AIBU to feel that teachers shouldn't really be striking?

[Pinky1011]

They have 3 months PAID holidays only work 9-4pm, no dangerous or really bad working conditions, great job security, good pensions, They had pay rises last year up to 8%!!! I work in the private sector and haven't had a pay rise in almost 6 years! I just feel compared to alot of other professions, teachers have it quite good? I mean their starting salary is the same as a junior doctor. I get it inflation has wrecked everyone, but surely the issue should be getting inflation down? Not just demanding for more money, which by the way only fuels inflation further. AIBU to feel that teachers just don't know how good they have it compared to the rest of us?

It is misleading to complain about pay whilst not talking about around a quarter of your pay (which becomes equivalent to more like 2/3 of your pay by the time you reach retirement)…. That the people you are comparing yourself to don’t get.

It's notional, though. No money goes anywhere. No money is paid into a fund.

X is pension contribution
Z is salary
Y is tax

A teacher works and is told X% of their salary is a pension contribution.

Government pays them their net salary, Z-Y. That's it. Then they have a piece of paper claiming they are paying X per month to their pension, to justify their lower salaries compared to private sector. But X isn't paid into a fund. X doesn't exist. They simply have a promise from Government that is will pay X times something at unspecified age that keeps changing. And since there is no X, and current promises of X are being paid out of general taxation to current retired teachers, and we have an ageing population, X is not worth the paper it is written on no matter how good it may sound at the moment.

It simply cannot be paid at the promised amounts, the same as the NHS promised (also unfunded) pensions, so it won't be. No Government wants to be the one to admit it, but for those mid career now, it's a pipe dream.

I'd much rather be in a DC scheme with actual money invested tbh!!

@itsgettingweird

Fact 1 - they don't get paid holiday for 3 months. They get a salary that reflects their working year

This always bugs me.

Because what you’re actually saying is that once holidays are taken into account, teachers salaries are actually much higher.

For example average teacher salary is £38k (govt stats… teacher with no SLT type role). They have 13 weeks not working, of which say 5 weeks is paid holiday to even things up even though on a pro rated basis over weeks worked this would be very generous but for arguments sake let’s try it. That means 8 weeks not working = not paid, or 15% of a year of 52 weeks (to which the salary applies). Therefore the salary is equivalent to £43,700 in a role where employee is paid for 52 weeks including 5 weeks holiday.

Add on pension contributions of 21% (24% less 3% that private sector get) and suddenly you have a salary that is worth around….

£53,800

I mean… it’s not all that bad is it?

Quick recovery from finding out teachers pay scales are available in the public domain. But not knowing this does suggest the OP troll is an amateur 🤣

The pension contributions are fake but I completely agree that for comparisons their salaries need to be grossed up to a "normal" working year, because their quoted salaries are a pro-rated figure.

You’re actually agreeing with my point that pensions are a huge part of the problem.

Pinky1011 - care to come and shadow me for a whole day. As in from the moment I start work which is in about 30 minutes until the time I finish which is about 11pm tonight? You are more than welcome to but I imagine you will make excuses as to why you can't do a full day's work.

Pinky1011 - I think you mean exacerbate not exasperate. The former means ‘make worse’ etc and the latter means ‘to irritate/frustrate’. Gotta love people mouthing off about educators while showing a lack of said education themselves. That’s not a typo, that’s a shaky grasp of English.

Here's why I disagree:

• Lack of staffing (also see extended maths for everyone, with lack of maths teachers!)
• Lack of training new teachers
• Unfair working conditions and lack of school funding - so much so, the ones by us couldn't put the heating on until just before Christmas. They often pay for topping up classroom supplies or incentives in the classroom themselves.
• Extended working hours without being paid for it but it being demanded (because of some of the reasons above) - my DB often worked 8.15-6pm and would still do some lesson planning at home.
• Sacrificing everything in their lives - Kid gets sick? Nope, that's your spouse/childcare provider's issue. You get ill? Suck it up. You want to take maternity early? If you have to but you might be begged to stick it out longer due to not having cover! (That one was is from a close friend.)
• The abuse from parents who don't want to homeschool their kids because they can't hack it but will happily abuse teachers about their angel.
• The abuse from the students - verbal and physical.

(I'm sure there's a lot more but I only know a group of those in the profession.)

Essentially, the pay and appreciation does not reflect the effort and good will is being relied upon, otherwise the media demonise all of the people in the UK who are striking at the moment. These are the people educating the future, much of the time they do a fantastic job. I don't care about their pension, a lot of them will not make it to whatever age the government try to increase it to next if they carry on with the amount of stress within the profession.

Don't make me laugh, of course they should be striking!

This is not a local government issue but a widespread, national issue that the middle to upper class will not necessarily see or understand. The government has cut, cut, cut, cut and cut every public sector in an effort to prove to the public how much they are failing in order to privatise them. Just last year, there was The Schools BIll which related to homeschooling but under it wanted to force every school to become an academy and make all schools answerable to DoE. All pupil absences would have needed to be approved by local councils rather than schools, inspections (I believe) they wanted overseen under DoE who could take control of a school whenever they wanted to.

I support all those currently striking. It's all that's left to voice their opinions which have fallen on deaf ears for years...but they want to take away that right too.

How would you quote the pension contributions?

Saying they’re fake is just stupid. They’re a cost associated with employment that will yield a very generous pension at retirement. The argument that they’re unfunded is spurious, they’re not going to disappear overnight.

I think TPS pays around average salary * years service / 80… so average salary of £38k over 25 years would be around £11,800 a year, of which 3/4 or c. 9k is from employer contributions… which is roughly the same as I’ve allowed for.

Pensions are part of your pay.

They have 3 months PAID holidays only work 9-4pm, no dangerous or really bad working conditions, great job security, good pensions, They had pay rises last year up to 8%!!!

😂

🙄

This has been done ad nauseum, but:

We're paid for working 37.5h/ week, 195 days/ year. The point of a salary is that income is the same across the year, so it gets split over the 12 pay days. So while we get paid every month, we don't get paid extra days on top of that.

We work, in actual fact, anywhere between 50-70h/week. But only get paid for 37.5h. That is an issue, even if it's technically not overtime, it's a hell of a lot of unpaid hours. Oh, and I work holidays, too - half-term I came in for a full day for revision lessons, then worked on lesson resourcing for at least half my holiday because we don't have enough qualified teachers in our department, so someone has to prepare stuff that a cover teacher can do without knowing anything about the subject. Which, in Physics, is quite a job in itself.

No dangerous work conditions?

Try being verbally assaulted almost daily for something as unreasonable as telling students to open their books. Try being in charge of 30 students while one is throwing a table in the room. The latter happened only last week, because there is no specialist provision for the child who really shouldn't be in mainstream and who has trashed rooms multiple times. Or having a kid bring in a machete. Or a chair being kicked at you, which breaks your ankle. Or have a kid make death threats while you're pregnant - all of these past incidents with colleagues just in my school.

No bad working conditions?

Imagine being told that the amount and quality of work of your teenagers is completely down to you and your excellence, which is measured every few months on a single lesson you teach with a random set and exam results, which depend on the child's brilliance on a single day. Down to you and you only and factors such as the child's home life, potential homelessness, drug use, friendship fallouts, breakups, lack of food, lack of equipment, severe SEND etc. all don't get taken into account, because you should be able to control performance even if you absolutely can't change any of the above. Imagine having someone look over your shoulder all the time, pressuring you to do more and more. Imagine being responsible for whether students and their parents can be bothered to turn up at school, even if all you can realistically do is cram in a phone call. Complete lack of autonomy with a huge amount of responsibility for outcomes.

Great job security? My arse.

I am starting a new teaching job, in which I can be fired with a week's notice any time for the first six months for any or no reason at all. Even in schools which still follow the burgundy book - which are fewer and fewer thanks to academisation - you can be cast out within 6 weeks if your performance isn't deemed up to scratch.
Whether it is deemed such is mainly down to what set you teach, when you teach them and how long for - your timetable in any given year can make or break you. If you walked into most of my lessons, they are calm and orderly, because I have been lucky and have been given a lot of top sets (and yes, I am experienced and good at it). Walk into my colleague's lessons, whose timetable is mostly bottom sets, and you'd mostly see chaos - not because they're a worse teacher, but by sheer nature of their classes this year. Guess who is deemed to be underperforming?
Performance management with unreachable targets, in which we have no say, means that there is "evidence" none of us are meeting expectations of senior leaders, so if we rear our heads too much, it's easy to manage us out.

Good pensions

Well, when I started this job the pensions were great. Since then, I've been told I'll have to pay more and for longer, but my pension has been changed from final salay to career average, which means now it's worth less. The contract I once entered has been changed unilaterally and who is to say I'll see any money by the time I'll be able to get it (which also still changes all the time). Yes, employer contributions are great and more than others get, but it's still 11% of my pay that I have to contribute.

Pay rises last year up to 8%

For those just starting, yes. Everyone else got 1.5-3%; I was on 1.5%. I have not seen a pay rise anywhere near inflation for more years than I can count and my pay is now worth 25% less than it was 10 years ago. The extra money I get for departmental responsibility also hasn't seen a rise at all, so I get less and less in real terms for the job I'm doing on top of just teaching.

For the love of all that's holy, please educate yourself.

The teachers I know work extremely long hours on a school day (not 9-4) and usually one day on the weekend. Remote teaching was very labour intensive, and after lockdown, we were out there unvaccinated on the front line with very few mitigations to keep us safe. Parents need to understand that the pay rise the government has offered is not fully funded, meaning it will come out of already strained school budgets. In the long run, as long as teachers feel unvalued, there will carry on being a recruitment and retention crisis as new graduates will consider it an unappealing profession and existing teachers will leave. This is why, after having endured real
term pay cuts for many years, teachers are owed better than the government's offer.

Well, become a teacher then. And never complain.

You sound spectacularly ignorant.

What no one seems to be discussing here is the toll that teaching takes on the rest of your life. You give up everything to be a really good teacher. All of the threads about parenting/bullying/child development etc? We have those children, all together, all day. If you think teaching is chalk and talk, but of marking and home, you are very wrong. Schools have armies of exhausted staff who have to have extreme emotional resilience to support young people who are in varying forms of crisis. Children who spent months of lockdown being unregulated, allowed to spend all their time on social media with no restrictions or limiting of access etc. and we are there to fix everything because CAMHS is broken, social work is broken and UC payments don’t cover the half of it.
Parents are, quite rightly, really upset that their children’s needs aren’t being met - we have regular complaints and long emails and requests for long meetings because SEND provision isn’t what it should be, or their child hasn’t had a regular teacher in four subjects whilst in Year 11. And the vitriol we are on the receiving end of, because, of course, at the frontline it is our fault (it clearly isn’t) is emotionally exhausting and upsetting, because we want that for their children to and have no idea how we might be able to provide it.
I have no emotional resilience for my own children and the rest of my family because I have expended it trying to remain positively upbeat all day because I know the way to win over students and teachers is through being supportive, cheerful and enthusiastic. Everyone needs to feel I like them and am rooting for them if they are going to make good progress (staff and students). I’m exhausted but I believe in what I do. I’ve been teaching for 16 years, am SLT and will be a Head one day. But fuck me, I’m tired. Teachers and students deserve better than this, they really, truly do.

Parents need to understand that the pay rise the government has offered is not fully funded, meaning it will come out of already strained school budgets

This is a good point not heard enough

😂😂😂

If this is the case, why aren't teacher's posts advertised as pro rata, like support staff are?
If teacher's recieve the full amount advertised, then they are actually really well paid.

Eg. A scale 5 support staff is advertised at £17k pro rata, they will earn somewhere around £12k a year (really roughly worked out).
A teacher's post is advertised at £25k and they earn £25k (less taxes etc), how is that actually pro rated?

B pls I start at 7.15 and go home around 17.30 just because I'm exhausted, not because the work is really done.
I don't have time to pee, I have lunch withe the pupils and during lunchtime I can't leave them. Wind sun cold: I'm outside watching them, for safety.
Then the lesson preparations: no I don't want to be lazy and give ever pupil in class the same lesson. That means I make changes so it fits everyone. Also I don't want to use the same boring lessons, I want the pupils to be active and interested. I spend hours making the lessons, 5 times a days. And what do I do when they hand over their materials? I read it, give feedback.. 30 times for 5-6 lessons a day.
Meetings after school with staff, with parents.. All the administration.. I know which pupil has trouble writing which letter, I know who can't cut with scicccors and what to do to train them. Maths, grammar, I need to keep track of everything.

Your dad must be a lazy teacher (to adults maybe?) And you have the wrong impression.
So wrong it's almost funny. I hope you don't have kids lol.

@Whatmarbles I made the same point here.

I am striking BECAUSE I care about the children. I don't want them to have no teachers because everyone has voted with their feet and left the profession. I want them to have teachers who are able to do a decent job of actually teaching the children because they are not so stressed out by appalling conditions and workload that they have the headspace to plan decent lessons. I don't want the current shitshow of a curriculum impacting their futures negatively - I want the teachers to be able to have time in the day to tailor the curriculum towards their needs, not cram the subjunctive and passive voice down their throats in a way that is completely outdated but the teachers and basically forced to do because it's the only way they can get through the curriculum quick enough. I don't want my kids put through the stress of SATS, pointless phonics & times tables tests which give the teachers the information they already know. I don't want their trachers spending hours and hours of their time jumping through paperwork hoops for Ofsted instead of making their lessons more fun, or - god forbid - actually having a work life balance!

The strike is ostensibly about pay - but teachers are just so pissed off at the moment about everything that affects our conditions and the children. The government needs to listen.

So just because they have it better than others they can’t strike? Maybe spend a day with your dad to see the reality of teaching.

They have 3 months PAID holidays only work 9-4pm

What bollocks.

Most of the teachers don't care about kids? are you actually serious???????

And how on earth is your father able to go on luxury holidays for months at a time, if he works 4 days a Week? What months? How many?

Please!!!!

I agree OP. Kids have suffered enough and they have it pretty good. In Scotland the sympathy is waning fast TBH

Also, Alot isn't a word!