to ask why, if you think a job is so cushy, you don't actually do it?

[Serendippy]

Genuine question, although guaranteed to rile a number of you

This comes mostly from the comments about teachers/childminders. Funnily enough, I have never once heard anyone say, 'God, I paid my callout plumber a fortune, I wish I had his job'. Is this because most of us do not have any idea about plumbing? But it seems that most think they know about educating a child, so why not do it? Especially now you are given money to train asa teacher and if you already have a degree, it only takes a 9 month course to qualify? I appreciate that if you have no qualifications in place already, becoming a teacher would involve a long time on no income training, but if you would only have to do 9 months and then get loadsa money for sitting kids in front of DVDs, leaving work at 3 and swanning off on holiday for 13 weeks a year, why don't you? Same goes for childminding, if it is so easy to mind other people's children and at the same time you would save on childcare for your own, why don't you do it?

Right, who wants to throw the first punch?

i am currently finding myself v excited that i may be getting a job to cover mat. leave for 4 months, so obviously i enjoy teaching.

i don't think you can look at the maximum salary & assume everyone earns it. there also seems to be a tendency to look at the min. requirement & assume that no-one has better than that.

teaching keeps getting compared with police, nurses, midwives, even accountants. none of those jobs require a degree to enter at the lowest level, but teaching does.

i'm a bit of a dinosaur, but it took me over 5 years to get paid 20k. (ok, that was a while ago) also, when i left my last job, i was just on 35k, after 12 years' teaching, and with a HoD and other responsibility allowances. go, on, ask me if i got given the full entitlement to non-teaching time? that would be a no. i also had industry experience, and youth work experience & qualifications, none of which counted as 'relevant' to get me any extra pay when i started.

i think teaching (and other caring careers) rely on a lot of goodwill, because we're all there for 'the cause'.

i would love teaching employment strategies to have an overhaul, to be more in line with business. the interview process is archaic & ridiculous, the attitude that this is your 'calling' and you should want to give up your holidays, rather than have a business arrangement, the idea that even bad teachers should be protected etc. i think the unions are as much to blame as the schools/leas in resisting change.

here's something i never once said out loud in school - i would LOVE teachers to have less job security. they should have to prove their worth (not be superteachers, but to meet a certain minimum). i would also love to see that teachers get paid more according to their achievements than just on a set scale.

it's when you reach the top of the pay scale, and realise that that is it, for the next 30 years. you can get no further without a lot of extra responsibility, that it gets frustrating. friends of mine who worked in the nhs (who didn't need a degree to enter their jobs) had a higher earning potential. there are a very few 'superheads' who get high salaries, but for the 'standard' teacher, you v quickly reach the top of the pay scale, and have no-where to go, unless you want to keep moving schools & house etc to move one step up the ladder.

i'm trying to think of other careers which require a degree as the min. entry that 'cap' people so quickly - a good teacher can reach stagnant point within a few years.

i don't by any means think that teaching is the most stressful job, but i think a lot of people are blind to some of the things that really go on. i've lost count of the number of times i've been talking to parent A, knowing that i can't explain properly to them why child B is still in school, because i have to protect child B. those situations trouble me, i never got used to dealing with child protection issues, but for obvious reasons, that info is on a 'need to know' basis so it's not generally known about.

the true numbers of child protection etc are one of those great 'unknown unknowns', but within teaching there is a much higher awareness than ever gets onto any official stat.s

oops - sorry for sucha long post - i seem to be doing that this morning.

cannot say for every school. The school in which I am involvedin recruitment has not, too my knowledge, recruited anyone who has less than a 2:1 in their subject specialism.

that's odd...the head of humanities at my school (a recognised 'highly achieving' one) had a dip Ed and no degree. (obv, he's been at it a while!) which presumably was a normal entry route into teaching when he started in the 1980's - is it in effect discriminating in favour of younger teachers?

bearing in mind that curently 60% of 330000 graduates get a 2:1 or 1st, when it was 50% of 270000 graduates ten years ago......

i note our local private school shows where their teaching staff did their degrees, rather than the classification.

edgar - when i was at school & getting careers advice, in the 80s, we were told all teachers had to have a degree, i thought other routes in faded out in the 70s. i've only ever come across one teacher in that situation, and she started teaching well before the 80s, is in fact retired now. all other teachers i worked with had a degree.

unless it's a private school - they can do what they like.

re: employment processes -

i think, having seen employment prcesses in a variety of companies, whichever prodecure they go through, what happens is the recruiters pick people who are in some way like them.

every time.

well, he would have been a new teacher in 1980 (and that is at a state school) - by the nineties yes it was definite that it was a degree .....but teaching colleges still existed prior to 1992, did they not?

man the nternet is so crap when you want information about anything that happened prior to about 2001.

Islandhopper the London weighting gives a huge boost!

My pay is bang on the payscales for outside London at my level of teaching and is sadly not £35k even with my TLR (which are variable depending on subject)