To think this could solve teachers' problems

[NovemberRains]

Teachers want higher pay.

Their employers currently pay a whopping ~24% into a defined benefit pension scheme!

AIBU to think that a lot of their problems could be solved if they were just given the option to either continue as they are, or get a 20% pay increase and have a 4% employer contribution to a standard defined contribution pension scheme like the vast majority of the population get!

I respect teachers, but based on my knowledge when overall remuneration is considered including pension and holidays, they really aren't underpaid compared to other professions!

It's a similar story for other public sector professions!

@Janedoe82 I thought so, thanks for clarification. I am a "front line" AHP in an underfunded, stressful environment, and, again, I'd like you to stop assuming you speak for everyone else who isn't a teacher, especially AHPs. We are a huge group of people and as such have a wide range of opinions.

If you line manage 50 AHPs, you must be very senior.

What wage are you on?

What is your profession?

It seems to be mainly primary where the problems lie, I may be wrong. My child's secondary has endless extra staff for welfare/student support etc - but isn't this extra support needed in primary too? To work on problems early? There was only 1 part time support/wellbeing person in my child's primary and there were dozens of children that needed support - she just couldn't get to them all.

I don’t want to say anything too outing but no I am not on a huge wage- certainly not more than teachers with management responsibilities.
At no point have I said teaching isn’t a difficult job- I myself wouldn’t do it as I know it would be highly stressful and I wouldn’t want to spend the bulk of my time in a classroom with children. But stressful and difficult are two different things, and when you have a specific budget you need to work within you are going to at times make decisions that annoy people.
I am not disputing that everyone is struggling with the cost of living rises and it is awful, but again- there isn’t a magic money tree and demands for these huge pay increases just are not realistic without taking money from somewhere else and it is very difficult to see where that might be.

@Janedoe82 oh, come on, you're just repeating the same things again and again. The discourse has gone way beyond May's "magic money tree". You're not engaging with the posters who have challenged you constructively and provided reasoned evidence-based counter-arguments. You duck around all this and circle back to parroting what has already been discredited. I'm out.

My school proposed it before Christmas - their plan is currently on hold after we balloted for strike action.

I can read what people are saying and why they are unhappy. But the bottom line is- there is no more money and these issues in relation to staff hours/ work load are something that the schools themselves need to look at and find solutions too. But simply getting paid more isn’t going to fix problems in the day to day running of schools.
The same as in any other business.

You're right that there're a lot of other things wrong in the system. But one argument has always been that pay increases will help (a bit) with recruitment & retention, and that has the knock-on effect of fewer vacancies, which eases up workload.

there isn’t a magic money tree

And yet you claim not to be spouting Tory propaganda.

I regularly see people on social media coming out with statements like "being a parent is the hardest job in the world".

We also regularly see threads on here from SAHP about their working partner and division of housework / care / money / whatever, and in almost every thread the general theme is that being a SAHP is at least as hard, if not harder, than working full-time in terms of stress, effort, time, etc.

In both those cases there are usually 1-3 children involved. Yet when it comes to teachers looking after 30+ kids for 6-8 hours a day it suddenly becomes a piece of piss anyone can do.

I'd love to know why there's such a switch in attitudes from parenting to teaching?

How many times does this need spelled out to you.........THERE IS PLENTY OF MONEY.

The sitting government just do not want to put it towards education.

Similarly, all the other issues around work load stem from government policy, they could review/change that too if they wanted too.

Increased pay is not going to deal with the operational issues that are causing the stress. This is an issue that needs to be solved internally within the schools and with the school inspectors in terms of their expectations.
I would imagine schools having better access to other outside services such counsellors/ educational psychologists and behaviour management specialists would also be a big help. But these are all things very much separate from teachers pay.

I don’t think being a teacher would be ‘piss easy’. I would hate it! I know how draining and stressful it would be.

Being paid 50k as opposed to 40k isn’t going to change anything.

@Janedoe82 it naffing well would !!! An extra £10,000 would mean I could pay people to do things to make my home tick over, mean I could get a car that's not falling apart and would make me feel valued. That alone would be nice.

But we can only strike over pay and conditions.

We can't strike over "underfunded SEN provision" which is my main gripe.

You don't think higher wages help with recruitment at all?

Weird.

@Janedoe82 and part of the work load issue is due to lack of staff. If we could retain staff (because they wouldn't earn more at Aldi) them we'd all have less work to do. Simples.

But simply getting paid more isn’t going to fix problems in the day to day running of schools

On the contrary, teachers asking the government to fund pay rises itself rather than depleting an exhausted school budget does, indeed, fix a problem in the day to day running of the school.

You seem to believe that we have a moral duty not to strike because the government has no money. This is nonsense. It’s also totally unhelpful because the government doesn’t give out prizes for bootlicking. Teachers aren’t prepared to put up with shit anymore and neither should the rest of us.

Being paid more will not deal with the workload- which apparently is the main complaint and reason teachers are leaving.
And you need to be qualified to be a teacher- if there is no pipeline of qualified people to fill the positions it doesn’t matter how much you pay.

(1) One of the causes of excessive workload at the moment is the shortage of teachers, (2) meaning people have to cover those classes.

The suggestion is that (3) increasing pay would help with recruitment & retention. (4) This would reduce the shortage and (5) ease the workload.

Which of these claims do you disagree with? I've numbered them for ease of reply.

3- I don’t think an increase in pay will have anywhere near the impact you think it will.
I used to earn double what I do now in a high pressured role. I wouldn’t go back to it as it wasn’t worth it. I suspect it is very much the same with teaching. People do not want to do it due to what the actual job entails and lack of ability to progress.

If someone can earn 40k and do a job they find fulfilling with a good work life balance and enough money to be comfortable, why would they want to earn 50k and be stressed all the time and having to pay the extra out on cleaners and have limited quality of life? If it really is as bad as everyone seems to be saying.
Pay won’t make a difference- sorting out the issues adding strain in the class room will improve the retention issues.

Thank you! The government thinks that it will, hence its manifesto commitment to increase starting salaries. I agree that there's a lot else to be fixed, but, as @mumsneedwine said, I also think that extra money can help stressed people by making home-life a bit easier in all sorts of ways.

Once more for the people at the back

YOU CAN'T IMPROVE TEACHER WORKLOAD WITH FEWER AND FEWER TEACHERS, IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE.

By the way, I have no particular axe to grind here. I'm nearing retirement and have a pretty nice job running a small department in a private school which has few of those stresses (although we're not entirely immune to ever-increasing paperwork and administration). But I'm not at all representative of teachers as a whole! The problem even for me is that the day-to-day requirements of the career have changed so much over the last 20/30 years. I probably wouldn't go into it now as a young graduate.