To be really worried about proposed teacher strikes.

[katedan]

In England not Scotland for context. My twin daughters are year 11 and I am terrified about the impact of teacher strikes on their GCSEs. They have not yet covered the curriculum and every day counts to get them exam ready so strike days will be disastrous for year 11 and 13 pupils ( and lots of other children especially those who are vulnerable) these kids have had their education impacted by covid and now strikes. This will make the divide between state and private schools even bigger. Do you think they will go ahead or if a safety net will be put around exam years if it does.

Don’t worry my son lost a whole year of teaching during Covid because online lessons didn’t happen. Just worksheets. He passed them all last year.

Well, yes. But wasn't the point to get more teachers through the first few years of teaching?

Lots of online training, even run by the best person in the world, isn't going to help with that.

Which year was that, then?

Excuse you, I have a first in maths and teaching was always my first choice career. You can stick that comment where the sun doesn't shine.

Teachers get more down time in holidays but they work significant unpaid overtime during term time. I think it balances out.

Are you a teacher?

If not, what you think doesn’t matter.

Yes. That was the plan. It's definitely having the opposite effect - it's condescending and totally inappropriate for our setting.
But avoiding the terrible provider is not easy, and they've got to clock up the learning hours. If I could, I'd write my own programme and get it validated... but I suspect that - no matter how good - it wouldn't get approved. Not enough cult...

That's interesting actually because in a course I've written, I go into Metacognition. You're right. It's not just about showing a PowerPoint and thinking they've learnt the material, questions, and discussion play a huge part in their learning.

Calculations I did at the time :

Year 9 and 10 total teach days : 381
OUT : 120
IN : 261

% IN : 68.5%
% OUT : 31.5%

Missed a third of teaching time.
There were 6 terms. He missed 2 whole terms

so a third of his two school years he had little to no formal schooling. Some schools were brilliant I hear. Ours wasn’t. I had to get tutors in subjects at great cost.

Covid to blame not education system

I was just pointing out that a few days isn’t going to mean failing. If my sons year could pull it together after missing third of proper teaching then the OP needn’t worry

Ah, a journalist, perhaps!

A third of two years is not a year, is it?

One of the best teachers I have ever worked with quit at the end of last term. She never ceased to amaze me throughout the year we shared a Y6 class as to just how good a teacher she was; if teachers like her are quitting due to stress and workload than god help the rest of us. That's what you should be worried about- the vandalism wrecked on the teaching profession and education sector- indeed all public services that we as teachers have to pick up the slack for- and not a few days' missed learning. I'm striking yes for pay, but also to draw attention to the lack of resources for schools.

I am a teacher.

I stand by what I said. I would not be a teacher without the holidays. I sacrifice too much in term time with my own children. It's my time to focus on them. Yes I work in the holidays but it's flexible and works around my life.

No I guess 1970s education system was shite too ……

It sounds ridiculous.

I know it puts a bigger burden on mentors too- which ironically makes it harder for ECTs to get jobs.

But someone is making a lot of money from it.

No, I'm not a journalist, lol. But I don't think it's unreasonable not to want to give out personal information on mn..

The cult is making a fortune out of this. And - guess what - the local uni hasn't been revalidated. Our only training provider will be the cult.

I don't understand why you are stuck on this "part-time, term-time" vs people like you in a full time job thing. Unless you have averaged 70 hours a week for 6 straight weeks you don't know what it is like. Not every week is a 70 hour one, but the majority are when you are in leadership and you have multiple supply teachers in your department (science in my case), not enough pastoral staff to deal with the relentless issues that we face and also need to react to mental health issues, students not being fed at home or abusive situations that I hope you never have to have a child describe to you. That is fucking relentless. I also haven't had actual downtime as I have been ill for both the October and the Christmas holiday. Apart from dying on the sofa or in bed, I did nothing that would be deemed as downtime. Maybe those 3 days of the holiday I had to be in the building did....

On to your hours per week thing again. I'm in the building a minimum of 48 hours a week. The most break or downtime I get is having a piss, because as SLT I will be on duty or supervising our isolation room every lunch. I certainly don't get to eat most lunch times. When in the building I do zero planning and marking. Where do you think all my GCSE and A Level planning and marking happens? That would be where I move towards 70 hours a week. That and my relentless (I like this word now) admin.

I, and many thousands of my colleagues, are not part time. I was not when I was marking at 8am on Sunday. I was not when I was on the phone to the Headteacher following another suicide threat from a student over email at 10pm on a Tuesday night. So I've done some sums.

Lets say I average 60 hours a week, 39 weeks a year. No holiday intervention, no going in for exam results days, no going in to support the exams officer on embargoed results days. No interviewing for 6th form in the week before school starts again in September. If I multiple the 2 and then divide by the 48 weeks an average job would be working for, I get to 48.75 hours a week.

Lets be generous and say I only do 65 hours a week. Now 52.8 hours a week.

Now, lets add the 17 days extra I was in the building (not just working from home). We will call those only 6 hours a day, like my contract says I am paid for. This gives us very nearly 55 hours a week.

I don't care that I work more hours than your average bear in my working week. Really, I know what I signed up for. I get pleasure from my job, because the difference I make is worth it. But it is killing me, has driven away some of the best teachers I have ever known, and is failing the kids. Failing so horrifically.

I am fucking boggled as to how you are getting that teachers work part time. I am honestly going to remember this post next time we have a major incident. Probably a suicide attempt or a weapon in school. Let's see if I beat my high score of 84 hours in a week. Might finally work full time.

That's really scary- not least because I only know one person who actually survived training with them.

2025 is going to be a really difficult year for recruitment. I know we've lost two big local(ish) unis too, and that will have a significant impact on the pool of teachers available. And we already don't have enough.

No actually all 3 unions for Local Authorities took it to their members and the majority voted against striking and to accept the recommended pay offer, which is roughly the same amount that teachers have turned down. Social workers included. Unite were particularly vocal recommending them not to accept it. The union members made their own decision.

@Roseberry1 What's the average teachers salary now? I know it varies from each area but interested in how it's a 24% pay cut?

It means, that when I signed up to teach, my projected salary was £48k after 8 years. What I actually earn due to pay freezes and below inflation pay rises is approx £8k less than that. And there is fuck all I can do about it because there is no negotiation in salary unless we strike.

It also means that because the current rise isn't funded, schools have to pull that money out of thin air to pay me. Which in reality means if I want my owed £8k they are probably going to get rid of my TA to fund it. Or not buy new reading books for the children. Or not provide extra resources to properly support the curriculum. (Come to think of it, school still owe me £70 for ingredients that I bought 2 weeks ago so that 90 of my KS1 children could do the required cookery module in DT, but I digress) The budget is literally robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Yes, the holidays (unpaid, as previously discussed) and "term time" hours sound attractive for the starting salary on paper. But if they were actually attractive, then we wouldn't have such a huge recruitment and retention crisis.

And yes, I will worry about some of my children who rely on school for their only hot meal of the day. But don't be mad at teachers for that, be fucking angry at the government that we live in such a country where there is such dire poverty right under our noses.

But ultimately, I'm a teacher. It's a career. I want to be paid. I'm not a charity. If that makes me a dick with a cushy job in your opinion, then so be it. Come join us if you think it's so great, there's plenty of vacancies...

I don’t have any experience of working in a secondary school but it does seem to me (as the parent of 3 teens) that it is a much harder job. Certainly in terms of staying late and marking etc.

Not the point of the thread but teacher surveys invariably show that primary teachers have a heavier workload than secondary. I can scientifically prove this by living in a household with a primary and secondary teacher and I can tell you which of us is up late in the evenings and weekends working. Personally I think there is less enjoyment in being a secondary teacher though.

Regardless, teachers in both sectors are underpaid and overworked so on with the strike.

Like, whether you have kids in school? That doesn't seem a particularly personal question, yet you have avoided answering. I wonder why.

Whilst that sounds pretty shit, I think we can agree it's not the normal working week of most teachers. When I refer to full-time, I refer to people who don't work pro-rata/term time, i mean people who are paid 52 weeks per year because they get the 28-day holiday entitlement a year and work the rest. That's what full-time means in recruitment terms.

We've already got performance related pay for teachers, that was brought in under Gove.

My point there was not performance-related pay, it was the idea that the government know that to retain talent in a competitive environment where you are losing staff you need to consider paying more than the competition.

But while they understand that bankers (their pals) might be motivated to stay by more money (even when they have plenty of it already), they seem sadly lacking in comprehension when it comes to public sector workers.