Well said Mr P - response to teacher strike

[MrsMurphyIWish]

No AIBU, just wanted to share.

Solidarity doe those of us striking and to those who are questioning why, please take a listen …

www.facebook.com/reel/708926614094881?fs=e&s=9RfQYY

My opinion is, if you don't want to do the job then find another one.

Teachers are.

Generally, this is considered a problem that needs sorting, by people who actually care about education.

My opinion is, if you don't want to do the job then find another one. I won't be praying for you.
We are! That's part of the problem.

I had a career before teaching and really enjoy teaching, but it is taking its toll on my family life in a way that isn't reasonable.

Before teaching I'd had a good enough work/life balance that with flexi-time I could live the lifestyle I wanted with annual leave to carry over some years.

I'm currently teaching part time and looking at my way out when I see the right thing, which is a shame but my own family come first.

On going training? like virtually every other occupation you mean?

I don't get this attitude that teachers can expect better from their employment because other also have it hard.

It's not a race to the bottom. If pay and conditions in all public sector jobs improved it would drag up pay and conditions in the private sector as they would have to be appearing in the face of better prospect for employment from public sector.

All of us who aren't the 1% at the top would benefit!

Yes. Like every other skilled occupation. It requires ongoing training to maintain those skills.

Although not obliged to, I told my head of my intention to strike as we have parents evenings on two of the strike days. They were very much in support. Here’s to the 1st and hopefully change!

Just a point about redundancies. Schools in London have been shedding pupils at an alarming rate as people make the most of working from home to sell up and move out of the city to the countryside where they can afford a bigger house and often private school. Schools are given money based on the number of pupils so falling numbers mean a reduced budget. If you are a two form entry moving down to a one form you either need staff to leave or you need to restructure and go through redundancies. I have personal experience of that and know it is happening to other schools local to mine.

Everanewbie : where is all that money coming from ?. Taxation is the highest it’s been in 70 years. You can’t keep on hiking taxation without having a drag effect on the entire economy.

Official redundancy is not that common but the "managing out" of experienced, more expensive teachers has been commonplace for years. Basically make their lives as unpleasant as possible until they leave and replace them with cheap ECTs.

It hasn't seemed to be so prolific in the current times of teacher shortages but it is one of the reasons teacher salaries need to be well funded by the government so that schools can choose the best teachers with a mixed level of experience, not just try to recruit only the cheapest because they don't have the budget for more.

You can't keep underfunding education without it having a drag effect on the entire economy.

Education is something you invest in, not try to do on as little money as possible.

@EileenAdler Do the people with bullet wounds throw things at you or tell you they want to suck your mum, or that you're a stupid fucking bitch whilst you treat them? Because that's what some teachers are putting up with every day.

Nobody is saying that teachers should get a pay rise above or instead of other public workers. You're barking (loudly and increasingly ridiculously, frankly) up the wrong tree.

As a young nurse working a weekend shift in a central London A&E I was frequently subject to sexual abuse and violently attacked. I was spat on , pissed on and vomited on. I’ve also been covered in blood and shit at the same time.

Working in major trauma I’ve seen ppl run over by cement mixers with their brain protruding from their skull which was in two pieces. Bullets tumble when they hit a body, they cavitate and if they hit bone they shatter. It can take your leg off.

Do it get shitty kids shouting abuse. Not anymore. I just get ppl hanging on to life by a thread. Covid was something else. We couldn’t do that from a laptop.

would I ever go on strike ?. No, I trained long and hard to keep ppl alive. You can’t do that waving a placard and shouting abuse.

But you also shouldn’t be expected to do that with a real term pay cut of whatever percentage it is over ten years.

You’ve chosen the wrong enemy.

"Waving a placard and shouting abuse". So, tell me you don't get the point of the strike (and what it actually entails) without telling me...

As other have said it isn't a race to the bottom and it's not a pissing contest on who is the worst off. I fully support the nurses strike and know it is a job I couldn't do. As teachers we are lucky in some respects opposed to others and not in others.

I'm an M2 teacher in my 3rd year of teaching, I came to the profession later in life and qualified when I was 39 (should have been 38 but unfortunately cervical cancer got in the way in the middle of my PGCE).

I work in a single form primary.

I try to be in school about 40 minutes or so before the start of the day to get set up and sorted. Then teach all day where I have to teach, act as nurse, social worker, educational psychologist as well as anything else that comes up. When the children leave I have to start marking between 90 and 120 pieces of work each day as that is the expectation and get resources etc ready for the next day. I tend to leave work at 6 to get home, eat my tea and usually finish about 10 or 11 at night. I also work all Saturday planning and resourcing for the next week. All the holidays I get, at least half are used for planning, catching up with all the things we don't get time to do as teaching gets in the way of all the other things you need to do. I also cannot choose a single day of my holidays so have to a premium if i ever want to do anything. I work around 70 hours a week my contract says 32.5 hours plus extra time to complete the role.

In the middle of my NQT I was made a subject lead and within 6 months I was subject lead for 3 subjects, I get no extra for all the extra work and responsibility. We are constantly up for scrutiny not only by SLT but from parents and don't forget the lovely OFSTED.

I technically work more hours overtime then I do get paid for and this is the problem. I actually haven't chosen to strike as I didn't want the kids to have any more disruption. I do think we should work to rule but technically we can't as we would be breaking the teaching standards.

My DCs school reduced the number of teachers by increasing class sizes and reducing the number of subjects offered.

The school I previously worked in just stopped replacing TAs that left until the numbers were down to where they needed them to be.

Mind you, now they, like all the other schools around here, are struggling to recruit TAs they need because the pay is better elsewhere.

Quite. Well that's the other problem. Other peoples income basically via taxation. That is why a demand of 12% or more is insulting to the rest of the tax paying country.

Maybe if you don’t want a decent education system. If you do, you need to invest in it.

Of course we all want a decent education system. But there are limits to how much of our money we can spend. Teachers need to be appropriately rewarded but huge pay rises will come at the expense of other areas or increased taxation or even more borrowing.

The other option, if you are unwilling to pay teachers more, is to reduce the suze of the job that they are expected to do.

Over time, a mainstream school teacher’s role has come to encompass and replace social services, parenting and nurture, nutrition and clothing, mental health provision, special education, crime and policing, many aspects of health and disability, to name but a few.

If ALL if these services were - as they generally once were - available in a timely manner from the correct other service, and teachers could simply provide education, then I suspect teachers would be more inclined to accept a lower pay deal in return for a much more manageable job.

It would of course also require money….it’s a but like the ambulance and nurse issues in the NHS can’t be solved without also sorting out primary healthcare on the one hand, and care in care homes and the community at the other.

I find it baffling that whenever I see someone saying this, it’s almost always a parent. Childless people are way more receptive of the need to increase taxation despite having no actual skin in the game. I can’t imagine being a parent and going, “well yeah I want a decent education for my kids but who’s going to pay for it because I’m not!”

If you want a decent education system then something needs to change.

We do not currently have a decent education system. We are losing experienced teachers and recruitment figures are horrendous.

It’s all very well saying the country can’t afford a ‘huge’ pay rise (which actually, in real terms is a small pay rise), but then you have to accept a shit education system. You can’t have improvement and no investment.

Cant is saying cut out the non-education stuff from a teacher’s job description, but someone will still need to do that work so it won’t save money or decrease taxes or whatever.

Cant is saying cut out the non-education stuff from a teacher’s job description, but someone will still need to do that work so it won’t save money or decrease taxes or whatever.

Exactly - we either need to remunerate teachers highly enough that recruitment, retention and quality are all sufficiently high to enable a good ‘education plus much more’ service OR we fund all other services well enough that teachers have a somewhat more manageable workload, which should improve recruitment, retention and quality so they can provide a good ‘education’ service.

There isn’t a cheap fix. Teachers are already being asked to provide a cheap ‘finger in the dyke’ fix for the huge issues in other services and in society. Not paying them enough and causing them to walk away leaves MUCH more expensive issues to fix.

I know it is small in real terms, but the rest of the work force are not getting anywhere near this. I would rather see a pay rise that is in line with AEI and the difference between that and the demanded rise be spent on alleviating the workload that teachers carry.

Furthermore, should the unions secure the rise they are after, how does this increase standards and reduce teacher workload? It may have a minimal effect on retention, but I can't see teachers en mass saying "well I was leaving on £35k pa, but not its £36,500 all is well"

Lets not pretend that this is really about educational standards. Its an ultimatum of pay us more or we'll withdraw our labour to the detriment of children. Now I don't see anything wrong with that, we don't work for warm hugs and gold stars after all.