Teachers balloting for strike action - school closures

[noblegiraffe]

A pre-ballot poll from the NEU suggests that the ballot will be in favour.

The NASUWT have announced that their ballot will open around 27th October in England, Scotland and Wales, and will close on 9th January, I assume that the NEU will be doing similar and it would be joint action.

Strike action would mean school closures around Jan/Feb time and obviously this will impact parents who need to start thinking about arrangements for this eventuality. Please consider emailing your MP asking them to forward any concerns about this to Kit Malthouse, Secretary of State for Education, as any pressure on him from parents to avert strike action by entering pay negotiations would be highly welcome.

The current pay offer of 5% for most teachers is unfunded, meaning that it has to come out of current school budgets. This means that the pay rise will result in cuts to education provision for your children. However, this offer is after over a decade of real terms pay cuts for teachers and with inflation at 10%, teachers cannot afford more pay cuts and to continue to shoulder the burden of government financial incompetence and deliberate running into the ground of public services any longer.

The unions are asking for an above inflation fully funded pay rise for teachers. A teacher pay rise, any teacher pay rise, cannot come out of current school budgets as this will mean a lower quality of education for your children. This could involve even bigger class sizes, even fewer courses on offer, even less provision for SEN children, fewer school trips and extra curricular activities.

School funding has been devastated by the Tory government over the last 12 years. SEN funding has been cut: the impact falls on schools and teachers to deal with. CAMHS funding has been cut: the impact falls on schools and teachers to deal with. Schools are being asked to solve more and more of society's issues, with fewer and fewer resources. It's unsustainable.

People will tell you that teachers are well paid and don't deserve a pay rise. However, we have a critical shortage of teachers, and the obvious conclusion is that if we can't get teachers for the pay that is on offer, then the pay is not enough. Market forces, right?

The government know the impact of increasing pay to attract and keep teachers; they have, this week, announced a big increase to the teacher training bursaries in response to the truly dire and alarming numbers of applicants to teacher training this year. They have also introduced early career payments in shortage areas. They have yet to extend this logic to increasing teacher pay to retain more experienced teachers - the ones who are crucial in training and supporting the new and early career teachers.

I'm not suggesting in the slightest that teachers are more deserving than other workers, or that we have it harder than other workers. If you have also not had a pay rise in years, that's unacceptable. If you are balloting for strike action, or undertaking strike action to try to improve your working conditions, then all power and support to you. I really hope that school support staff join us in taking action.

This government is ruining the country. I think everyone can see that now. Instead of proposing increases to public funding, they are proposing further cuts. But we've already cut everything.

They'll claim there is no money, but then propose tax cuts for the best off. They'll reject windfall taxes even when Shell is asking for them. They'll claim that higher wages will increase inflation so they can't possibly increase wages, while talking about how important it is to move to a higher wage economy. Not higher wages for the ordinary worker though, they mean the ones already on high wages. The ones who would have benefited from the 45p tax rate cut that they've already had to u-turn on.

The DfE have said that strike will damage the education of children, that they can't afford to miss out on more school. Teachers, if they vote to strike, will be voting for better education. We want a qualified, decent teacher in front of every class. This is absolutely not happening at the moment, and will not have a chance of happening unless teacher pay and conditions improve.

TLDR: Support teachers; the government are self-interested, public service destroying, incompetent shitheads.

So what? They are still a huge problem that needs to be dealt with.

Take away the opportunity for teachers to work a day here, a day there, with no additional responsibilities for planning and marking, when they feel like it, and you will presumably find the demand for permanent jobs increases dramatically.

@EYProvider I was about to ask if you could think WHY schools are having to use agency staff…. But @Postapocalypticcowgirl has answered. Obviously schools don’t want to use agency staff but many have no choice….

Yes, and also there's the issue that some ECHP students need someone with specialist training. If no-one with that training is available, e.g. due to staff sickness they simply can't come to school.

That's ridiculously unfair.

That said, I'm amazed we can ever find any TAs to take on the responsibility for the level of pay they get.

Take away the opportunity for teachers to work a day here, a day there, with no additional responsibilities for planning and marking, when they feel like it, and you will presumably find the demand for permanent jobs increases dramatically.

This is a particularly idiotic suggestion, if you think supply teaching is somehow a 'doss' form of teaching.

Yes, I get that. But the prices charged by agencies are crippling school budgets (in London, anyway).

The government needs to have its own agency where fees are not 100% of the daily rate.

I support teachers voting to strike. I've worked in schools and now outside of school but still with young people

The issue which we are seeing with trains, post and when teachers and nurses strike. The government don't care that it affects the ordinary people, so will be quite happy to let them strike to then say look who is causing all this mess. The government can hold out much longer than everyone else since it doesn't directly affect the majority of them....

I know for a fact it is.

Take away the opportunity for teachers to work a day here, a day there, with no additional responsibilities for planning and marking, when they feel like it, and you will presumably find the demand for permanent jobs increases dramatically.

I assume you're based in London from your posts. In the Midlands we can't get supply for love nor money. Even general cover to babysit a class, never mind a subject specialist.

Supply is far from a doss. In a lot of cases it's daily abuse, shit money, no job satisfaction and last minute work.

Supply is far from a doss. In a lot of cases it's daily abuse, shit money, no job satisfaction and last minute work.

Exactly.

I do like the idea of sending kids home whenever there isn't a qualified teacher to take their class though. That would make parents realise pretty sharpish how bad things are.

Yes, I do think it’s probably different in London.

Here, there are literally hundreds of agencies and teachers choose to work for them to avoid additional responsibilities. A teacher is paid approximately £120 a day by the agency. However, the fee to the school is £240 a day. The agency makes 100% for each booking.

The government needs to get this under control, even if it isn’t an issue in an East Midlands or Scottish village school.

I do like the idea of sending kids home whenever there isn't a qualified teacher to take their class though. That would make parents realise pretty sharpish how bad things are

It's what they do in Germany. It would certainly focus some minds.

We use three or four ex colleagues as supply. However, they do not wnat to do long term contracts where they are working full time and are responsible for planning and marking. They will do the odd day or two. I foresee real difficulties when staff resign mid year as there are few candidates for the roles.

Employee contributions to the teachers' pension scheme are between 7.4% and 11.7% now. Also many teachers have 2 student loan payments - 1 for undergraduate degree and 1 for PGCE

🤣🤣🤣 OR they could pay teachers enough and fund schools properly to fulfil posts so they wouldn’t need to find their own supply teaching agency…

EYProvider
The teacher’s contribution is between 7 and 9%, which is entirely reasonable (and normal).

It is more than this for teachers at the top of pay scale.

The letter I got from the EIS with my ballot had the 23rd November as a day of unified National action with other potentially localised actions up to the end of May/ the start of the exam season.

Last year, I'm pretty sure the school I was working at had about 10 vacancies at Easter. They managed to recruit 2 staff. They tried to recruit for some of those vacancies as a January start and didn't get anyone.

I know at least one school locally recruits for certain roles every summer because they know if they lose someone mid year, they won't be able to replace them.

I don't think of all teachers were on strike this was possible.

Mainly because if you have 2 TAs in a class both covering 1:1 EHCP you can't have one of them teaching instead.

Plus if a class is usually has 2/3 staff members with a teacher in charge it's nots fair and I'd argue H and S to just have 2 TAs instead.

There's one TA in each class, and we all cover PPA and teacher absences on our own. So, potentially, the school could stay open, but I hope not.

And this is what's wrong with the current system.

TAs are expected to teach a class with less support than a qualified teacher.

For half the pay.

We are continuing to see the effect of budget cuts on leadership/Headteacher roles too. Who wants to be responsible and accountable to all stakeholders for children’s outcomes, when the financial cuts are impacting on staffing and resourcing. An inadequate OFSTED judgement is publically humiliating and in most cases career ending.

We are struggling to recruit heafteachers. Numerous schools with interim and shared arrangements, numerous good schools who are on their third round of adverts to attract a new headteacher, being unable to recruit in the first two rounds.
I've never known headteacher recruitment be so difficult.

I’m fairly sure you can refuse to do the job of someone who’s striking. TA’s shouldn’t cover teachers’ classes.

NEU has confirmed they are going to ballot support staff. I'd expect strikes to be co-ordinated. So if you're concerned, the obvious answer is to join the NEU! But equally unless no support staff are members, or they don't reach the threshold to strike (unlikely, given indicative ballot results), it's unlikely every TA would be at work.

It also relies, presumably, on no TAs being unwell on any strike days, which is a bit of a risk!

I also think if you refused to cover a striking worker, even if cover is part of your normal duties, you would have legal protection (obviously confirm this with your union). I've seen a cover supervisor refuse to cover striking teachers in the past, and this was allowed, as they were a member of a different union.

Your school leadership may also be members of NEU or NASUWT- not all join the unions specific to heads! If they're not in, and other teachers aren't in, presumably you'd have no safeguarding leads in, so couldn't open.

I've never known headteacher recruitment be so difficult.

Yes, and heads are being balloted for strike action over pay too. And yet earlier in this thread someone was saying that if we cut SLT pay, we could pay teachers more.

The argument is obviously, if we can't recruit for the money we're offering, we have to offer more. And that goes for headteachers too, even if people think they are well paid.

God knows who'd want to be a headteacher right now, they have been treated so badly by the government. That the unfunded nature of the 5% pay rise has basically been handed to them by the government to sort out and cut budgets to accommodate after school budgets were set for September is just another example.

This is another really valid point. Being a head is really difficult, and with shrinking budgets you're often stuck between a rock and a hard place. I've also heard it's more and more difficult to get a good head. And I do think a good head makes the school.

It also means we're seeing people who are very early in their teaching careers get promoted to leadership. I know some will say there are pros and cons to this, but it concerns me.