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.

Have you considered moving from teaching into a job that pays more rather than simply complaining?

That would leave my classes without a maths teacher, including exam classes. When teachers have left mid-year before they have then spent the rest of the year with a string of supply teachers. One of my current classes had 5 maths teachers last year.

Have you got kids in secondary state education? If so, I hope you would be more hesitant to tell all their teachers to quit and earn more elsewhere, and that you might consider that there is some value to them staying in teaching.

@forgotoldusername Have you missed the point that the payrise is unfunded so it means schools will have to make even more cuts? Do you have children? Do you want them to have well qualified professional teachers in 5 years time? Do you want schools to be able to support children with SEN? Do you want schools to have resources to fund teaching in subjects such as music and DT?

You've just made her point for her. Of course they probably have because for the same hours and significantly less responsibility they can work in a job which pays the same. I would get the same pay doing 12 hour shifts on a checkout in Aldi. And teachers will frequently work a 12 hour day.

You want a decent public sector then you need to value that service and pay the highly trained professionals to do the job.

@noblegiraffe one child left at boarding school and I don't think independent school teachers strike thankfully.

I'm not after your sympathy, but I would offer you solidarity if you went on strike. If you're not willing to do that, presumably you're actually happy with your pay and working conditions, so the comparison isn't valid.

I disagree that paying all public sector workers a decent wage would bankrupt the country- doctors and nurses 100% deserve a pay rise, and I will support them when they strike too. We could easily fund it- raising things like capital gains tax, or as I suggested previously, taxing those with second properties, closing the loopholes that allow a lot of people in this country to evade tax, and so on. There was a huge amount of money to waste on dodgy contracts during the pandemic, too.

If I worked in the private sector still, I'd have a lot more freedom to negotiate my wage, and if I was unhappy with my pay, I'd move jobs.

Within teaching, pay scales are pretty standard, and negotiation is rare, so it has to be done on a national level. I've already moved jobs twice in a relatively short teaching career- each time to areas with a lower cost of living (although that wasn't the only factor in my decision to move schools) and to schools which I believed would offer me better working conditions. But, despite having skills which are demonstrably in a shortage in my local area, there's no real scope to negotiate on pay.

Therefore, negotiations happen at a national level.

I know people who teach really in demand subjects who are leaving the profession over pay. They can earn better elsewhere, and as a young single person teaching in e.g. the M4 corridor, the lower end of the pay scale isn't enough to give decent quality of life. Teaching is a stressful job, so people think, why bother.

The alternative is that people chase promotions early in their career, but that still leaves gaps in the classroom, and I don't think inexperienced middle leaders, or worse SLT are great for the kids.

I believe classroom teachers should be valued, because I believe high quality education is important, and I'm willing to fight for that. I also don't think I'm obliged to accept low pay because other people in other professions choose to do so.

They absolutely do, they just aren't involved in this pay dispute because it doesn't impact them- independent schools set their own pay scales.

one child left at boarding school and I don't think independent school teachers strike thankfully.

Ah yes, another one who can dismiss concerns because they have no skin in the game.

You're wrong about independent school teachers not striking by the way, there have been plenty of indie school strikes recently over leaving the TPS.

My DH fully expects to strike.

You are aware that actually a lot of teachers are taking this option? They are leaving the profession entirely, for jobs that pay better. Long term, if things continue as they are, there simply won't be qualified maths teachers, physics teachers, language teachers etc in some (many?) state schools. Which has a massively detrimental impact on the country, but never mind, eh- as long as you can buy your way out of the system...

The teachers who are staying in the profession and striking are doing so because we care about the state of education, and we don't want to just walk away.

www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/private-school-pension-deal-ends-strike?amp

Hope this helps clarify some of the misinformation you seem to be spouting….

I'm not sure someone who has children at boarding school talking about extended skiing holidays can really contribute much to a thread about people who live in an entirely different world.

Why don’t you retrain as a teacher? You’d love it - great money, loads of holidays

@MrsHerculePoirot apologies I was wrong. My child is not in a GDST school (those are day schools, and my child is at boarding). I can't remember any strike at my children's school (oldest 24 youngest 16, all privately educated so no experience of state schools) but I might have forgotten

if you have no experience of state schools then you won't appreciate how cut back budgets have been in recent years. For me this isn't about whether the pay rise for teachers is 5% or 10%, it is that the payrise needs to be funded with new money as otherwise there will be staffing cuts, reduced SEN support and educational options, or just unfilled vacancies.

I suspect that’s because they are not chronically underfunded and staff paid appropriately as they don’t follow the national payscales for state school teachers…. When you have parents paying ££££££££ turns out it makes quite the difference. Who’d have thought? 🙄

You didn't specify that it had to be boarding or 'famous'. You just said independent. He teaches at a eel regarded private school (it no longer has boarders but did once). The private sector is on its knees, financially, post covid, you know. They are employing multiple tactics to stop paying all their loyal, wonderful staff more money. Presumably you want good recruitment and retention in the private sector, too.

All these people talking about the private sector- when I worked in the private sector, it was pretty normal to negotiate pay at interview, and also to negotiate your yearly pay rise a bit, if you had a good appraisal, or if you had a job offer elsewhere, but really wanted to stay at your current company.

This is much, much, rarer in teaching. I do know a few physics teachers who negotiated starting on M2, and I do know a few people who have negotiated a "double jump" on the pay scales. But once you hit UPS3, there's nowhere to go, unless you take on a specific duty which comes with a TLR, which usually, these days, takes you out of the classroom.

I can't, for example, get a new job, and negotiate a salary that's, say 10% higher. If I'm on M6, but don't meet the UPS threshold, I can't negotiate a 5% pay increase anyway. None of that exists within teaching in the vast majority of state schools.

Schools in cities with high costs of living (apart from London) aren't allowed to pay more in order to attract staff. Schools can't offer teachers with skills they are desperate for extra money, really- particularly if it's an experienced teacher on the top of the classroom pay scale. (I do actually know a local FE college that does this for certain subjects, but they're governed by different rules around pay).

Perhaps teaching salaries should work more like this. You'd see maths teachers being paid a lot more than history teachers, and PE teachers, for example, and that would lead to resentment, but it might help recruit in shortage subjects.

However, this would be a huge change to education, so I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon. Therefore, industrial action is the only recourse teachers, especially teachers at the top of the pay scale have, in terms of getting a pay rise.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you think the benefits of a teaching job are. The reality is that they are simply not enough to attract graduates in certain subjects, or to retain these graduates in the profession.

@Postapocalypticcowgirl ‘If I worked in the private sector still, I'd have a lot more freedom to negotiate my wage, and if I was unhappy with my pay, I'd move jobs’

Simply not true. The only real opportunity for negotiation is when you first start in a company. And simply moving jobs isn’t as simple as you make out when you have a house, kids in school and no other employers in your sector nearby. I could say the same about teaching that if I was unhappy with the pay I’d move jobs

BTW, I don't really care about private schools, I actually think they should be abolished.

But I do think it's naive to think poor recruitment and retention across teaching as a whole has no impact on private schools.

If I was paying a significant chunk of money for my child to be educated, I would 100% want experienced, subject specialists with a teaching qualification. I know not everyone values all of those things, but I would think most people value at least one of them.

If less people are starting PGCEs, then there's less qualified teachers. That could make it hard to recruit for private schools, or maybe they have to offer more money, pushing up fees.

If less people stay in teaching, then there are less experienced teachers about to recruit from. Maybe schools have to accept someone who's not as high calibre, or as experienced as they'd usually employ.

If there's not a qualified physics teacher, but they need one, because an existing one has retired, even a well regarded boarding school can't magic one out of thin air.

The private sector is facing huge recruitment challenges too. And guess where they are now poaching all their staff from?

12 teachers from my (sate) school have left in the last two years to work in two private schools. They are literally poaching our teachers. The big lure is time , as it goes, along with longer holidays, smaller classes and promises (often unfounded) of impeccable behaviour..

I love the "if you aren't happy just LEAVE" people. My absolutely favourite kind of idiot.

What do you think happens when the teachers leave? Nurses leave? Paramedics leave? Posties leave? Rail support staff leave? Firemen leave?
So desperate to sneer at people fighting for better conditions, but what happens in the future?
The people that leave due to poor conditions and dismal wages or burnout can't just be replaced. Hence the massive shortage in nurse numbers, and how is that knock on effect working out for everyone.

I assume that the eventual plan is to have one remote teacher delivering lessons to multiple classes and schools and have a TA or similar there just for supervision purposes. Surely that's the government's aim for state schools. Paying teachers is just an inconvenience for them.

It was my experience of the private sector, but equally I was young and happy to move around the country for work if I needed to. I also had skills and experience which made me pretty employable. I teach because I choose to, but if it ever reaches the point where it's no longer financially viable for me, I will leave.

Presumably you want your kids to have, idk, science teachers? How would you feel if they all left, to work in the private sector, doing something else. Most science teachers do have the skills to do that- it's one of the reasons why science as a whole is a hard subject to recruit for.

Or what about maths teachers, or DT, or languages, or any other of a number of shortage subjects....

This is what's happening right now. It really is getting harder and harder to recruit. This September, there were schools up and down the country with unfilled vacancies, and given the poor recruitment onto training courses, that is only going to get worse.

And that's why I think we need to strike. Not for my own personal gain, although obviously I'd gain from it- but because I think state education as a whole has reached a really dangerous tipping point. Either we improve working conditions for teachers, dramatically, and soon, or we accept a significantly lower standard of education for young people nationally.

For me, the latter isn't something I want to accept. Hence being in support of striking.

I honestly think the current plan is unqualified teachers delivering lessons from a national bank of resources such as oak academy. It will save them a lot of money, and they believe as long as the children are babysat, parents won't care.

It's a terrible plan, long term- because then where do we find young people with the skills to work in professions such as healthcare or engineering (just to give two examples)? Some children might be able to learn subject knowledge this way, although a lot will perform more poorly. But they won't get the chance to develop practical skills, and they won't get extracurricular experiences. So they will go to uni starting at a much lower skill level, and unless they spend a lot longer in uni, they simply won't achieve the same level of technical competence.

It's also just not as inspiring, or engaging, and it would turn a lot of young people off education entirely.