teaching drove my mum to several nervous breakdowns. She now works in the even more scary voluntary sector. Her pension is non-existent. She will be surviving on my fathers' rather more generous university pension.
i really do wonder how any of the workers of the future will survive old age. The public sector must, it seems, be deprived in old age to match the deprivation they undoubtedly face during their working years. Don't tell me that a person with the responsibilities and level of education a teacher has, in a decent private company, would be earning as little as they often do.
I know whereof I speak because I'm a university lecturer who used to be a (gasp) banker. Yeah, I've beaten myself up already about that one- and left :D. I hated it but kept getting promoted anyway. If I'd carried on being a hideous capitalist fat cat and participated in the destruction of the UK, I would probably have been on a six figure salary by now and had a pension at least 6 times the size I'll be receiving from the universities pension scheme. That's if we end up with one at all, which at the current rate of decline looks fairly unlikely.
incidentally I work harder as a lecturer than I ever did in the banks where people mostly churned out excel spreadsheets all day and got on the phone a lot to look important. Public servants serve because they want to serve, yes, but they already took the hit in terms of lower pay.
Worse conditions down the line will mean lower quality people doing the job. If you degrade a job, you get degraded morale as well.
I just love how people like the Op who presumably expect teachers to slave for their kids expect them to do so for less and less reward as well as the bizarre hatred which is now targeted at all public servants for not meekly accepting poverty and/or transferring to something 'better' i.e. profiteering private work. Bah.
This country is going to the dogs.