The thing is, teachers are also parents, they also are impacted by the strikes - for example, my kids school strikes on different days than mine, except I am physically not able to take a day off to cover it as we don’t have “holidays” in the way that other employees do, and parental leave policy does not apply as it is a “planned” closure (ie we knew about it so it’s on us to work out childcare)
Teachers are also not paid when they are on strike, and teachers are financially struggling too. Hence why we are striking.
Teachers don’t want to be on strike, but their pay has been cut by 24% in the past 15 years. In the same time, the workload has grown exponentially, to the point that I’m working over double my contracted hours most weeks. Often this means that I’m earning less than national minimum wage for each hour I work.
And before someone says it. No, we don’t HAVE to do that. We could regurgitate five year old lessons and we could not differentiate work for the increasing number of children who need it. We could leave our classroom walls blank. We could not read up on strategies for managing various learning barriers we have in class. We could not try and make our lessons engaging in the hope that it minimises the constant stream of low-level behaviour. We could not try to minimise the wealth divide in our classroom by organising supported study.
However, the only people that would suffer would be the children. We are striking because what we are doing now is untenable, especially for what we are paid.
We completely accept that we are fairly well paid in comparison to others (in terms of salary) and most teachers support strikes in other sectors too. Yet the narrative is constantly “lazy teachers work 9-3 and get 11 billion weeks of holiday, what about the poor …”
We have the power to strike over our own pay and conditions; teachers getting fairly compensated for their work sets the precedent for others to get a wage rise too.
The argument that “paying teachers 10% will drive up inflation” is a red herring. Less than 1% of the population of Scotland is a teacher. There are around 54,000 FTE teachers.
Lets assume that all of them are at the top of the pay scale, and there are no promoted teachers which is absolutely not true, but probably works out to a similar wage bill. this means teachers in Scotland cost £2,268,000,000 PA in a wage bill. (That’s 2.2 billion) against a budget of 4.1 billion for education, and a total budget of 56.5 billion against approx 50 billion spending.
The 10% pay rise amounts to approx £226,800,000. Which is a lot of money on a personal level, but when speaking about a country as a whole, it’s not much.