Teacher pay rise/strike

[Nix32]

AIBU to want people to realise that the potential teacher strikes are NOT about the percentage payrise?

They are about the fact that this payrise would be unfunded, which means they would have to come out of already stretched budgets. This would mean redundancies and even fewer resources. This has a direct effect on the children.

Please remember this when you are slating teachers.

Teacher here who is currently looking at a very long to do list that needs completing in the holidays. It's not the pay that's the issue. It's the ridiculous amount of evenings, weekends and holidays given over to planning, preparation and marking and increasingly filling in paperwork for doctors, social workers, SEN assessments.
My wages look great for a 40 hour working week but this is a job where you are increasingly working 60-70 hours a week. I currently get 3 hours a week to prep, plan and mark the other 22 hours of classes. It's impossible even without the government constantly tinkering with exams and specifications. Every 8 to 10 years we rip up everything we've been doing and start over.
I don't want a payrise, I want 20% PPA as standard. I want properly funded departments where we can buy things in rather than having to reinvent the wheel. I want parents who don't constantly take their children's word over that of adults and who try to put a label on children at the first sign of any issues. I'd like a supportive monitoring system that empowers rather than belittles teachers. I could go on and on... This has never been about the money.

You're absolutely right. It's the time to do everything that's expected that is the biggest problem.

Obviously a teacher needs to do their own PPA to inform teaching, but I often think it's like two separate jobs. In other roles, there are groups of people who spend the vast majority of the week on the ground / in the field etc, while others complement them by completing admin, dealing with stakeholders and actively working on new strategies.

In teaching, it's a full timetable where you're always on, with no break between different requirements and usually not a long enough stretch to work on anything meaningfully within the working week.

If I teach five lessons a day, I then have 150 pieces of work to assess in some way and five lessons to prepare for the next day, so it's done after the working day should have stopped, when my private sector DH will have had a few hours within the working day to collaborate with colleagues and prepare for 1 meeting/presentation the next day!

But the unions don't seem to have mentioned non contact time.

The retention crisis is not about pay, but it is also about retaining teachers who have been in the system for a long time.
There are pretty good incentive to get into teaching, but not to stay.
I do know a lot of people who left for better paying jobs (or comparable pay with a few for pay increase every once and so often). People who left for worse paying jobs earn the same after tax and have a lot more free time (they can use to tutor etc so bring more money). I dont know many people who would be much worse off after leaving.

The NEU support non-teaching staff too, but they have to coordinate any potential action with other unions who more typically represent support staff. So they do consider support staff and I’ve been very impressed with the level of engagement for that staff cohort. I’m fully behind any action they propose for their teacher membership.

I was on a long term supply contract. I lost my job the first week of April because the head said he couldn't afford to keep me on as he has to pay staff salary increases and the hike in employers' NI out of current budget. My role will be covered by a mix of SLT and HLTAs. The school is also training up 6 TAs to do supply duty. As virtually all the TAs in the school are 1 to 1s (hardly any general classroom TAs left), this will mean children with SEND left unsupported on the days their TAs cover teacher absence. Nobody wants schools to be like this.

This is disappointing from the government. They would be better to say "here is 1% funded as that is all we can afford" and then see what teachers do with that. An unfunded pay rise is what I expect from the Tories.
Poor teachers.

I'm nor against teachers getting a pay rise and I think it's well deserved, but this is partly why attendance is so bad in schools, all the strikes plus covid closures, parents think well if they can cancel a day's education like it's not important then so can I. It can't only be important when they decide, it's either terrible if they miss a day or it's not, can't be terrible for me to take my child out for 1 day but ok for gov/teachers to cancel learning for a day

Only the thick ones…. I’m sorry but I’m not sure what the alternative would have been during the pandemic- we had little to no choice.
And striking would be a last resort of teachers standing up for the children’s right to a decent education. Hardly the same as not bothering or thinking it’s unimportant.
Go make your digs somewhere else.

Support staff absolutely should be paid more. However, rules around industrial action govern how strikes can be carried out, and teachers can only strike regarding their own pay and conditions . This can only happen once correct ballot procedures have been followed.

Support staff need to encourage their own unions to ballot the membership if they are keen to take action- wildcat strikes by teachers on behalf of workers who are not members of their own union are not allowed.

However, if the strike action by teachers is effective it would benefit support staff indirectly, because the strike action is to push the government to fund teacher pay, rather than expecting schools to cut provision.

It’s not teachers fining parents for removing children for a day- it’s local authorities. School heads have no powers to authorise absence in the vast majority of circumstances.

I’m a leader in a primary school and we have been told by our LA that we will be worse off next year than we were under the Tories. This shouldn’t be the way under a labour government. I know that education didn’t form a big part of their election campaign but I naively thought we’d be ok!

We can’t not have teachers teaching classes. About 90% of our budget goes on staffing. When schools aren’t funded, it’s support staff who are at risk. This obviously also puts further pressure on teachers. I will be striking if it comes to it- not for the salary for the 60 hour weeks I do but because they are not planning to fund the pay rise they are suggesting and we are constantly being asked to do more for less.

I know this, but it's not 1 rule for 1 and 2 for another. It's how plenty of parents see it.

Education is key to social mobility. Given their history and all they supposedly stand for, Labour should, out of any of the political parties, be the education sector's biggest supporter.

However, they are expecting schools to fund a (paltry) pay rise and increase in NI contributions out of existing budgets, which ultimately means staff will have to be made redundant, and/or supplies, facilities and trips for children won't be able to be funded, which all equates to children getting a worse quality of education.

Those of us who have been teaching for a long time can see the difference over the past ten years - we used to have full supply cupboards, cover supervisors, TAs, plenty of trips out and lots of experienced, well educated teachers on UPS.

Now teachers are providing the coloured pencils out of their own money, schools are filled with ECTs with crap degrees from crap unis who can't spell or add up, and TAs are teaching classes when teachers are off.

If we value social mobility, we have to value education. We have to fund education so that it's an attractive profession for well qualified, intelligent people, that's competitive to get into, offers good promotion and pay rise opportunities, and allows teachers time and space to plan and prepare properly within the boundaries of the working day. While we continue to pay teachers peanuts, we will get monkeys - in my experience, the quality of entrants to the profession over the past ten or so years has been declining rapidly, and this will only get worse if the pay teachers receive remains at current levels. If parents like @Flowers1985 want their kids to be taught by people who can barely spell or add up, then they're going the right way about it by not supporting strikes.

Good lord.

Yes, because teachers going on strike to pressure the government into giving schools enough money to give your child a decent education is really the same as you taking your child out of school so you can get £100 off your flights to the Costa del Sol.

Exactly.

It's a stupid and ignorant way to see it though. Teachers strike for better conditions FOR the students now and in future, not just themselves. There is a purpose of the strikes, to make sure kids get funding they need. Kids sitting at home doing f all is not quite the same thing. If oyu cant see a difference then you cant be helped.
It would be the same if teachers decided to go on a holiday term time to also save on flights. Which they dont.

What would your suggestion be then?

You know a lot of stupid parents - I make no apologies for calling them that.

Teachers value education, which is why they are striking:

YANBU

But... as some people lack brain cells and think teachers earn £49k a year and only work 9am til 3pm term time, then trying to get this across might be rather tricky!

Schools are already stretched financially, so awarding a pay rise that the school has to foot the bill for is ludicrous!

I support anyone taking collective action to improve their pay and working conditions. Needing to strike is a clear sign that the contract between staff and employers isn’t working as it should and workers have very limited ways to redress that balance. Teachers on strike is inconvenient to the general population, but having poorly run schools and burnt out educators is disastrous in the long term.

There's been a lot of work put in on here over the past couple of months putting down teachers, so it's nice to see it's been a little bit in vain and actually teachers do have support

I'm a middle leader in a specialist role, my pay is okay, but that is largely because my husband earns more than me and my mortgage is low! When I started teaching a few teachers in middle leadership had second homes in France to allow them affordable holidays for the summer months and would retire fairly early on a good pension having paid off their mortgage. There's no doubt the standard of living for your average teacher has declined - I'm sure when I stated the salary was about the same as the average UK wage - now it's definitely below. Average wages have gone up just over 5% in last 6 months, so an annual increase of 2.8% is low and unfunded as others have said will have a knock on effect on our workload and ability to do our job effectively.

The biggest issue for me is that we are simply not attracting enough people into teaching, schools can not fill current vacancies with quality appointments. This in turn makes everyones job harder. How many schools are there with at least one science teacher vacancy, kids just having supply every lesson, it isn't just devastating for their learning in that subject, but behaviour becomes poor and that then has a knock on effect on the rest of the school and the rest of the learning.

We talk about persistant absenteeism, well if there isn't a teacher, or there is likely to be 20% of lessons where no learning happens because of failure to appoint or appointing teachers simply not up to the job, you can understand why families start to value attendance less.

So despite the fact that I personally have a reasonable standard of living, I do support strike action because the whole system is currently underfunded and undervalued.

I wouldn't worry about redundancies. The hemorrhage of teachers out and the lack of recruitment of new teachers will still out weigh any reduction in need.

Well quite - we may need to reduce numbers in a few years, but we need to cover all the maths/science/geography/tech/English classes now. In my school they weren't even getting many candidates for the last PE vacancy, I know a couple of schools struggling to cover art - these subjects used to be massively over subscribed.
Very few kids taking A-levels in English these days, it's a real worry - where are the next generation of teachers going to come from?

@wonderstuff because they keep marketing A Level English as English and then students crash and burn, when in reality, it's really linguistics. I had a head teacher once refer to it as the first year of a linguistics degree. So refreshing to find someone who really got it.

But a student with a mediocre GCSE English grade, or IGCSE English wouldn't stand a chance with A Level English Lang. A shame, because it is a GREAT, high quality qualification.

There are LOADS of very experienced, well qualified, GREAT teachers out there that might consider returning if working conditions were better. But who wants to work 80 hours a week, when they can earn a similar wage on a standard 40/45 hour week? Until the government wises up to this, there will be no resolution.