Teachers strike... what will actually happen in end?!

[SpringPop]

My school is striking again next week with others that have teachers from the particular union.

All that is happening is parents are getting massively angry. Kids are missing out. I've used so much holiday on strike days as I have multiple children. I know my anger should not be directed to school but exactly where can I direct it to? I'm pretty sure my MP wouldn't care. He's completely useless.

The government don't seem to care.

I personally think something needs to change in that profession and funding in my area is shocking! It's probably not attracting the best people to the profession and certainly is driving people away.

However, am I right in thinking rishi and co don't care?! Teachers could do 5, 10, 100 days and it seems they won't budge right?

Parents don't seem to care or get angry enough, short of tweeting about it or writing to MP. It isn't really enough to get this resolved.

How do you think this situation will end?

I think I started teaching well before you. Non teaching HOYs definitely were not a thing. Ofsted was a very different beast.

I also was there. As a teaching HOY. Yes, New Labour introduced some dubious things but we didn't have free schools, huge MATs, the madness of data obsession in anything like the same way. The behaviour and uniform thing goes in circles. Most parents actually judge a school on the smartness of uniform. We have gone from blazers to ties and jumpers, to polo shirts to hoodies and back to ties and blazers.

Your education policies definitely don't sound like Tory ones.

They most definitely were a thing and I too was a teaching HOY. In academic year 2007/8 I was on a protected salary doing nothing as all our pastoral care was turned over to two pastoral managers (KS3 and KS4) and I ended up being appointed as Head of IAG/Citizenship/PSHEE instead. It sticks in my mind as I was pregnant when I interviewed for it!

Possibly as an outcome then of the generally sound Teachers' Workload Agreement.

They were rare, and vanishingly rare in the late 90s to mid 2000s.

Thinking about it now, that was when the rot set in for me as I was a D and T teacher with curriculum responsibility for another area (and taught it too) and when I came back from my second maternity leave I had a new curriculum leader who couldn't cope with the fact I was on the same TLR as him. Also hated women of a certain age, which was most of his department, and behaved appallingly to all of us. Nothing to do with being managed out because I was crap. Oh, happy days 😂

Something that has appeared a few times on this thread has been the reduction of languages offered at schools and the use of non qualified teachers. I was an MFL a teacher but left at Christmas as I couldn’t take the 60 hour weeks, getting up at 5.30 to read emails and work before getting to work, teaching five periods a day with ever decreasing breaks, meetings galore before and after school, running interventions for GCSE pupils who never turned up, constant rudeness, defiance and disrespect for my subject, the never ending re writing of schemes of work and
lesson plans, soul crushing levels of scrutiny and unrealistic data targets… the list goes on.

i started off as an enthusiastic Spanish teacher hoping to inspire pupils, become head of department, lead trips abroad etc etc and what I found was most pupils do not value my subject and even at GCSE level the ones who picked it often gave up when they realized they had to actually do some work. Many parents I called admitted they had told their kids to focus on other more important subjects and ultimately i paid the price by having to give up my time chasing up every piece of homework and substandard grade.

Now I’ve heard a non subject specialist who doesn’t speak Spanish is teaching my classes. No idea how and I find this upsetting on one hand but also this is what happens when you make teachers feel like crap and like their subject is worthless.

I may return if things change in the future but am currently retraining as a speech therapist in the hope of finding a job where I can make a difference and not be abused everyday. One can hope.

Oh, that first paragraph sounds so familiar!! Laughably, people still refer to school 'lunch hours'. It's one of the biggest squeezes on our time since I started teaching - and it's no use for enrichment or extra curricular either, for those who want to put something on. It's just a treadmill, sadly. DH works in an independent school where they still have an hour and ten minutes for lunch. Sure, he finishes later but there is at least a point in the day to eat something properly, catch up with colleagues, read , go for a stroll, nip to the shop, have a cuppa.

I'm an MFL teacher and my school still teaches three languages, fortunately. Unusually, the students do all three in Y7, then drop to two in Y8 and have to take at least one for GCSE. We run A Level courses in all 3 (though often with pretty small classes). It is a grammar school though, but obviously that doesn't mean it has more money. We also have a full hour lunch break.