Teachers on strike - do they usually name names?

[hester]

Just had a letter from dc's school, warning us of strike action at the end of the month and listing by name those teachers who will be on strike, and those who won't. They will close the classes of the striking teachers, and keep open the others.

Is this normal practice? I would have thought it would expose individual teachers to some irate parents? I also expected that they would treat it as a whole school issue, provide what cover they can, maybe suspend lessons and hav a games day in the hall. And if they couldn't do that, close the whole school?

Also sun, I really don't think I have a choice but to gamble on the stock market, there is no safe haven for me to put my profits in. Nobody can gurantee to give me a regular income at retirement and the annuity rates are shocking. Also you need to start early to have enough time for the funds to grow.

Where has the £20 000 pension figure come from? The average teacher's pension is £9,000 a year. If you retire at 55, your pension is reduced by about 23%.

I thought that mrz - mine is calculated at less than £9000 as I've done lots of p/t (also a fair bit of f/t)

Mines much less than £9000 because I had a previous private sector career (luckily with a much better pension)

Don't you get an 80th for each year of service plus 3/80ths tax free lump sum at retirement. Therefore a teacher on a salary of £26,000 who worked full time for 30 years would be 26000/80*20 = £6,500 plus a lump sum of £19,500. Most other final salary schemes have 1/60th for each year but deduct the lump sum from the final salary so it would be misleading to compare - apples and pears. If you work part-time, your pension is based on the full salary but the year pro-ratad based on the number of hours you work. After 30 years you would get £9,750 plus nearly £30,000 as a lump sum of full time.

The new teacher's pension is calculated at a 60th of final average salary and there is no automatic lump sum entitlement

"Pension is 1/60 of final average salary for each year of reckonable service.

There is no automatic pension lump sum for members. There is however, the option to take a retirement lump sum, up to 25% of fund value, by surrendering £1 of pension for £12 of lump sum.

Reckonable service is the number of years and days the member has been in the TPS (that is, in pensionable employment), plus any other service they may be entitled to take into account. This could be service they have transferred from another pension scheme. "

As a private sector worker with a final salary scheme I have to weigh very heavily whether to change jobs (and am considering a move now) because I won't get a final salary anywhere else - they just don't exist for new joiners in the private sector now. But the final salary scheme I started with ( was 'promised') has been whittled away over the years, and is now much less than it would have been, because it is just not affordable any more - like the teachers' So I have to accept the same reality that some of them are just refusing to face up to.

So you are expecting a pension of less than £9000 for 30 years service MrsG?

MrsGuy - would this be the same pension scheme as Fred Goodwin? Has it occurred to you to wonder if the same effort had been put into defending your pension that you might still have it? A little gullible to think these attacks on our living standards are ineitable, like weather. They're not. Pensions (and all the rest) were fought for and will be fought for again to defend them. This 'reality' seems very selective in its effects.

No - according to Mrs Guy people had tantrums to get pensions, and you are tantrumming if you try to defend them, apparently.

You are tantrumming if you are refusing to accept the reality of the situation - ie there is not enough money swishing about for everyone to have 25+ years of retirement without funding it from earnings - ie setting aside MUCH more than we have been doing.
The baby-boomers have hada good ride, which appears to have set unrealistic expectations - but this was an aberration - throughout history people have had to work almost all their lives. We with cushy jobs, including teachers, can expect to live to 85+. So.... who pays?

You didn't answer MrsG are you expecting less than £9000 pension for 30 years contributions?

I think it was the people who the babyboomers paid for that had the good ride. those who got pensions in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. If you retired in 1960, then there was no way you had made a lifetime of NI contributions but you still got the pension.

In the 80s there was a whole trend towards people being able to retire in the mid-50s on a decent pension and their pension was paid for by the work the babyboomers were doing at that time.

However, now that the babyboomers want to retire, they are finding that they didn't produce enough babies to keep the whole thing going.

mrz- i don't think MrsG's pension is any of your business, is it?

Well since my pension seems to be her (and your) business it only seems fair sun ... are you expecting to get less than £9000 pension for 30 years service?

how much you get is not my business. How much teachers want the tax payer to top up their pensions is my business. Its another downside of being a state employee. But then there are upsides and if you have worked in both then you will know how the two compare and contrast better than me

You seem to conveniently be ignoring the fact that public sector workers including teachers make up the bulk of UK tax payers.
The upside of being a teacher is that I love my job and my workplace
The downside is the workload/the wages/and the public's ignorance of the demands of the job and the belief that we are going to get huge pensions when we retire.

One thing that I haven't seen an answer on is: are teachers having their final salary scheme closed or are they just getting a less advantageous final salary scheme? is there an option of switching to a money purchase scheme? Obviously mrz would not know exactly how much she would receive under a money purchase scheme so there must be some sort of final salary scheme still on offer.

The final salary scheme is being replaced with a career average option.

but its still defined benefit as opposed to defined contribution? (and that's the expensive and risky part)

why not just change to a defined contribution scheme and have done with it, instead of having your guaranteed pension whittled away? If you are confident that your current contributions cover what you need to retire, then you'll be fine. If you are wrong though, then you won't be fine and therein lies the problem most people in Britain are facing today.

One of the changes to TPS from 6 April 2012, if you are a member of a contracted-out defined contribution pension scheme (also called a money-purchase scheme), you will cease to be contracted out....

Just to clarify

Assume I pay £100 in tax (as a private sector business)

This tax is given to the government

The government payes your wages

You then pay £100 in tax

Where did the money come from? The private sector (my profits)

Yes you are paying tax but the original source is the private sector. Whilst you do amazing work, can you see that the original source is always the private sector as government has no other source of money.

All I am saying is the private sector cannot keep taking all the risk. I think the time has come for you to have a defined benefit scheme in the same way as most of the private sector has. In IMHO your wages should increase to reflect the change.

sorry I meant you should have a defined contriubution scheme*.