6500 extra teachers....

[noblegiraffe]

This was one of Labour's main headline pledges. They were a bit vague on the details - is this 6500 more than the amount of teachers that are currently needed, or 6500 more than the Tories managed to recruit, which was well below the amount currently needed? I don't know.

Anyway, where are we at?
Teachers were awarded a 5.5% pay rise as recommended - good.
Ofsted single word judgements scrapped immediately - good.
PPA can now be taken from home - meh, maybe good for primary
Performance related pay scrapped -good

The situation:
Teacher trainee recruitment targets were massively missed again for this September so schools will continue to have unfilled vacancies next September.

The projected fall in pupil numbers due to decreasing birth rates won't be as big as expected so more primary teachers will be needed (and this will impact school funding as fewer pupils meant there was going to be potentially spare cash in the system).

Potentially more pupils in the state system from private could be balanced out by returning private teachers to state schools. That will take some time to shake out.

PGCE mentors are now expected to do 20 hours of training this year to be a mentor, and lead mentors 30 hours, regardless of how experienced they are. This is putting people off being mentors so PGCE providers are struggling to find placements for what few trainees they have.

Workload for teachers is increasing due to lack of funding, and lack of teachers, so they have less time to devote to training teachers. The lack of experienced teachers available to train them is also a problem. At the same time, the demands of training new teachers on schools has increased (e.g. the NQT year is now two years of support and reduced timetable and schools also need to provide PGCE students with 4 extra weeks of intensive training and practice).

This is an extremely urgent issue, and a key government pledge, so why all the airtime about anything to do with education is being taken up with bloody VAT is beyond me.

The impact of the lack of teachers in the system is huge. Inability to recruit teachers means kids have supply and cover teachers which affects their learning, but also their behaviour across the school as they become disaffected in those subjects. Experienced teachers are not only having to plan lessons for the supply teachers and sometimes mark for them too, they are having to pick up the pieces and fill in the gaps when they teach the classes the next year. Heads of Department are spending huge amounts of time fielding legitimate complaints about the quality of teaching. Advertising for positions that cannot be filled is expensive.

What do Labour need to do to turn this around?

The pp asked about final salary pensions. The teacher pension is no longer final salary and hasn’t been for years.

Using your free time wisely @noblegiraffe

I'll rephrase. Is it a defined benefit scheme? ie: is it a guaranteed income for the rest of your life, regardless of how much that costs to the state, and regardless of how much you paid in? Calculated not on final salary but on an average of your working life salary (a small change in comparison to the difference between a defined contribution and a defined benefit scheme).

Defined benefits civil service pensions are crippling the tax payer. Reform that and there'd be so much more to go round for teachers, resources, mental healthcare, social support schemes like restart etc.

Using your free time wisely

Same as you?

Look to the private schools if you want to see what happens if you try to mess around with teacher pensions.

About 85% of my pension is final salary, the rest is averaged out over the 40 years that I worked. It changed in the last few years before I retired.

Thank you Rachel. And 100% of the value of it is guaranteed (underwritten by the taxpayer) for the rest of your life.

That is an astronomically generous benefit for a financially struggling country.

It is what it is. People do jobs for different reasons - I chose teaching because it had long holidays and a generous pension (joking)

Oh, and just to annoy you even further, I got a very large tax free lump sum 😆

But if you stop the benefit continuing from today, the existing liabilities still have to be paid. Its an unfunded scheme. The current employee and employer contributions just go into the melting pot to cover current payments, with a top up from general taxation.

if you go to a normal pension scheme, the employee and employer contribution will go in thier own special pot just for them not to offsetting what's being paid out like now.
Short term it would cost more. I can't work out at what point it woukd cost less.

Well exactly. If we are going to change things going forwards, perhaps we need to look at the retirement age and benefits of people who work 39 out of 52 weeks a year all their working lives, versus what the taxpayers in the private sector come out with. (Clue, no guarantee of final pension value, far later expectation of retirement and 30-40 years of working an additional 2 months every year).

Many, arguably most jobs are hard. Many jobs have periods of intensity, high pressure and long hours. Very few of those jobs also come with a massive pension and 13 weeks holidays a year.

Compare a year in the life of a nurse to one as a teacher.

But rather irrelevant when discussing recruitment and retention of current teachers as final salary pensions don’t apply. Unless you are proposing bringing them back?

There’s a massive recruitment and retention crisis. Logic (and capitalism) will tell you that whatever your opinion of the pay, terms and conditions the6 aren’t good enough yet to attract a sufficient workforce.

@Frowningprovidence I'm afraid I don't understand your point. Are you saying because the state has committed to these defined benefit schemes up to now it needs to do so forever? Because.... it's very pricey anyway...?!

Because if you look what has happened when private schools have withdrawn from the TPS the result has been strikes and teachers leaving.

The idea is to recruit more teachers.

@cardibach

That's because it's not pay and benefits that need to change.

And the stuff that needs to change costs money.

So where will that money come from?

Will you work more/receive less in order to pay for better conditions?

Yes. The very idea of losing a defined contribution pension causes strikes.

Teachers are not good at accepting change. Even when it would pay for a greater good overall.

Are you a teacher? It’s not just pay and benefits, no, but the pension was us3d for most of my career to justify lower pay rises. It definitely matters.
If you want to recruit more teachers (and stop others leaving) you can’t ask for more work or give worse pay/pension. How will that persuade people? When pay in the financial sector is discussed we are always told they need massive pay to attract them. Well, it’s not massive pay teachers are after - but if you want to attract/keep more of them you certainly can’t erode pay and conditions further.
Do you accept that?

Our private school revealed that its contributions to the TPS were going up from something like 26 to over 29%. That's completely unrealistic for any private business but Jonny taxpayer just sucks it up then wonders why there's no money to expand the teaching workforce.

How would it pay for greater good overall for a teacher?

I'm saying it will increase costs to change in the mid term. The mid term could be 30 years. I dont know. I haven't got time to work out the maths.

It's very hard to get a government to increase costs for the entirety of its term and beyond. Governments are short term. If there is no money now, saying let's make teachers conditions worse and spend more to achieve this is quite a tough stance to take. Especially on the back drop of wanting more teachers.

I'm in favour of abolishing all defined benefits pensions. The country can't afford them.

Much like the 'even playing field' arguments we see around private/grammar schooling - I'd like to see a financially even playing field for retirees - and therefore a fairer deal for the beleaguered taxpayer barely able to make ends meet whilst propping them all up.

You don’t seem to understand the issues here. The pay and conditions are not good enough to attract enough teachers. For some, in easier working environments, the pay isn’t the issue but the pension is. It’s not because teachers ‘aren’t good at accepting change’ at all. We’ve accepted and absorbed change after change in exams, teaching methods, inspections and in and on. But if you want more teachers you can’t mess with pay and conditions in a way that impacts them negatively.

You can’t have a financially equal playing field for all pensioners when some fields attract higher salaries than others and therefore allow more to be saved for retirement (whether that’s in a pension or whatever). Many teachers would have earned more if they had done something other than teach. Remove the defined benefit pensi9ns if you like, but them you’ll have to pay more throughout a teacher’s working life or they’ll do something else.

And actually , @LaurenOrda , the country can afford them. This from the Telegraph but the information is widely available.

@cardibach differences in salaries is normal in a capitalist society.

What is unfair and financially unsustainable is state sector employees having high guaranteed income pension scenes inaccessible by everyone else yet funded by everyone else. Massive inequality.

@cardibach LOL.

Do you know what UK GDP is and what 2% of it is? Perhaps you can google that too.

It is in the TENS of BILLIONS. Every year. Solely for public sector retirees.

It’s exactly what many private sector businesses have done; scrapped defined benefit benefit schemes in favour of higher basic pay. Some organisations offered existing staff a 15% pay rise to withdraw from the defined benefit scheme for example.