Teachers - most disliked profession on mumsnet?

[OhReally18]

In the last few days, I've seen a lot of teacher bashing on mumsnet. Even teachers giving other teachers a hard time. Seems like it could be one of the most disliked professions on mn. Is this a true reflection of how the rest of society feels?

I've been teaching in primary for a good few years and I have never experienced bad feelings towards teaching in real life, just on here and social media occasionally. Maybe the odd envious comment about holidays but that's it.

It's by no means harder than other professions but teachers are portrayed as lazy, moany, hard done by, ungrateful, the list goes on...
Is this fair? Surely it's no different to other professions?

I should say I worked in the commercial world for 20 years before going into school. That, I think, makes a huge difference. Yes teaching is hard and can be emotionally draining, but so is constant pressure to meet sales targets, knowing that if you don't you'll lose your job and having only one 2 week block of holiday a year

Everyone thinks their own work is hard, until they do something else.

I think it was worse over covid because there were a lot of teachers saying that we were expected to deal with a level of risk that no one else was, which just wasn’t true. I think it demonstrated a real lack of awareness for people who work in genuinely shit conditions like some factories etc.

Also, the constant saying that schools should close, the time when loads of teachers on here handed in that thing from the union saying they didn’t feel safe to work, when lots of other people were getting on with it. I would have felt annoyed. I don’t know any teachers in real life who handed it in, though.

I will happily stand up and say that a) teaching is a hard job which takes over your life if you aren’t careful and b) teaching yesterday in the heat was absolutely horrible for both me and the children. It’s difficult because you always get people then reacting with “LOADS of jobs are hard” and “LOADS of people had to work in the heat”. Like - yeah? All of those things are true at once.

The last thing I will say is that people constantly seem to criticise the fact that we have holidays. This too could be yours if you just do a PGCE! I am not afraid to say the holidays are a great perk of the job, but it’s not as though I was like, specifically selected to have access to them. I trained, qualified and applied for a job which happens to have those holidays. You could literally all have those holidays too if you wanted them.

Teaching is just one in a line of full on, challenging jobs. I watch my boyfriend at work as a bartender and think there’s no fucking way I could cope with that. It’s all relative.

Let's be clear. The teachers (on Mumsnet) implied we wanted to schools open because we couldn't look after our own children/didn't like them. Which was part of what made me lose respect for them

The reality was - I was actually still needing to do long days at work alongside caring for and teaching my children (a key worker job, but one I could do from home).. but the teachers at my children's school were definitely not doing full days or indeed many days at school and all as lots of them are friends of friends so I saw their Facebook chats about bike rides and cake baking completions etc etc .

Their was an astonishing resistance from the unions to find a solution to teach, and I pointed out at the time how that would backfire. Every other profession either innovated and moved online swiftly or just kept going in real life.

Teachers on here didn't help by sneering at parents who found school closures hard and claiming it was because they were bad parents. This showed a real lack of understanding that many of us were juggling long hours in stressful jobs with having our children at home full time and wanting to make things nice for them

HR usually gets it worse

I posted a lot under a different name about the need for schools to reopen. I don’t remember a huge amount of people doing the same, though, and a very large amount of teachers (or maybe just a vocal amount) filling threads with graphs etc about why schools must stay shut.

I don’t think we really have a say in it, though - the DfE don’t actually seem to like or respect us and I certainly have never been asked my opinion by SLT - the messaging is very much that we just do what the LA tells us.

I posted a thread about very young children having lost linguistic skills and there were a LOT of posters (not just teachers) blaming parents for it. It is a bit depressing.

I do think covid has caused a real rift in teachers and non teachers on here and that is a shame.

Why is it the teachers who have demanded it though? As far as I am aware it was government advise to protect children . Not a request from teachers so they could have s as nice afternoon off. Am not a teacher but get really fed up with teacher bashing!

But not remotely as often!

In real life though, yes, I've often wondered why anyone would do the job, given that no-one has a good word to say about them. If you do, I take my hat off to you!

When most of you have never had any other career to compare it with

I am afraid these days many of us have had other careers to compare it with. I know fewer and fewer career teachers who have always done the job.

A first year teacher is on a good salary for a new graduate and there is good career progression to really very good salaries for those who want it

there is a post running at the moment where the majority of posters claim a starting salary of £22k for a graduate is way too low. M1 is now £25.9k and M6 where a teacher with no desire to do anything other than teach (which is not unreasonable) is £36.9k, reached in a minimum of 6 years. In some parts of the country now, 2 teachers together will struggle to buy a property big enough to bring up a couple of children and run a couple of cars so they can work. A single teacher will struggle to own property pretty much across the whole of the UK. We have teachers using food banks. In real terms, I think I read the salary has deflated around 10% since 2010.

Companies going bust and disappearing overnight owing you wages. Companies being bought and sold and employees being thrown out like yesterday’s rubbish. The constant “restructuring” (in other words, getting rid of anyone whose face doesn’t fit). No job security. Things you’ll never experience

Have you had a look at school budgets recently? The persistent ‘removal’ of older/more expensive teachers? The removal of support staff? We currently have a would-be PM stating she would strip back subjects offered even further - so plenty of teachers there who would overnight be out of a job. Redundancies have been happening across the board for years now and/or schools are not replacing staff who leave. I am not sure why you think teaching is exempt from issues faced by the private sector?

I have only seen maybe a handful of posts that are genuinely teacher bashing. I have seen more posts from teachers massively overreacting to any criticism or questioning and saying it is teacher bashing.

You don't see this with other professions. I have seen many many posts where people talk about poor care during labour and never once seen a midwife come in and say "stop midwife bashing"

I do also think there is an over the top poor me attitude from some teachers on here who genuinely seem to think it's the hardest job in the world and much much harder than any other.

IRL I don't find this - I was chatting to my son's reception teacher the other day, as I run into her on the way to school a lot (I drop off at about 8 to breakfast club) and she actually says that she loves that she gets to work 8-4 and not have to take work home and the holidays off.. I immediately thought of the Mumsnet teachers who all claim to do double that

Jesus, that's a really low bar. In my profession. Would you really be OK with 80% of your profession being just OK? Should they not try harder, to at least improve to "good" or "very good"? Christ! That would not wash anywhere else.

on Mumsnet it probably comes from the teachers that post being unsupportive of other people interested in becoming teachers. The responses to career advice are generally rude and crass.

One teacher that posted a few days ago said they’d rather nobody trained as new teachers, so the whole profession breaks down until the Government steps in. She didn’t care that education “was on its knees” and supported the shortage in teachers.

I personally found that attitude appalling. And I won’t lie - posters like that has change my perception of teachers (and will add to the teacher shortage!)

Thank you - this was exactly my experience. It still angers me now.

My friend says this also as she worked elsewhere before going into teaching. She says a lot of teachers went from school to Uni then back to School as a teacher so have never worked elsewhere and so have no comprehension of what other jobs are like. Not saying that teaching isn’t difficult but like you say other jobs come with pressures as well

In my original post, I did say that I DON'T think teaching is harder than other jobs. My question is to do with mumsnet more. As a pp said, they don't disclose that they are a teacher on threads. Obviously it's not relevant to do so quite often but if it was, that suggests that it's not 'safe' to do so on mumsnet because other posters use it as ammunition for an attack.

the rest of us carry on, mainly without complaint
😂😂😂😂

I haven't noticed on here but I sing in a chorus with four of them and they do go on and on about how hard they work, how difficult it is, how awful the kids are, how awful the parents etc etc.
It's as though they have no concept that other people too have difficult and challenging jobs.

I'm a lawyer by the way 😀

@OhReally18 In the nicest possible way, starting threads like this is part of the issue.

You’re drawing attention to the profession, sometimes hostile in your replies and hypersensitive to any criticism.

Using negative words like “attack” is similar to a journalist using sensationalism to draw attention to an article (in this case a thread)

Ok. Do you think, genuinely that the above remark is in any way representative of an entire profession?

This is what got to me to as it was my experience too of what the teachers sent out whilst also reading posts on mumsnet about hard it was for teachers as they were having to simultaneously teach the key worker children whilst teaching a full class online and their own kids. This just wasn’t what I saw in reality. Our reality was virtually no contact at all during the first lockdown, no online presence at all except for videos of teachers doing new hobbies and the teachers went in on a rota system about once every two weeks. I’m not saying the teachers should have done more but it was grinding then reading posts about how hard teachers had things. son has ehcp so was able to go in the 2nd lockdown

This just isn't true though is it? Most people at some point complain about their jobs I'm sure. Possibly public sector jobs more so? I know a cardiac nurse, a policeman and a fireman - they love a good moan about their jobs!

I think this thread proves the OP.
People queueing up to explain why teachers "deserve it".

Yes, sorry I was quoting someone else! I totally agree with you! I have a neighbour who is a civil servant and does nothing but moan!

Please just stop with the hypersensitivity to criticism, if it was a child you’d be teaching them resilience :)

@Maireas of course not but I could also say

“Do you think, genuinely that the above OP is in any way representative of an entire website?” (Only a small % of people on Mumsnet post about teachers!)

My sister is a teacher. She loves her job, as far as I know she's a good teacher. I visited this weekend. She has probably a 120ft length of fence in her garden, which, since I last saw it (becuase of lockdown) has turned a lovely pastel shade. She was saying she did it during lockdown and she regrets it now because she'll "never get that lovely block of time again" when it needs redoing.

I know she found lockdown hard, in that she had her own children's education to worry about, worried about the vulnerable children they weren't seeing as much as they should, her CEV husband, but she does own the fact that she had plenty of time on her hands when she was teaching from home mornings only and going into school once a fortnight!

I work in a special school and we were fully open, but it wasn't business as usual with many parents choosing to keep their childen away. In fact if we have a problem with staff currently, it's that they're finding it very difficult to get back to working full time.