Parents becoming teachers? Is it me or has Gove totally lost it?

[sogrownup]

How do you feel about going into school to cover for a teacher who is on strike? Is there anyone out there who believes that this is a sound idea.... I think it's madness!!

Oops, that should have said "aren't penalised" rather than "aren't excessively penalised"! I don't want teachers "penalised" at all!

Henwelly, I don't have a problem with where you're coming from at all. Because you're not making a point, or judging, you're just trying to manage the practicalities.

The pension changes are nothing to do with 2011 really. Its a change, over time, of people living longer and therefore the cost has increeased threefold. When the arrangements were first in place they were designed to pay out for a mean numbers of years - probably less than 10. Now the mean average is probably double, treble that?

This change has almost come too late - it happens virtually immediatly for most of us, with lower investment rates kicking in in the 1990's and lower annuity rates getting worse since 1990's and not (apparantly) stopping!

This revision of pension terms had to happen sometime and, when in the public sector for many years, there is a detachment with reality. That is not helped by the Unions. I wish the Unions would concentrate on reality and negotiate for something sensible. It will be a big difference to what the contract was but that's because things have changed so substantially.

The person quoting - a pension of only 10,000 a year. For me to have that (according to my latest pension statement) I would need a pot of £350,000. You can see how the contributions being made are just not enough.

Now to your school conditions - the constant meddling with exams and paperwork requirements. New initiatives which you have to adjust to, only to know they will fail and then they do. The need for really unruly children, who probably need special help to get an education, to be passed from school to school and not taken out of the system to a special school. All this is awful and frustrating, and I'd wish it would stop too. Its nothing to do with pensions and people living longer and annuity rates falling, though.

elliebean thankyou but I did see a scabs crossing picket lines comment earlier so I may not fair so well with others!!!

For what its worth I am close friends with 5 primary teachers and they have all chosen NOT to strike as they dont agree!

allegrageller;

You are not useless (unless you are one of the few that are but we all have those!), you are almost certainly not lazy - I doubt even a useless teacher would get away with being lazy and - as for winger - you are entitled to fight your corner as much as the law will allow (which is what you are doing).

However, I can also have an opinion, and think it would do teachers cause more good if they (or their Unions) would accept reality and fight for the best new deal they could rather than having industrial action at such an early part of the process.

But, I can imagine Gove has royally p**d you off. I cannot stand the guy and I thank goodness his ignorant letters recently have not been addressed to me. I do have sympathy with your exasperation.

Hi, have just joined - so be gentle with me.....

The way I see it is Mr Gove has asked parents to provide childcare for the day in order to cover for those mums who are in a nasty position of being unable to take a day off at short notice and unable to afford childcare. I do not think that is unreasonable.

I work in a school as midday support staff - our school is closed to kids - I have 2 there - but we have to attend to midday supervise no one. We will be watching the same fire/safety video we watched on joining. I am not allowed to take my kids in. I have to find childcare for 1.5 hours in the middle of the day for 2 kids for less than £10 (my pay) or lose a day's pay to stay home and care for them. That pay is enough to provide my kids with packed lunches all week (in the real world of us lowly paid support staff - that REALLY matters).

We were told that we cannot bring the kids in as "the idea of the strike is to cause maximum disruption to parents - if it does not hurt we will never get what we want".

Some of us are between a rock and a hard place!

Our school is open. If it were to be manned by parents I would remove ds for the day. I send him to school to be taught by qualified professionals not to be babysat by parents - I can do that myself.

If there is a relationship breakdown between parents and certain teachers, then is it just possible that the teachers may have provoked that by the way they treat parents?

(I don't like the head at my children's school because she is not putting the children collectively or individually first, but i do like certain teachers because they do that. When interests are aligned why would there be a relationship breakdown?)

BTW - Shame your uion (GMB?) didn't organise a strike to get better terms for you too. Eg, the stacks of equal pay backdated to the year dot that has yet to be paid. Now you are all being told 'the country can't afford it'. Stop tax avoidance/evasion, tax corporations fairly - pay public sector workers properly

I have a possibe solution...

How old is Gove? He oviously thinks anyone can teach, and I pressume is really interested in education. How about getting hi in the classroom from the age of 65 to 68 and see what he thinks of his idea then?

Basically, we will all ultimately have to keep working into our mid-70s, without career breaks, to be able to afford 10-15 years worth of pension. Obviously, there is no guarantee we will be capable of working that long - we may be living longer, but we are living longer with diabetes, heart disease, bad backs, cancer etc. Thus, many of us won't be capable of sustaining our jobs into our 70s, so will need unemployment benefits. Or maybe by then we will just be left to starve or turn to charities (if any exist to cover the need). Or maybe we can save the money by getting rid of the NHS - then we won't have to keep people alive unless they can afford to pay for the privilege. Or perhaps we could keep some people alive, because they have enough references from friends, neighbours, family and work colleagues that they've worked hard all their lives and tried to keep themselves healthy, and haven't been too much of a drain on the NHS. Or maybe we could set up a system of compulsory euthanasia for anyone over 75 who can't afford to care for themselves and doesn't have relatives willing to take them on - either that, or effective euthanasia, by refusing to help them. The future's bright. Really looking forward to it. I think I shall work on my vegetable patch and maybe get a few pigs in the garden, before digging a well. Might be able to sustain myself for a week or two on that, unless someone else breaks in to steal it.

PotteringAlong you mention being able to earn more in the private sector - can anyone put any figures on that? Take the wage you could earn in a private job that you are qualified for, minus the pension you currently get (which you would have to pay in yourself at the same rate each month, minus the paid holidays that you would no longer get (allow 25). Minus the cost of any childcare that you would need to pay if working bog standard 9-5 job. Wouldn't you be worse off? I dont know the figures but that is the assumption I am making from my (admitedly ignorant of the facts) standpoint?

aliceliddell - you are obviously not a business studies teacher!

Tax corporations fairly. We had one of the highest company tax rates in Eurpoe. Companies can just move nowadays, and do. When they move, they don't just take their corporation tax they take employments (and the taxes that generates) and VAT. If we are careful as to what level we tax companies we can keep as many as we can here.

These are reasons why your pensions are unsustainable. If, in the future, you have your pension income which has to be funded from tax, you cannot just put tax up. There is a limit after which businesses move or have no incentive to grow.

Think of it from your own perspective. If you were offered an hours overtime at 30% taxes, you might do it. At 60% taxes you wouldn't unless desparate to pay the mortgage or eat. At 90% you'd tell your employer where to go. That is exactly what companies do and, when they go, they take masses of other taxes which they collect with them. The rates in Europe were looking very attractive until our coalition showed an interest in reduction.

As for tax avoidance - you do it all the time. If you have an ISA or claim a personal allowance. You can't and wouldn't want to stop that. Tax evasion is illegal and that's what HMRC are designed to chase. I doubt it can ever be stopped - although if the Government wrote the legislation clearer it might help minimise it.

Kez100 - I have no interest in the welfare of institutions or individuals 'rights' to make and keep profits while presiding over the destruction of the public sector. My concern is with the service users and workers, not the privatisers and profiteers. It is naive to assume that the attacks on services will stop if xy or z. The clear political project is to undermine public provision and allow the private sector access to our services.

i don't know how you police corporate tax avoidance. you have a company (say Barclays) that 100% owns another company in a different country. All it has ot do is pass an invoice between those two companies and the company in the higher tax country will simply make no profit that year. Whereas profit will be made by the subsiduary and will be taxed there. As long as the other country has lower corporation tax and a double taxation treaty with Britain (most do as its only fair), then there is nothing the Uk government can do about it.

Gove is an utterly ignorant twit. He hasn't a clue about how hard teachers really work and he seems to be increasingly determined to set the media and the public in general against the state school system and turn it into a system where, rather than schools working together with their eternally limited budgets and resources, they're working against each other.

Trust me, teachers are really, really pissed off if ATL is striking. It's a union which, up until recently has sought every course of action but strike action to make a point.

sherbetpips, I think your thinking is way too simplistic. Don't you mean money saved on childcare during the school holidays, or do you think teachers don't need childcare during the time they are working in the school, which generally extends well beyond the beginning and end of the children's school day (and since many teachers can't afford to live near the schools they teach in, they are unlikely to be in the school their children are at)? And do you mean to imply that teachers don't have to pay substantial contributions out of their salaries into their own pensions???!!! And I thought it had been established that teachers don't get paid for their holidays? And as for the wage in a private job you are qualified for - some teachers could easily earn more by going into banking, becoming airline pilots, setting up their own businesses, working in IT, marketing, accountancy, law, management consultancy, etc, others could easily find a job paying an equivalent amount and others might well end up earning considerably less, so it's a bit of an odd calculation to ask someone to make, unless you work on the assumption that everyone goes for the best paid job that they can with the qualifications they have, which would be a bit of a worry for the teaching profession in attracting good candidates, as many good candidates could earn a LOT more if they wanted to.

Also, I cannot remember another single issue where every single union, including ATL and the NAHT (neither of whom have been on strike for over a hundred years), has either balloted or signalled their intention to ballot.

Sherbetpips, most teachers have to pay a half retaining fee in the holidays - so it's not hugely different.

Perhaps it wasn't his intention, but I heard this morning from a teacher at my sons' school that more people are now deciding to strike having seen Gove on the telly this weekend.

(as an aside to sun1234 that won't necessarily work as there are tax rules on transfer pricing to prevent it in the case of large companies)

One of our lovely teachers is sadly abandoning teaching this year to go back to ICT: better money, more security

Be interested to hear where it is they will be getting more security.

Not surprised re: Gove. He is an idiot.

It's a crazy notion.

I'm a qualified teacher but not working at present, so it wouldn't be that strange for me to go into DD1's school, however, because I'm a teacher and hope to return to work at some point, I don't want to keep the school open. Teachers are striking for a reason and to make an impact. It's supposed to be an inconvenience, that's the whole bloody point!

The teacher's [pension scheme was reviewed 2 years ago by an independent body who's recommendation was that it was already cost effective and efficient and not due for review again anytime soon. It's this government that has decided to ignore this advice and throw it back into the pot with all the other public sector pensions.

Also can I please inform those of you on the board who don't understand how the pension scheme is calculated, it's actually made up of deferred payments. basically we give a part of our monthly wage to the government to look after for us until we retire. Essentially we are asking them to keep it safe, the argument why so many people are getting angry is that what's happened to the money that they should have been looking after since the TPS was set up? all the retired teachers and teachers who sadly died before the collected any or all of their pensions, where has that gone? I can understand why some teachers are starting to opt out, but if they do they lose that additional part of their salaries.

Again you can't compare private sector and Public sector, it's part of the teacher's pay and condtions we have as employees of the government. Basically this raid on pensions is because we are soft targets and have a scheme that we pay directly to the government (our employer) , they want more of our salary back and us to work longer.

As a secondary school teacher i can NOT imagine standing in front of a bunch of teenagers at 66 years old, they don't even respect 50 year old teachers. The way society is going at the moment with poor parental control, it will be a nightmare in 20 years time in a classroom of 30. Who's to say in the future more and more private sector workers won't negotiate private school fees into their 'perks' therefore leaving our state schools to sink even further...

Exactly, minty! Although there was someone on one of these threads the other day suggesting that the strikes were held in the summer holiday!!