Does anyone NOT support teachers’ strikes?

[Notbeinggoadybut]

I’ve got mixed views. Support that they, as all public sector workers, need a pay rise. And schools need more funding (but the NEU hasn’t badged this as a public reason which is a mistake IMP).

But 12% is a lot when you’re on a £40k salary. The TA’s deserve 12%, the nurses and ambulance drivers with dire conditions and worse salaries deserve 12%. But not from a starting salary of £40k.

Also public services can be dire. I work in one, it can be bordering on a joke and in so many ways such a waste of money. I will be striking on the 1st of February. But I don’t think it’s right - I voted against the strike. I want a pay rise, but don’t feel like it’s right to ask for 10% and strike if I don’t get it.

And those that can’t teach, teach sport!

I don’t agree with this btw, just filling the gap

Why are people supporting nurses but not teachers?

More posters are directly affected when their child's school closes due to a teacher strike than when a nurse strikes, in general. Chances of lots of posters here having a nurse appointment planned for the day of the strike is significantly lowered than having a child who's class is closed.

If they or their child wasn't affected by a strike day they'd care far less, usually.

I'm a railway worker and before anyone starts I'm not a driver and I don't earn 60k haha!

I worked throughout the pandemic, being spat at and told to fuck off by people who weren't adhering to the rules... all the while not seeing my family and living alone.

It's not just about pay, they wanna mess with my pension and my working conditions, they wanna condense it down which compromises safety.

I support all sectors, it's not always about pay!!

I’ve never known a thread like this. I don’t think a thread about nurses would have escalated so quickly. Teachers are saying what a nightmare job it is, backed up by the low retention rate and people leaving in droves. Hearing this seems to really rile people up….

On my PGCE, we would say “those who can’t teach, teach education” because (with our lecturers) it was broadly true. 😂

What other stuff and are you saying there should have been no support for energy bills, bearing in mind the government do not control the international energy market ?. Education is just one part of public sector expenditure along with social security, healthcare , the NHS , Police, transport, infrastructure and Defence etc etc. All of that has to come from taxation. On top of funding government borrowing and the national debt, which is at record levels, more than post WW2 !!!!. And just printing more money fuels inflation. There are no easy solutions.

It's not about being paid to go and see sports day or whatever, it's having the flexibility to take half a day as holiday. Can't do that in schools, unless you have a very supportive leadership team.

What an awful lot of bile directed at a group of workers trying to earn the same now as they did 12 years ago.

To be fair I suspect during the pandemic, supermarket workers had a far more stressful time at work than teachers, mainly because supermarkets were the only shops allowed open and had to try to enfore covid rules to the general public, and they are paid £10 an hour or so for the privilege. Teachers had it relatively easy in comparison!

I think I originally heard it as work for Ofsted.

I am neutral as to whether teachers strike, but I think it would be fairer to consider all the facts.

I work in the payroll/ finance area of a school... teachers in my local authority just had a 5% pay rise in their December pay backdated to September.

They are also guaranteed another pay rise which will bring the starting salary of a new teacher to approx. £30k a year by September. They are striking as they are not happy with this - they want a 12% pay rise in their next raise.

Teachers get paid on a teaching contract for 52 weeks a year, despite working only 39 contractual weeks (38 of teaching (inc. PPA time), 1 week of INSETS) - anything additional they work is up to them so long as they are prepared for their classes.

I would like to point out that in comparison, Support Staff are generally only paid on a term-time (or close to term time basis). So a salary of roughly £20k advertised for a TA, is nowhere near that. It's 38-39 weeks worth of £20k, and is unpaid for the remaining weeks.
Support staff got a 1.9% pay rise this financial year.

I am not against them striking, but hear this. There is no extra funding coming into schools to allow for the pay rises that have already taken effect, nor for the ones they are already guaranteed in coming months. That means that other resources will have to be cut... this could mean support staff redundancies (less Teaching Assistants/ Learning Support Assistants), less IT equipment and other classroom resources.

The schools have also not received any additional funding to cope with the increased energy costs. Not a penny.

In a couple of years, if not sooner, schools will be operating on skeletal staffing structures and needing parent donations for basics such as pencils and glue sticks.

Welcome to the real world!

Teachers and schools/the DfE are not the same thing. I think people misunderstand that.

Teachers are not responsible for fines for absent children.

Teachers were not to blame for schools partially closing during Covid. Teachers were not responsible for school arrangements for home learning during the pandemic - that was school management. They just did their best in the way in which they were deployed.

TLRs came up earlier. Earlier in my career I had one for managing ICT in a primary school. You would never, ever get one for that anymore. You'd struggle to get one for leading Maths or English now. Most Primary teachers now have a subject responsibility for no extra pay because of Ofsted's latest framework.

When I started teaching, you could get extra money for extra responsibilities, but not now. Now it is expected that you will take them on from day 1 and suck it up.

There are no special school places. Children with SEN are nearly all in mainstream. In addition to which, schools have cut their TA numbers to the bone so that, in lots of schools, one works across 3/4 classes. It's a double whammy of more children who need support and far fewer adults to provide it.

You could be the best teacher in the world but you are set up to fail. Teachers love to teach (if they are any good) and thrive on watching children learn. There is nothing more demoralising than knowing you are stretched too thin and no one is getting the best of you.

So what has this got to do with pay? Well it's about a more general, big picture. There is what has been said over and over about unfunded increases coming out of school budgets, but also it's a whole attitude to schools and education that means children are getting a substandard education with burnt out teachers, who all feel they are not doing their jobs as well as they can because their hands are tied behind their backs. It's about a lack of respect and esteem for teachers and education in general. It feels like the lowest priority. Your children are being treated like they don't matter. Their teachers, who are entrusted with their futures, don't matter.

We have failed to get rid of this Government despite this being obvious. I doubt many teachers voted Tory in the last election...

So what can we do to express protest? This is it. It would work if the rest of the country would take this opportunity to shout about it with us. Maybe not about pay, if you don't agree with that, but about education cuts. Support us because we are trying to get the Government to sit up and notice. It is in your interests to help us do that.

But instead, we are being turned on as if we have no right to complain.

I'm not a classroom teacher anymore. I found a better way. I wouldn't go back if you paid me double unless I could go back to the profession I started my career in - with proper support, resources and some breathing space to grow and develop.

"Teachers had it relatively easy in comparison!"

Compared to retail workers, I quite agree. A pp brought covid up as a reason why people don't support the teachers' strike. I merely pointed out that we were working not at home on furlough.

Starting salary of 40K? Erm what? I am now reached the dizzy height of 40K after qualifying in 2002 and in a promoted post. I really don’t think it is in comparable to nurses in a similar role. Where do you get your facts from?

Teachers didn’t get a payrise last year.
This years payrise is unfunded, the schools need to find it from their budget and therefore likely means a restructure and redundancies.
Only who meet upper threshold criteria would be in about £40k. Yeah the pensions are ok, once they’ve paid in 9.6%.
Teachers are special, not just anyone can control a class of 30. Most on here struggle with just their own kids.

support them, don’t support them but don’t belittle their work or compare them to another profession. I’m an accountant, that’s bloody tough but I could never be a teacher.

The OP, who has fucked off, clearly set this up as a goady thread. What has amazed me though after years on MN it shouldn't, is just how culpably thick and lazy so many posters are, seemingly incapable of doing a bit of Googling to find out some facts before posting.

I blame the teachers

@BankOfDave 😆

The current 5% has come out of school budgets hence no more for resources, TAs etc.

I guess the snowflake parenting will never end but there's always hope that people will start parenting their kids, rather than dragging them up.

I support, I do not support the rail workers strike. That are over paid already.

You really believe noone should ever try to improve their salary/conditions at work even if their circumstances change (or the economic landscape does)? Or that experienced teachers should just quit if they don't want to suck it up? If everyone who is currently fed up does leave then a couple of strike days will be the least of your worries.....

I’m a teacher in an inner London primary school.
On 32K, but work 0.8 contract, so 4/5 of that.

I am on a 0.8 contract because I need one day off to plan, prep, mark, write up SEN admin etc, unpaid, on that 5th day, as a lot of other teaching colleagues do.

I am 50 and the most vanilla person in the world. Hate confrontation, hate upsetting people. And slightly surprised that I will be going on strike.

It’s partly for better pay - I work 50 hour + weeks for £1400 a month - and have class with 28% SEN compared to national average of about 13%, 10 % eHCPs compared to national average of 3%. About a 1/3 is EAL.

Yet I am still expected to get them to the national average of expected levels for reading, writing, and maths. How?

Missing one day of school For strike action is abomination, but missing school for a state funeral and coronation is fine…

I am striking because the offered pay rise is not fully funded. To pay me and my teaching colleagues, my HT is not getting any more money. The only way he can find it is by cutting staff costs - TAs. And we don’t have enough TAs for all the literacy, numeracy, motor skills, emotional skills, speech and language interventions as it is.

I am striking because it is not right that most of my colleagues - and myself - have cried at work on numerous occasions. That’s not right. I don’t want my children taught by people so ground down. I don’t think my lovely class’s parents would like to know I have cried on the way to work, as I turned on my pc, after a fraught afternoon without a TA with a class of high need 6 year olds.

I am striking because the whole system is broken, just like the NHS, and even through striking is futile I can’t just put up with it. My own children deserve better, my ‘class’ children deserve better, everyone’s children deserve better.

Other stuff? Like wasting billions on a shit and short-lived PM? Or contracts to mates? Paying for lawyers for Boris Johnson?

Unless you are extremely stupid, you would realise that you need to invest in education if you want a strong economy.

You seem to be arguing that there should have been money to support energy companies because that was important, but that education is way down the list.

All this banging on about growing the economy and no thought for the education of the future workforce is extremely short-term thinking.

The biggest misconception in teaching is our free holidays - we pay for our holidays, a bit each month is sacrificed to give us a July wage, we only get 30 days paid leave a year!

I don’t think there’s another profession where you would expect to go in everyday to be hurt, I have permanent bite marks and scratch marks on my body. I’m covered in bruises from children. I bring in food and clothes from children who don’t have them. I buy half the resources for my class too. All the party supplies, Christmas and Easter gifts yes buy them too. Half my Sunday os spent working too,

I'm not even on 30k, third year of teaching and do seventy plus hours a week. Where are people getting 40k starting from