Teachers take £7000 pay cut to save colleagues’ jobs

[noblegiraffe]

www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/30/teachers-volunteer-pay-cut-save-colleagues-jobs-furzedown-funding

No no no no no. We can’t go down this route. Teachers already give up their own money to fund stuff for their classrooms, they can’t start paying their colleagues’ wages as well. We can’t devalue ourselves, we need to fight the government for our full worth.

Such a lovely, kind gesture, as you’d expect from teachers, but not good for the profession.

I know this is about teachers but a similar proposal was suggested to our team a few months ago to save one person's full time or two people's part time job in Children's services.

We all refused because it meant we were devaluing our own skills.
Everyone agreed to go to interview instead.

I'm so glad you posted this, @noblegiraffe . When it was announced I was a lone voice on a Fb post by a local councillor, who had swallowed the marvellous-sacrifice-for-our-children line, hook, line and sinker.

In a month's time, the Wandsworth parents will have totally forgotten those slashed hours and salaries, and any outrage will have faded. And life for teachers in perhaps less-benign MATs will be a whole lot harder when similar "deals" are put before them on the table: either you take the cut, or an LSA gets it.

Awful as it is, pressure from the public to resist further cuts will only come while the impact of those cuts is visible.