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

The media and the government are anti the rail strikes not because they are wrong but because they are right.

Correct, the media and govt are 100% correct to be against the strikes. Allowing small sections of the workforce to hold the rest of us to ransom is plain wrong, and shouldn't be allowed. There should be no right to strike, a person who is not happy with their current pay or conditions can either continue to work whilst negotiating an improvement, or hand in their notice and find a job that suits them better.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that our system is morally wrong and nobody should be forced to work just to have a roof over their head and food on the table. Those things should be basic rights - there should be a universal basic income of £30K per year so that nobody has to work to survive. Obviously those people who claim to love working would be allowed to.

My view is just that inconveniencing the public is not the right way to go about it.

pretty amazing stat:

In every quarter of 2021, U.S. corporations’ overall profit margin remained above 13%, a level reached during only one previous quarter in the past 70 years

fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/

”all in it together!”

“Corporate greed is motivating large companies to use the pandemic and supply-chain issues as an excuse to raise prices simply because they can,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said during a February inflation hearing”.

fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/

Of course exactly the same is happening in Europe, with Russia/Brexit/Pandemic (take your pick) used as cover.

To the people claiming teachers aren't paid badly, you're missing the point.

There are, right now, massive teacher shortages. So many teachers are leaving the profession and teacher training programes cannot meet their recruitment targets

So it would seem that a large number have people have considered their options carefully and decided teaching isn't for them. If the conditions weren't that bad, they wouldn't be choosing to do this.

As I've said before though, it's not just the money, it's the workload and the expectations to work from 7.30 - 9 pm during the week and at least one full day on weekends to get everything done.

Also, I've just seen that Teach First has just recently reopened their applications for this coming September, which is a clear sign they don't have enough incoming trainees. Not sure what good easing the requirements and qualifications to enter the profession will be when they can't get people who wan to enter it in the first place.

I'm a TA and I won't be covering for anyone. If my teachers strike then I will be right there with them!

The government tried the same thing with the railways/tube and initially claimed temp staff would help keep things running during the strikes. That did not happen and the RMT is smashing it with their strike and spokesperson annihilating any mP or journalist who comes against him with the usual lies and bluster...

Good luck to teachers and HNS staff with their strikes. Time to make a stand against that vile government.

In fact I want to see a general strike.

Enough is enough.

@Dotjones
its not quite as easy as “taking another job” when you’ve spent your whole life (and possibly significant money) training for the career you currently have.
Your arguments for Universal Income may be right. However the fact is that right now we do not have it. So it’s an argument sort of built on a false premise. Removing the right to strike would be madness. If we are to start stripping away our existing rights, we’d better get alternative protections in place FIRST, surely!

I would support teachers striking of course.

However, I do wonder if unions could be a bit more creative with action-short-of-strikes. Perhaps for industrial action days teachers could do things like:

Not do paperwork beyond what is needed for basic safeguarding.
Boycott after school punishments and meetings.
Take a full lunch break.
Not follow the curriculum and not plan lessons, just teach things they find fun and interesting. (If that included things like history of the unions, recent politics, critical thinking, media studies, debate, bias, real colonial history and other things the government doesn't want taught, then good. Although it might end up being lots of sport.)

All this would inconvenience and upset the government and management without upsetting most pupils or parents very much. It might get more people on their side. it could lead to some memorable days at school as well!

I know it won't happen though.

If the government is going to use agency staff then they will also have to outlaw picketing. Nobody in their right mind is going to walk past a picket line to break a strike.

Brexit will hit workers’ real wages by nearly £500-a-year
www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-britain-workers-wages-damage-competitiveness-b1007614.html

Had the idiotic government not recently taken us out of the world’s biggest trading block, there’d be far more leeway for reasonable wages in the public sector.

The government tried the same thing with the railways/tube and initially claimed temp staff would help keep things running during the strikes

Well I think it depends where you live and what rail company it is, but we have a half hourly service on our line today, which is actually better than the Sunday service they ran yesterday! SWR have plenty of practice dealing with strikes though because of the strike by guards before covid. Nothing to do with the government.

In some ways it would be good to see a strike against this vile government, but all of this has been caused by covid (not their fault) and Brexit (partly their fault for pursuing such a hard line Brexit but partly the people who voted for it, and then voted for Boris in the first place "to get Brexit done". No good moaning about the government and Boris if you voted for it! The strike would be for all the wrong reasons.

And also - even if you accept that rail staff are underpaid, who's going to pay the increased wages? People don't want to pay tax. We've just come out of the worst bits of the covid pandemic, and STILL people moaned about the NI increase for the NHS and social care!

If you want decent public services with well paid staff you have to pay the tax. It's that simple.

Had the idiotic government not recently taken us out of the world’s biggest trading block, there’d be far more leeway for reasonable wages in the public sector

Had the idiot Cameron not called a bloody referendum which was only ever going to go one way. Twit.

I accept that there were different ways of "getting Brexit done" and we could have at least stayed in the customs union if not the single market, but it was obvious what line Boris was going to take, and still people voted for him.

Lol. Reminds me of the dinny poster who said teachers should only strike in the school holidays.

Strikes must cause inconvenience. That's the whole point.

Basically you don't support a worker's right to withdraw their labour. Up to you I guess.

I am intrigued by a PP's suggestion of "working to rule." Refuse to do the piles of paperwork and "extras," stop doing marking and do whole-class feedback instead. What would make this interesting is that we would have an opportunity to see whether all this pointless "make-work" bollocks makes any difference to the kids. My guess is that it does not.

We had action short of strike for a really long time in the 2000s, what happened was that loads of teachers ignored it, because it’s really difficult to be in work with people who are constantly going the extra mile and say ‘I’m not going to do x, y or z’. Unless everyone does it, which they often don’t individuals are seen as difficult or militant. I’m very much of the opinion I should do what I’m paid to do and nothing else unless I want to, but I’m not interested in career progression beyond my current job and have an exit plan, hopefully will be doing something else in a couple of years.

Last time there was a strike quite a few colleagues refused to participate as they weren’t prepared to lose a days wages. I’m often surprised how many teachers have no interest in politics at all, even when it affects their job.

Many teachers are only in a union for the legal protection it gives if a complaint is made against you. Will be interesting to see how ballots go.

No way will they pull that off!

Supply teachers are actual teachers so they're well aware how feckin shit it is!

A massive✊✊✊for noblegiraffe in her tireless support for teachers. Good on yer.

Here in Victoria, similarly afflicted by a lack of supply teachers (though to be fair It's not about utter contempt for teachers, though better pay would be good) they're offering big bucks to teach in the regions and have waived the vaxx requirement to teach, er, anywhere.

I'm recently retired after 43 years and have no desire to dive in the Covid soup when I won't get paid if I go sick. FFS.

"There should be no right to strike, a person who is not happy with their current pay or conditions can either continue to work whilst negotiating an improvement, or hand in their notice and find a job that suits them better."

This would do nothing to solve recruitment problems in core sectors that we all need.

You approach would only work in a scenario where absolutely all services are run on a free market basis so pay could match demand for those services. Not everyone can afford private healthcare and education etc

Only authoritarian government ban strikes and what you propose is not compatible with British values as they currently stand, even if those values are being flushed down the toilet as we speak.

Teacher have the right to strike and can’t be disciplined for this.

They do not have the right to decide not to follow school policy on marking or not attend meetings or whatever.

Working to rule when the ‘rule’ is whatever tasks deemed necessary by your head to discharge your professional duties means you still have to do the vast majority of the massive workload.

We’ve worked to rule before, did anyone notice? I’m not sure the union work to rule instruction was ever lifted, tbh. We still had to mark and plan and assess and attend meetings. What we were told we could refuse to do was organise school trips and clubs. But teachers who wanted to, still could. And because trips and clubs are nice things that teachers want to put on, they still happened.

I taught for 30 years and walked away two years ago. I now do agency temping work in admin posts for less than half of my old salary.

Hell would freeze over before I went back into school. The stress, hours, pointless bureaucracy, shoking behaviour for a minority of students (and sometimes their parents), constant ctiticism from the press and some sections of the public, constant need to 'prove' your worth through endless lesson observations, book reviews, the constant threat that the school may be inspected at any minute, overpromoted managers with little to no teaching experience....... I could go on but my stress levels are rising just remembering it.

I quit teaching before my marriage broke up and my health collapsed. It has taken me two years to get back my sense of self worth. I will never be free of the anxiety it caused me.

There is no army of supply teachers ready and willing to cross a picket line. There are not enough to go in today. As a pp rightly said, those of us who got out of teaching did so with good reason and will never return.

This country needs to take a long, hard look at the state of it's schools. I am seriously concerned about the sort of experience my own grandchildren will have. Don't blame the teachers. The majority give and give and give agan, until they have become broken. I loved teaching - very little beats the pure joy of teaching someone something new and watching them as they understand and grow as learners and as people. But it's not enough. You can't keep exploiting people becuase it is a vocation and then wring your hands and pretend to be shocked when those people cannot take any more.

Apparently there’s a post-covid baby boom coming too! This will affect teaching staff disproportionately due to the number of young women who go into teaching - particularly in primary.

I know a primary school with 14 teacher vacancies for September, most of them mat covers. They haven’t found a single temporary cover or supply yet… it’s not looking good!

Teaching is a hard to come-by skill. You can’t just put any old body in front of the class and expect a skilled workforce to pop out the other end of the system in 10-15 years.

It is short sighted to not prioritise teachers.

its just Boris living up to his clown name. He’s trying out new material.
there are no supply teachers
there are no bin men
there are no kitchen staff
there are no vets
there are no lorry drivers
there are no nurses

i could go on.

Well said @Whitehorsegirl if every profession came together and were not comparing who gets what and showed a united front then the government would have to take note.

I will again say - Train Drivers are not on strike ! there is an interesting thread in chat titled Rail strikes, where a member of staff (not a driver !) sets everything out with a detailed explanation which is worth a read.

YABU
the teachers at my children's school school are crap

oops I meant underpaid and overworked

YABU the teachers at my children's school school are crap

Well, we should let the government keep cutting their pay and budgets then, that will fix the problem.

It's definitely the case that it must just be the teachers who are personally crap people rather than problems with the system.