I don't want paying extra to do overtime. I have a child and she deserves me to be present as well. Again, this goes back to my original post that parents assume teachers can work longer and longer to solve the massive issues in schools.
I used to tick every box in my 20s. My school was good and I did get paid overtime. But to fit in my job to the level it actually required, I was in at 7am every day and didn't leave till 7pm at the very very earliest and I was also in most Saturdays running extra intervention classes. It was not sustainable, I had a breakdown after 4 years and took 6 months off on sick. In that time, every child had a non-specialist supply. Every child got the same worksheet printed off the Internet to keep them busy. No one had their needs met. When I came back to work, they told me they didn't know where they could cut the pressure as it all NEEDED doing. And they were right.
My books needed marking.
Parents expect children to be able to come back after to school to get homework help.
I was contracted to do all the open days, parent's evenings, year 9 GCSE taster events etc, all happening outside of school hours.
I needed to plan my lessons.
I was expected to have differentiated resources personalised to the need of every student in the class. Of which, as mentioned before, nowadays there are a lot.
Parents expect revision sessions to be put on.
Then you have all the extra stuff like organising trips, guest speakers, assemblies.
I'm not going back to working those hours, so I quit and found a school that respected my time more. It's still impossible to do it all, so corners get cut. But there is an understanding that I am a human, not a machine, and I can only do my best with the time and resources available to me.
I have also worked at a school where ramps did not get installed for a disabled student. The student had all their classes in an accessible ground-floor room and all the class moved to that room rather than moving to the teacher's room. We don't even have money for books in September. Like literally, the kids will start in September and I have about 5 pieces of paper left over from last year and no books.
Again, if schools were funded properly, class sizes could be smaller, meaning we have less books to mark, less students disrupting the learning, less students to cater the needs to, less parents to see at parents evening. This would increase the time I have outside of school. Funding schools properly would allow us to go back to the days when we could afford teaching assistants, so students with SEN get additional support and would allow for things like a student WiFi to be in schools so students could download the resources onto a device so they can apply coloured filters etc, perhaps do their work on a Google docs instead of in an exercise book because dyslexic handwriting can be impossible to read, so I'm missing additional errors when marking.
Teachers, 99% of the time, really care about every young person they teach. But I just kind of wanted to give you another picture as to why it may not be spot on every time. This is also going to get worse whilst people still keep voting Tory. Teachers have had enough of the hours and are leaving in droves. There's a group on social media for teachers planning on quitting the profession with hundreds of thousands of members and is growing, not shrinking. Those people leaving are often accepting a pay cut just to get a work-life balance. Training programs are not not being filled. Experienced teachers are being managed out and replaced for cheaper teachers who won't have the same level of knowledge on SEN.
There's basic things a school can do to be more dyslexia friendly, but to do it properly, what they need is time.