Govt planning to screw over teachers again

[noblegiraffe]

The government have recommended to the independent pay review body (late, they missed the deadline) that teacher pay rises should be 'more sustainable' this year. They haven't suggested a figure but looking at budget this would be 1-2% (i.e. another below inflation pay-cut.)

In the meantime, their commitment to reduce teacher working hours by 5 hours per week has been a complete failure as teacher working hours have actually increased in the last year:

"The latest wave of the working lives of teachers and leaders survey shows full-time leaders’ average working week in 2023 was 58.2 hours – over 11 hours a day – up from 57.5 in 2022.
The survey polled more than 10,000 workers, and found full-time teachers’ average hours were 52.4 per week, up from 51.9 in 2022......Teachers and leaders’ job satisfaction has also plummeted. Only 46 per cent were satisfied “most of the time”, compared to 58 per cent last year.

At the same time, the number of teachers quitting is increasing, and recruitment is becoming an even bigger issue due to the lack of people starting a PGCE last September who should now be applying for jobs.

The government gearing up for another war with teachers is clearly something they see as a vote-winner in an election year.

However, many voters are parents and can see the impact of the state of education on their children's experience at school.

NEU and NASUWT are currently consulting members to see if they want another ballot for strike action.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/keegan-calls-for-return-to-more-sustainable-teacher-pay-rises/
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/heads-and-teachers-working-longer-despite-workload-push/

*if you don’t like it, leave, no one is begging you to stay.
A) they are leaving
B) we are begging them to stay

You'll soon be singing a different song when your precious child is struggling with maths being taught by a RE or music teacher and there is no chemistry teacher at all in the school and the class is being 'supervised' by an 18 year old gap year student
You are in primary right now. You have no idea what awaits you*

👏

The way to drastically improve teachers' workload is to reduce teaching time (more PPA). And that requires more teachers.

Or, the other alternative would be to cut down the amount of time kids are in school. Parents wouldn't be up for that, I expect. They might start to take a bit more notice of the conditions in schools though.

Exactly this!!

I'm not sure that increasing PPA time is a good thing.

There are many teachers who spend much of their class time away from their pupils eg subject leader time, SLT time, year leader time, mentoring time, as well as PPA time.

I once worked with a teacher, on a very high salary who barely spent half a week in the class and was constantly banging on about needing even more time out of class.
There weren't enough HLTAs to cover this time and it was too costly to provide agency supply teachers.
So it was left to the TA who got a few pence, literally, extra per hour.

I think Education needs a complete overhaul if too many staff take too much time out of class, too many children have behavioural issues, too many young teachers are leaving in their droves, and too many younger /less experienced teachers feel overworked, under remunerated, stressed and fed up.

It's a hierarchical structure that needs addressing as there are too many long serving teachers who know they can't progress as they're too expensive to work in a different school but somehow manage to blag so much non-contact time due to their longevity and ability to bag extra pay due to these 'responsibilities.'

Don't forget... they all rely on Twinkl and a pre printed bought in scheme for their planning.

There's a difference between PPA time and the time you're talking about though.

We're all entitled to a minimum of 10% PPA. I get considerably more "non contact time" because I have a whole school role.

All of my mentoring and leadership time is additional to that but doesn't take me away from my classes because I'm not allocated during that time. I do a lot of observations and I'm only able to do that in allocated time in very rare instances. Which is as it should be.

Primary is very different though.

Don't forget... they all rely on Twinkl and a pre printed bought in scheme for their planning.

So? Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Insistence that teachers do their own planning from scratch is absolutely toxic to the profession.

I sat through a meeting this week on rolling out a suicide prevention toolkit for secondary school teachers. That's another string to my bow.
The amount of responsibility being heaped onto teachers grows every year.
I'm just glad I'm not teaching primary - I don't fancy tooth brushing or toilet training again.

Yes, when I say increasing PPA time, I don't mean shoving a TA in front of the class to cover. This is secondary.

In primary I guess if you didn't want to increase PPA you could reduce class sizes.

You have to be joking right?!

Secondary school don’t use Twinkl for a start. When l was teaching we had 3 hours non contact out of a 25 hour week. The 25 hours didn’t include form time, so more like 26 1/2 hours.

3 hours to mark, assess, prepare lessons, understand SEND needs, mark coursework, make visual aids, understand exam specifications, do any training, deal with naughty kids, set detentions, sort out pastoral issues, phone parents. For about 500 kids a week. 1/2 of which go to different subjects every 1/2 term.

Heads of Departments got an extra hour.

Is this what you want for your secondary kids?

Teachers need a lot more preparation time. Is it France where they get half their time for this? England gets 3 hours. How can you say they don’t need more ppa time. You must be mad.

10% PPA time means you have 6 minutes to plan an hour lesson and do any marking resulting from it.

When you think of it in those terms, it's bloody ridiculous.

For all the 'but the private sector...' whingers, the private sector has had greater pay increases than the public sector recently, HTH.

We already regularly have non qualified, non graduates supervising classes. I teach in a shortage subject. Been teaching nearly 30 years. Love my job but workload horrendous. Behaviour deteriorating. Conditions shocking

But if you pro rata teachers salary for the weeks they actually work the pay is much higher!

Add to that, the golden pension, annual pay rise, sociable hours etc I think you'll find they would not be better off working at Tesco.

I left primary teaching over a decade ago, after teaching successfully at class teacher, middle management and SLT roles. I have carved out a (mostly)* successful career in a different sector and never looked back.

So, with the benefit of hindsight, the reasons why I left were:

1. Workload - the need to constantly plan and come up with new ideas quite literally sucked up my life energy. I never had a term-time weekend to rest and recuperate. By about eight years in I was finding it harder and harder to generate fresh ideas, fresh lessons. I was almost certainly heading for burnout. Once I left (after maternity leave) I experienced a creative and professional flourishing, accomplishing more than I had ever done before, despite being mum to a toddler.

2. Workload - aspects of the teaching system seemed actually intended to increase workload in pointless and unnecessary ways. Reports - my class reports Word document in my last-but-one year of teaching was thirty thousand words long. Homework- of very questionable value at primary. Subject leadership - there would never, ever be sufficient time to implement the improvement plans for each subject, so just why? Change - dear God, the relentless change! Display boards - so time-consuming and the children don’t even glance at them once they’ve been up for a day. Who are they for? But, funnily enough, it was a forty-minute staff-meeting discussion about KS1 sketchbooks, of all things, that finally made me lose the will to live.

3. Behaviour - a huge issue. Enough said already.

4. Lack of flexible working - I held a leadership role and was turned down for part-time hours after maternity leave. This was the final catalyst to me leaving teaching. Because all schools are separate organisations there was no sense that I could or should be retained within the teaching workforce, despite a huge teacher shortage. The same inner-London LA that had sent me on leadership courses was quite happy, nay oblivious, to the fact that I was effectively leaving teaching. I reached out to my ‘leadership mentor’ in the LA, but nada.

5. Restrictions on when you can take annual leave - I have never, ever missed the holidays as the ability have my weekends free of work and to take a day off, when I need it, is priceless.

Two factors that I perhaps didn’t appreciate enough about teaching:

1. Employability - you are relatively employable as a teacher. Whereas competition can be quite stiff in other sectors, especially as you get older. Redundancy is also a real risk elsewhere. *I am job-searching at the moment, hence that perspective.

2. The pension is brilliant - defined benefit schemes are mere pallid imitations of what you receive as a teacher!

God does anyone complain as much as teachers. They are paid more than nurses which is a much worse job and yet nurses don’t complain like this. It always sounds like teachers think they are the only people who do unpaid overtime

im going to apologise straight away and say that as soon as I pressed send , I realised that I was only talking about Primary Schools and I really should have said so.

My concerns are with Primary and no way reflect my opinions on Secondary teaching which I KNOW, is a completely different ball game entirely and has a very different structural set up as well . KS3/4/5 requires considerably more time re lesson planning, marking, monitoring etc… and I’m actually wondering if secondary education should actually be treated more favourably than primary. Contentious I know but planning for a Yr1 literacy lesson has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on planning for a GCSE literacy class.
Similarly , behaviour management at KS1 level is nothing like BM at KS4.

There are schemes around to help convert TAs ( with poor GCSE grades) into Primary teachers. I’m pretty sure this can’t happen at Secondary level.

Well given all that we must be staggering under a deluge of teacher training applications...

"sociable hours" 😂

Sounds like you're happy for your kid to not have a teacher.

Which is an odd position to be taking, really.

I think there are a few issues here.

Firstly, teachers work so many extra hours outside the classroom (and yes, I appreciate that other professionals do to) and I think it's only right thag their salary reflects this. In addition to this, the cost of becoming a teacher is also a lot - uni, PGCE, some with a Masters etc. I'd almost forgotten- lots of teachers have to buy resources for the classroom, snacks for the children etc - why should this come out of their pockets? Doctors don't have to buy medicine etc...I don't see why teachers should have to use their own money to do their job.

Secondly, the workload is ridiculous. I obviously expect to work additional hours to the typical school day...but it shouldn't be as much as it is. Especially as a lot of what's requested/required isn't needed. I'd prefer the workload be reduced rather than a pay rise tbh (maybe 1 full day PPA a week would make a difference?!)

Thirdly, schools are being ridiculously underfunded which is having a major impact in so many ways.

The Government really need to think about the future of education and the way they want to play this...I feel society has really declined in the last 15 years or so and without a proper education, it'll get a whole lot worse! Not only that, future generations will be less skilled and qualified, leading to an increase in those not working/replying on benefits etc.

Teaching is a tough job, even just at the minimum. There are a lot of amazing teachers who do wonderful work.
I work supply. The teachers give me detailed lesson plans so I cover anything from Year 7 Art to Year 11 Further Maths. Where the kids respect the instructions they get continuity of learning.
It does wrankle a little when I see posters talking us subs down - many are actually qualified teachers. I'm not, because i'm a professional from another industry. I looked at training as a teacher and it didn't add up - the workload plus the course fees.
The organisation of cover could be better - I've had classes tell me they had different subs for each lesson, when just having the same unqualified teacher would at least give them continuity, and that would then make life easier for the qualified teacher/ head of department who sets and marks the work.

This is a massive problem. I teach. I estimate 50% of the new teachers coming through have got terrible subject and general knowledge. The entry requirements are now so low to accommodate the lack of interest in teaching as a career, that educational standards are absolutely being affected.

The emails and displays I see with awful spelling and punctuation is extremely worrying. I am literally teaching some student/new teachers about continents and basic geography.

I’ll be leaving soon. I know I’m a good teacher but this is really not worth it. I am run ragged with the systemic demise of the public sector. I have kids with so much need that get no support from the health service or social services. The threshold for support is so high, that I genuinely worry about what the country will look like in 20 years unless some of these children get help soon.

I have other qualifications, so I will go back to my industry role and probably get a job that pays another 50% of my current salary.

I will vote for strike action, not on the basis of salary, but because the education sector is an absolute car crash.

They also fail to mention the pension for Teachers..increasing to 28.68% from April!!! Way ahead of private sector...

The emails and displays I see with awful spelling and punctuation is extremely worrying

Yep!

I sadly agree with this too.

My concerns are with Primary and no way reflect my opinions on Secondary teaching which I KNOW, is a completely different ball game entirely and has a very different structural set up as well . KS3/4/5 requires considerably more time re lesson planning, marking, monitoring etc… and I’m actually wondering if secondary education should actually be treated more favourably than primary. Contentious I know but planning for a Yr1 literacy lesson has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on planning for a GCSE literacy class.

I've been teaching secondary English for more than 20 years. Teaching a child to read and write is way harder than what I do.