may not even be compulsory for you as a student (it was for me because there were a lot of undergraduates so we all had to pitch in). Regardless of whether you have to do it or not, if you are doing it you will be paid to do it. The mechanism by which this occurs will likely differ between universities, but we filled in a timesheet and got the money along with our stipend each month. The hourly rate was excellent too, something like £17 an hour. But you'd only do a few hours so this kind of marking/demonstrating would not give you anything like enough money to live on. That's what your stipend is for.

I think this is the main difference to the USA, where you are paid primarily as a TA and those duties come first, above and beyond research.