Meet Teachers Building Society

About Teachers Building Society

Teachers Building Society is a mutual organisation formed in 1966 to support teachers with small deposits to buy their own homes. It continues to provide mortgages and savings today, and aims to work in a way that supports the wider communities and environment in which it operates.

🕰️  Established in: 1966

🏠  Based in: Wimborne, Dorset, England

🏢  Offices: Wimborne, Dorset, England

🧍‍♂️ Number of employees: 60

❤️  Raisin UK partner since: 2020

🏆  Key achievements: 
In 2020 the Society delivered a strong set of financial results, announcing that it had surpassed £300m total assets for the first time in its 55 year history, despite the effective shut down of the housing market when the nation went into ‘lockdown’ to fight the covid-19 pandemic.

🦮  Charity work:
Our primary partnership is with Education Support, a charity dedicated to the mental health and wellbeing of teachers and education staff. Education Support offers a confidential support helpline, a grants service for teachers with money worries and an employee assistance programme. During the first covid-19 lockdown we were able to make an immediate donation of £50,000 to ensure the charity’s vital services were not interrupted at time when teachers were facing unprecedented challenges inside and outside of the classroom.

What are your building society’s core values?

Like other building societies, our members are our top priority. We genuinely put the needs of our savers and borrowers first and make every decision with them in mind.

Whilst we accept that we can’t solve all of the earth’s problems, we do care as much about the way we do business as the goals we are trying to achieve, and do our best to operate in a way that is kind to people and the planet.

What are the benefits of your building society working with Raisin UK?

Like all building societies, we use the collective deposits of savers to support mortgage lending. Simply put, the more savers who chose to trust us with their money, the more first time buyers we can help onto the property ladder. Working with Raisin allows us to expand our reach to a different, more diverse audience. It helps us raise our brand profile amongst a wider sphere of consumers, in turn attracting deposits to the society which we wouldn’t otherwise have received.

Finally, tell us something about your bank that customers would be interested to know.

We were formed specifically to combat the financial inequality that left teachers in general and female teachers in particular unable to obtain a mortgage.

In the 1960s many male primary school teachers earned so little that their own children qualified for free school meals, making them an unattractive mortgage lending prospect. For women, it was even harder, they needed male ‘permission’ to even open a bank account, let alone take out a mortgage. It sounds unbelievable but it’s true.

Our founders didn’t think things were right or fair. In fact, they were so firm in their belief that any young teacher (regardless of gender) who wanted to buy a home should be able to achieve that dream that they decided to set up a new building society to do things differently. And so Teachers Building Society was born. The Society first reached out to members of the NUT (now NEU) teaching union to attract investment (savings) and then began offering mortgages.

We continue to provide savings accounts and mortgages today, aiming to help as many teacher first time buyers own a home as possible.