Govt declares war on teachers again. Fucksake.

[noblegiraffe]

The Telegraph front page tomorrow is reporting that the DfE is preparing an 'army of supply teachers' to keep schools open in the event of a teacher strike.

Is that like the army of volunteers they failed to raise to keep schools open during the covid surge in January?

Changing the law to allow agency staff to cover for striking colleagues is a shitty move, an opportunity I can't imagine agency staff in general would be leaping at; but using it as some sort of trump card against teachers?

1. supply teachers would most likely be in a teaching union (they'd be mad if not)

2. WE CAN'T GET SUPPLY TEACHERS NOW BECAUSE THERE'S A CRITICAL SHORTAGE OF TEACHERS

If they've got an army of supply teachers, where are they fucking hiding them?

If the government think children have 'suffered enough' during the pandemic then:

1. fund schools properly

2. stop haemorrhaging teachers by e.g. not treating them like shit in the national press

3. improve working conditions and reduce workload by e.g. funding children's services like CAMHS, SEN services, social services so that schools aren't picking up ALL the slack.

That would improve the situation far more for children than shitty headlines in the Telegraph deliberately antagonising the few teachers the country has left.

twitter.com/samfr/status/1539717032043859968?s=21&t=uLvLET4xftQW31sTEKBaLg

Most train drivers are in ASLEF.

ASLEF aren't striking. The striking workers belong to RMT. They represent workers such as signallers, conductors, maintenance workers and cleaners.

The median salary for RMT members is £33,000 although the range is quite large.

The dispute is partly about wages (they are asking for a below inflation increase) but also other issues such as working hours.

Teaching sounds like it's going into corporate bullshit. Being made to do absolutely nonsical nonsense to somehow look good instead of actually doing the task in hand to an amazing standard and not doing the utter unneeded shit. I have a few friends who teach early years and love the kids and teaching but the rest is dire. My DS is secondary and just has a stream of supply teachers and many troubled kids and some teachers cannot get control over the class. It's a very sad state of affairs but the education needs a massive shake up. Years of education based on a poxy exam?

But even the Dfe admit 50 hours a week for experience teachers and ECTs are on 70 hours a week

Not a teacher. But this is the piece I can't understand. The teachers I know work long hours. Everyone knows that. Why is there this pretense of working hours? It's very odd.

Rather than striking surely a permanent work to rule is more <snigger> educational.

To me it looks like teaching turned to shit when academies were brought in, having executive heads on £100k+ salaries & piling more & more work on teaching staff. If schools were brought back under the education authorities branch of the council, executive heads were got rid of & the money saved was spent on more teachers & TA's.

I wouldn’t worry, they’ll have a job assembling an ‘army’ of any profession at the minute. They might have had a fighting chance before Brexit.

@safclass you do know it's not train drivers who are striking, right?

More sabre rattling. Said they would try the same with the rail workers. It takes a huge amount of time to train. All of this is needed to detract from Boris’s issues. Particularly if the by-elections go against him this week.

The government is full of corrupt and incompetent people who themselves should be replaced by an army of supply ministers.

Can’t stomach them.

Ha ha ha what supply teachers?

There are NO supply teachers. We can't get any. We are going with ppa or tas are covering (send school)

Even if we could find supply teachers, we don't have any budget to pay for them!

Experience tells me that if you are a qualified teacher but not teaching, you usually have no intention of doing so. At all. So the idea that armies of teachers will rock up on demand is ludicrous.

Perhaps they grow on the same tree as the staff for those Nightingale hospitals?

We are one part-time teacher down for KS2 next year. We’ve just appointed a mat-leave contract and had an unusually low pool for that. Normally when the economy is tanking, teaching is seen as a safe bet and applicants increase- not now it seems.

An issue I'm aware of is that many trainees who did their courses during the pandemic haven't/ don't feel v confident teaching so are currently working as TAs. We have 4 I think.

Like you, we can't get supply teachers. There are very few and I still get begging texts from an agency, 2 years after I thought about going to supply. So don't let it bother you.

I wonder how long before the government declare the caretaker can take combined classes in the hall to keep schools open!

Yeah, that whole army of supply teachers is clear and obvious bollocks.

I think they should have the actual army on standby.

(full disclosure: I'm a teacher, and I only think this should go ahead if someone makes a documentary about it. I'm not actually sure who would crack first when it came to army major vs my year 9s, but I'd love to watch )

But any teachers who were out striking wouldn't be paid for that day. (this is always quoted in those "teachers don't paid for working in the holidays" threads)

Who is going to pay this army of supply teachers if they exist and would break the strike? Schools have no money and are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yes I get paid decentish money although as mine is the only salary into my home at the moment things are tight.

My Amazon account shows that my recent purchases are black whiteboard pens, 100 glue sticks, blue tac and a4 paper. Guess where all that is going!

Erm, what? You seem to have a very dim view of the nation’s children

Because it’s all about them and not about the kids. Plus ca change.

The HT of the school I’m a governor at is actually pleased that she’s managed to get enough supply to cover the current absences due to COVID for a change. I’d love to see where this “army” comes from.

Public Service workers are totally undervalued and the idea that 'a clap' will be enough to show they are appreciated is insulting.
There are other public service workers largely ignored at our peril. Prison Officers and Police - under paid, dangerous jobs where recruitment and retention is critically low. If these people went on strike we are all stuffed.
Sadly, it's only the take of strike that brings many public services into the public eye.
We need to value them much more than we do.

The right to strike is obviously on the chopping block. But to be honest, I joined the picket lines and national marches on pay and conditions many years back and all that happened as a result was being down a day's pay for every day I joined the strikes.

The goverment ignored us as best as they could, the public loathed us because it inconvenienced them and got them in the shit with their own employers unable to understand that they needed childcare.

So I stopped joining strikes.

What I do now is much more effective for my own mental wellbeing. I effectively work to rule, with some minor exceptions like the odd bit of lesson prep or marking a set of exam papers while watching TV, but I start at 8, finish at 4.30 latest and while I work through most breaks and many lunches I rarely take work home.

The hard bit is saying no and showing work I mean it. I refused to cover for a colleague driven out by the profession in my gained time. I refused to take on extra marking for the mocks for a colleague who was off with stress when I got asked to. I make a note of all the times my "gained time" has been taken off me for intervention, exam cramming, sports days, PSHE days etc. so that when I get asked why the huge amount of work I'm meant to be doing during my gained time wasn't completed I can ask "so when did you want me to do these, exactly"? I also refuse to comply with ridiculous demands that have zero impact, like parking in an assigned spot or having all of my book boxes colour coordinated. I have had open arguments with SLT over workload and some of the more ludicrous demands and I challenge them when it's needed.

The other side of the coin is this: I can do all of these things because I am very experienced, so can plan and fully resource a lesson in 10min, and I am very good at my job in a shortage subject. I get away with a lot, because it would be much more of a ballache for my school to replace me than to accept that I am one of the more "militant" teachers in my school and mostly leave me be. Parents don't complain to the school about me (unless their darlings are one of those), but they do complain about endless cover, marking not being done and generally lack of staff - as they should.

I wish fewer of my colleagues were wet lettuces and did the same, because then things may change for the poor, young, fresh-faced graduates joining our profession who do not know how to stand up for themselves.

TL;DR: striking is mostly pointless these days; more teachers need to work to rule and stop being scared - we are in a strong position now to do this with no one to replace us.

Is this going to be the same group of agency staff they were going to get to cover the railway strikes!

Teachers need a Mick Lynch he is a bloody legend!

Train drivers aren't on strike anyway! See how the government managed to make everyone belie that?

This winds me up so much (already- thanks government). There hasn't even been a ballot. This is massively pre emptive. The Telegraph - voicebox of the government- couldn't wait to start setting up teachers for a bashing again after a few months respite.

Let's face it, Edapt was set up to anticipate all this to produce a union of angelic non strikers. It has a tiny membership.

Everyone needs a Mick Lynch. The Labour party especially.