To think academics are seriously entitled??

Most of them will have come up the ranks as academics. Few have run a non university business.

There are plenty of school teachers who are rubbish teachers too. I spent a fortune on tutoring for my dc to compensate for poor teachers.

I work with some academics who are amazing in the classroom and some who are rubbish. Some are excellent researchers, some are poor. I also worked in industry in past. Guess what? Some colleagues were excellent at their jobs, others weren’t.

The VCs of your average Russell group unis are running a business with turnover of billions. How much do you think that sort of expertise usually earns? And how in demand do you think the skills of an expert in late Iron Age pottery or whatever is? How much are those skills worth on the open market? Not a lot. An academic on the cutting edge of say AI could earn a fortune elsewhere, the niche academics have no other outlet for their skills and should be glad to have a job.

If a university makes poor financial decisions its not the fault of the staff, but 99% of staff at financial institutions that were badly affected by the financial crisis were totally blameless too, and yet they sucked up pay freezes and redundancies for years as they realised their employer had no other option. It all seems so childish, stoking about pay and redundancies when they’re just a fact of life.

It’s that many academics class themselves as teachers and I have significant issues with their pedagogical skills. Haveing spent time with many people having just been through university the quality of education provided is ‘limited’.

I would argue that you can’t compare school teachers to university lecturers, it’s a completely different skill set.

lecturers don’t need the people skills or cat herding skills that teachers do, or the management of learners who may not want to be there.

lecturers don’t really teach. The students are there because they want to learn, and it’s more about breaking down what can be complex ideas, it’s often a more interactive discussion of concepts and “here’s how you find out what you need to know” rather than than “here’s what you need to know”.
that plus the majority of the job is working on their own research, grant writing, supervising etc.

I'm just drawing on my own experiences when I was at secondary school. There were some really nasty kids at my school and the way they spoke to the teachers was quite shocking, especially younger female teachers or supply teachers. But I'm glad you work under much better conditions and hopefully that is the norm.
How much would a HoD earn at a secondary school? Personally, I'd not consider an SL a particularly senior role, despite the title. It's one level up from the entry level and carries no managerial responsibilities at all. I'd probably liken it more to a teacher at the top of the upper pay scale. I'm glad you're on a good salary as a head/assistant head, as you should be. Our senior leaders are also on salaries far above what I posted for SL/Reader.
Anyway, people will definitely have different preferences for their job. As I said, I find classroom teaching quite draining, so I couldn't do 39 weeks a year of it. Having a job where I do 20 weeks of it and only 6 hours a week suits me better. There are also lots of downsides to my job but the teaching level compared to schools is not one of them.

Hmmm.... I think you are being rather disingenuous there. Comparing a senior lecturer post to a main-scale teaching post is not really appropriate is it? A more realistic comparison might be an Head of Department of an Assistant Head. And I'm not sure I recognise the conditions you describe either. Something isn't quite right if you are regularly being called a fat bitch. Unless you work in a fairly specialist setting. (For what it's worth I went into leadership and my salary has outstripped anything you've set out above for some time now btw).

Yeah from my experience the vast majority of academics are paid by research funding, not by the uni.

the chair of the dept might have been on a salary, but they then employed their staff according to funding- which was usually broken down per project- to do this work over 3 years it will need 1 lecturer/senior post doc, , one post doc and two PhD students.

they weren’t paid out of uni money.

Visited in what capacity? You do realise that pay demands are usually national actions led by the union, of which many academics are not members? I can't recall a significant national pay increase in recent years based on industrial action/'whining'. No, money doesn't appear from nowhere but it's also not reasonable to expect people to work for low pay (a lot of these actions actually relate to the conditions faced by hourly paid staff, which are often really really bad). If the university makes poor financial investments, which many have, that's not the problem of the staff either. There are a lot of these 'on their knees' institutions that somehow manage to pay their VCs £350,000 a year for instance.

You have a mile-wide chip on your shoulder, OP. It's quite unedifying and very revealing of your own particular prejudices.

Not least, the description you give of this supposed overheard conversation is so far removed from the average academic's workload in 2026, particularly in UKHE which is currently in freefall from Oxbridge to post-92, that it resembles a sector unrecognisable since about 1995.

Only 2/10. Must try harder.

I expect it was supposed to deliver another "universities/degrees are a waste of time" pile-on

Good grief, lost for words!

Why does this sound like OP's second account?

Which uni?
How much where they demanding
When did this happen?

@Bananavibez what is your link to these professors, do you also work in academia?

.

Academics are teachers in higher education. Schoolteaching isn’t the only kind of teaching that exists.

The other things that is laughable about academics Jim’s the complete and utter lack off any commercial understanding. The pay demands at the uni I visited were insane. The uni was on its knees financially, and the academics were demanding totally unaffordable pay rises. Strikes went on for ages, some uplift in pay because of all the whining, then lots of redundancies, because guess what, if your employer is skint it’s no pay rise and a few redundancies or pay rises and lots of redundancies. Money doesn’t just appear from nowhere.

Absolutely PhD’s are required.

lecturing and university education isn’t just about the content and passing exams.

it’s about methodology, about pushing forward new ideas, inspiring minds.

most universities aren’t churning out a’level students with 3 years more learning. graduates should be able to think critically, assess others work, use it to drive their own research. It’s not simply repeating what others have done, you need to be able to read a paper and think “oh, I wonder if anyone has tried this to see if this happens, or shown that this related theory is true” - then think of how you would do that, how you would structure your process/experiments/reading, then gather the information, the evidence and interpret it.

if you haven’t done that in an academic setting- ie a PhD, it will be almost impossible to teach.

decent uni’s want to produce thinkers, not memorisers. If uni’s employ people without, simply to teach, then that is not university level education.

again, I am out of date since I did my PhD, but the vast majority were funded. The only people I knew who “paid” to do a PhD were international students. Generally, if you weren’t funded it was pointless doing the research. Granted it wasn’t much, but was enough to live on reasonably comfortably.

But 'teacher' doesn't necessarily imply a school. Part of an academic's job is being a university teacher.

However, that, and associated admin and pastoral responsibilities, is only part of it -- there's also the obligation to bid for funding and produce and disseminate peer-reviewed research. It's comparatively rare to be just a Teaching Fellow. Any promotion criteria will involve research, and 'contribution to the discipline'. Most school teachers aren't bidding for hundreds of thousands of pounds of research grant money and employing postdocs in what is essentially a small business to further that piece of research, and then disseminating it at regular intervals in both scholarly journals/monographs and to the world at large via newspapers, TV, podcasts etc.

Your post is really interesting. I know nothing about any of this.
When I finished school I had to get a job because money was tight. I would have loved to have gone to university though. I keep looking at The Open University even now. And i'm old.

I actually like it when parents are given permission to attend meetings. Too often, problem students hide behind GDPR and tell their parents a whole pack of lies about how hard they’ve been working. Parents then email us with a stream of abuse and we’re not able to put them right.

I will DM you as I don't want to be outed... It's the top of the salary bracket so if you're newly promoted, you'd not get that. It's also technically discretionary as the top of the bracket is 'contribution points' but in practice, people get an increase each year.

And lots of teachers wouldn’t last a week in academia. So what? We all have different skills, preferences etc, which is just as well, as otherwise we’d all want to do the same job and nobody would want to do the rest of them

Some of the students are also interesting....
As pp mentioned I've also been asked to move exam dates because of holidays; student asked if they can take an exam a week after everyone else because they've 'got something else on'.
One put in a formal complaint because the email they sent on Saturday afternoon was not responded to until Monday morning. I've had a complaint because I asked some to stop taking selfies during a lecture. More complaints about grades than I care to think about.
A favourite example....
Why have I failed?
You only submitted 500 words.
So?
It's a 3,000 word assignment and you didn't address the subject matter or use any references (you produced a rambling stream of consciousness and think that because your parents are successful in this field you don't need to put the effort in).
Parent demands to attend the complaint meeting, which the university agrees to because the student needs support😡
Parent suitably humiliated when I produce the evidence that their DC is a lazy, arrogant little *

That’s because it’s a very different job.

Lots of people “wouldn’t last a week in a school”. It’s not the only measure of value for someone’s worth whether they would last a week in a secondary school.