To already be fed up with teachers/eduaction workers posting about their long holiday!

[Freshlysqueezed]

Facebook is swarming with people saying how much they deserve it and other people patting them on the back. It seems like the world and his wife are in education or SAHM's with 6 glorious weeks ahead of them. Apart from a one week holiday I have a juggling timetable of various childcare arrangements to run to and fro from.

Exactly. Some people always have it harder than everyone else.

But that's not exclusive to teachers.

echt - yup. Wouldn't be so much better if INSET Days were done in the holidays. Oh hang on...

purple how are you supposing that it would give the teachers an extra weeks pay?

The way some people talk you'd swear the 6 weeks holiday perk was only revealed after people had chosen their respective careers. It's not classified information, so I just don't get why some non teachers are acting hard done by.

Evil our teachers didn't need to find childcare as they were quite open about having done the training in several sessions after school and so were able to have a long weekend.

And by and large, purple, most schools do tack them onto holidays, don't they? I know my school does.

No, I was being slightly tongue in cheek suggesting not having children, but it just seems to be another stick to beat teachers/schools with.

INSET days DO take place in the school holidays. In that the days were taken FROM the teachers holidays. But often they're scheduled to fit with specific points in the school year or when a school can get a specific speaker/expert.

"baker days" as they were originally called were 5 days taken from teachers holidays. The amount of holiday children get has never changed.

I don't see the holidays as a perk. It's just part of the job. Everyone knows it's part of the job, so why do people get pissed off about it?

FWIW, no teacher I know has posted about deserving holidays. I could get equally as irate at friends who post that they are about to go on hoiday at various other points in the year. I'd love a bit of mid-March sunshine but I have to go when the school says I do. I'm not complaining - it's part of the job.

downgraded my understanding from pp was that teachers were paid for hours worked (which included inset days) so if the inset days took place in the 13 weeks "holiday" that would increase the hours worked.

BINGO!

Inset days in holidays?! It had to come up.

They were from holidays. Your children have no more and no less holidays than we did as children.

The teachers however have 5 less days. Now these 5 days are taken as inset days, to be taken as and when the school feels they fit in best, according to the needs of the school in terms of training, etc

In most secondaries they couldn't be done in school holidays due to holiday revision. The only holidays that did not involve any teaching in my school this year were the Cheistmas holidays and that's because our amazing site team take leave then so the school building shuts down. Every other holiday the school was open, the number of staff involved on any one day is relatively small but you couldn't have inset days without all the teachers present and with kids milling about. The school was also open and teaching every Saturday from November to June, including the ones in the Feb and May half terms and the Easter holidays. Every single available day was used with skeleton staff manning the school so that our students got the intervention they needed to achieve the very best grades.

We don't tack them all onto holidays in my school as each one happens on a different day of the week in order to ensure that the students don't miss the same lessons each time.

Purplesprings - you do know that teaching staff also have to find childcare when their own children have inset , yes? Most teachers are working parents too, juggling working hours v looking after their own children.

I think this thread needs to stop right now so as to give a space for it to be revived later in the summer by irate parents who've had enough of their children/childcare juggling.

:o

wideopen it is really a stick to beat government with. They want parents working full time, schools are closed 13 week's a year. There needs to be something (other than more teaching) to bridge the gap so that teachers and pupils can recharge their batteries.

Yes, purple I can see that - unfortunately it is often presented as school bashing.

In all honesty, this debate should be less about school holidays and more about flexible working practice in all sectors.

Hulabye not always as can be seen from my earlier post. Of course I understand teachers have to get childcare too so you think they'd be more empathetic about the issues involved in finding childcare for odd days. Not every school gives loads of notice of them happening or tacks them on to holidays or links to other schools so that siblings are off at the same time.

DH & I are 'only' support staff in schools but quite frankly the second half of summer term every year is an utter bastard for both of us. DD is 10 and is also overtired & stressed out due to having so much going on and worrying about Yr 6 & choosing a secondary school in October.

I cannot bloody wait for Wednesday & already have a bottle of Prosecco chilling to celebrate the start of the hols.

Sooty thanks for the link. I shall look at it in more detail when I'm a lot less tired.

I agree that most teachers do a great job and I have no problem with them having holidays but I do wish they would stop the whining and martyrdom

My DD has just done some work in a school and, on several occasions when experienced teachers could have helped or mentored with minimal effort they did not, leading to stress and higher workload all round. The martyrdom, saying "Welcome to teaching" with a big sigh and competitive misery were regular occurrences. Then they wonder why young people don't want to go into teaching!

Purple re linking to other schools - my secondary can have in the region of 40 feeder schools so linking our INSET's to them would never work - we have about 15 main feeder schools.

I work in a different county to where I live and this year Easter didn't tie up - luckily I was on Mat leave and don't have school age children yet but it is something we will have to bare in mind - teaching helps with the childcare but isn't perfect either.

Oh and a point a while ago re bank holidays - teachers get 1 of the 8 - May Day - all the others fall into holidays. This isn't a moan or a whine its stating a fact!

We don't always tack them onto holidays or even weekends, though try to. But sometimes we have to be more flexible in order to get specific trainers in for staff training purposes.

But we always send out the list of inset days at the start of the year, and infact generally during the academic year before.

And yes, sometimes we take INSET as Twilight sessions. This is often due to trainer availability, or fitting additional evening information sessions with parents at key points in the year. We did this for yesterday's INSET infact.
But that then generally means teachers, especially with younger children, need to find additional or longer childcare for their own children into an evening, especially as it then goes to a time beyond what normal after school care and nurseries offer. This can be more difficult than finding childcare for full days for some staff.

The only time i have EVER seen ANY comment saying teachers are always saying they deaerve their holidays in on mumsnet by non-teachers. I see a lot of thank fuck for the holidays, but never any teacher saying they deserve them. Id say most of my fb friends and real life friends are teachers. I know a few solicitors and they have a lot of photos of their cars (usually a sporty lotus) as their cover photo. Should i be accusing them of gloating and telling them they are parasites who do no good and who do not deserving their pay?

We all make choices. Everyday. We choose how we live. Sometimes tge choices are easy, sometimes they are incredibly hard. Nonetheless we still, every second of every day, have a choice. If you do not like the choice you made, make a different one. If you dont think you can, think carefully about why that is.

You are the only person who can make you happy and fulfilled.

Work on how you can make yourself happy and you will feel less bitterness about other people's choices.

One thing I don't understand about all these threads - which compare private sector work to public sector work, is why everyone who works for the public sector assumes private is so much better.

I have always worked in the private sector and most of the jobs were fine but in the last place I worked I got 3 weeks holiday and I had to take Christmas day, boxing day and new year's day out of that allowance; on top of that the pay was well below the market rate for my experience and qualifications.

I also believe there are many large companies that take the piss with their employees - not saying teachers don't have a difficult job because they do but at least they get proper holidays and paid appropriately.

Well, in primary, let's rejig education and rethink the entire year for the 21st century instead of the 19th.
Stop the ridiculous intensity which crams stupid amounts of part-learned knowledge into tiny spaces and gives our children and staff insane levels of stress, spread the learning throughout the year and break up the heavy stuff with activity/expressive arts/sports/!CT/eco/healthy living/cooking weeks or blocks. Give us time to do all the extras that used to be the areas that parents covered that are now teachers' responsibilities.
Scrap the three uneven terms and revamp them so that the breaks are spread evenly. There were proposals to make the year have 5 terms at one point.
Teaching is now an area populated by part-timers, short-termers and the young, so extending the hours meaningfully would be possible if the roles were shared between several people. Shift work.

Working hours. I'm a supply teacher. I aim to be in school from 8am, and stay until the marking is done which can be anytime from end of school day if I've marked KS1 in the lunchbreak, or 6pm if I've had Y6 all day.
I take nothing home, I can't.
I plan nothing over the weekend, I don't know where I'll be next week.
I do nothing serious in my holidays, other than gather together a few ideas and resources.
I get to teach, enthuse, see children learn and have lots of 'Wow!' moments and usually have a lot of fun over a week.
I make a lot less than I used to, and that's fine by me. I get to do what I liked about the job when I first started 30 years ago, and I leave the exhaustion, sleeplessness, paranoia and guilt behind.
I love teaching, and I've culled the parts I couldn't bear.