63 replies to this topic

[Jammy]

I think legally you should get 21 days holiday. That 21 days can include public holidays.And I'm sure thats only for people working full time.

[ferrit]

Just wanted to add my two penneth worth to the discussion. Mrs Ferrit is a teacher in a High School in the North West, she is not in the NUT and therefore wasnt on strike. The school did not close down but opperated on reduced classes with the non NUT teachers being expected to pick up the pieces caused by the strike action.

Unfortunatley for me I have a good knowledge of the situation with regard to teachers pay as every time its on the news she goes off on one about it, so here is I hope a reasonably easy to understand explanation of the strike action:-

1. Teachers must have a Degree subject, we all know this and as lots of us can tetify a University education is now a costly business with lots of students now leaving not only with a degree but also sadled with, in the worse cases £30k worth of debt. Now lets think about that one for a minute before you actually start work you are in a negative equity position.

2. Having got their degree prospective teachers must now hold a Post Graduate qualification in teaching which is another minimum of a year so more debt incurred.

3. Having become a qualified teacher (NQT) you would think they are on the gravy traine. Wrong!. Starting salery for a teacher is on average £20,133, wow thats a lot of money. Not really it is comensurate with other newly qualified Professions, ands lets face it thats what they are. They need a degree and a post grad therefore are professionals in the true sense of the word (Architects, Solictors, Barristers, Surveyors etc). BUT they are already a year behind as trainee professionals can go straight into practice at a junior level and study their professional exams whilst working but paid at a reduced rate.
Lets look how that compares with others:-

Teachers starting off in classrooms in England and Wales earn £20,133 and your pension isnt available until 65, so become a teacher at 20 and work until 65 before you can access your pension

Police Officers after training, all officers start earning £24,039 a year, after 10 years without going for promotion £33,800. Oh and you need only get 25 years in before you can retire on full pension. So join at 20 and work until 45 then retire from the force on full wack supplementing your income with other paid work. SWEET!

Firefighters when qualified all receive a basic £27,185, after that you must get promotion to increase your earnings.Under the old scheme you worked until 55 before you could claim your full pension, under the new scheme its 60. Not as sweet as the police but seeter than a teacher.

Nurses, its difficult to say as there so many designations however a figure on avarage often quoted is £25000 for an RGN, Dont jump on me if this is incorrect as its difficult to get this information. Earliest available retirment date of full pension 65.

And just to stir thing up an average salary for trainee solicitors in 2003 was £19,748 and a recent Law Society fact sheet on Private Practice Solicitors' Salaries estimates the average salary of a solicitor in private practice as £50,000. Architects - Post Diploma £20575, Project Architect £39750, Partner £67125. Wowsers!!! and lets go back to the fact that teachers are actually professionals in the truest sense of the word ie University educated with professional post graduate qualification. We compare them to othe PSO workers as they are in the public sector but a truer comparison would be against other Prpfessions.

4. But they finish at 3.30pm and have loads of holidays, right? Wrong! My misses works until 8.00pm at the earliest, if shes not marking books she is preparing schemes of work, validating other teachers work, exam marking, preparing for Ofsted inspections blah blah blah On top of this she runs our household and looks after our own son. Most of us go home at 5pm have our tea and put the kids to bed. We then put our feet up with a cup of tea and watch Corrie, easy life! The same goes for the massive amounts of holidays, 50% of these massive amount of holidays are also spent preparing for the forth coming term or marking examination papers. Oh and think about this one most of us can go on holiday when we please, if we want to go abroad in term time we just take this kiddywinks out of school and go, we might even have to pretend they are ill. Therefore being able to access holidays at sensilble rates, yet teachers can only go out of term time at what is called peak season when prices are at there highest.

5. They are greedy so and so's, nobody else is getting an at cost of inflation payrise. True but lets look at the offer:-
2.45% this year, followed by 2.3% for the next two years. Nice, not really inflation is currently at 3.8% based on the RPI which is effectivlet the increase to the cost of products in the shops ie food. Oh yeah thats per annum by the way. So what we are asking teachers to accept is in fact a PAY CUT! And we expect them to accept that for the next 3 years, so even if inflation drops slightly the teaching unions will not be allowed to come back to the table to ask for more.

6. They are putting our childrens education at risk! Not really missing one or two days normal lessons doesnt affect their education to much. Your kids do that more effectivley by failing to return coursework pieces on time when practically spoon fed the correct way of preparing the work. My misses has to repeatedly chase kids and their parents, who regularly have a laissez faire attitude to their childrens educations, for pieces of course work that a trained monkey could quite easily produce. I dont recall it being like that when I was a lad, if you didnt hand it in on time you failed, if you plagiarised you failed, if it was substandard you failed. Nowadays it seams harder to fail than pass as it is all put on a plate for them, you get repeated chance to rewrite after teacher has looked at it, provisionally marked, it offered advice on rewritting etc.

A more effective way of withdrawing their labour would be to refuse to carry out exam marking, which is done on a paid voluntary basis. Therefore if nobody did it, which they a contractually within their rights to refuse to do, none of your children would ever get any qualifications. MMM sobering thought there!

I could go on about the lack of discipline structure in schools nowadays, teachers regularly being threatened with physical violence by students, deliberate vandalism of teachers homes and cars, thefts from teachers within schools but those are all topics for another discussion.

So all in all, you are entitled to view the teachers strike anyway you like but hopefully this has informed you a little bit more than the mass media usually attempt to ie Teachers strike, arn't they greedy, children and parents suffer, teachers have it easy blah blah

Toodle pip

[Jammy]

Thats a pretty enlightening post Ferrit. One question though. Given your other half had to pick up the pieces, and I assume this strike action caused a lot of disruption, were you in favour of the strike? Do you think it was the correct way to go about things?

[Holly]

(PS: Where's Holly when you need her?!)

Cant believe I totaly missed this subject!

not all NUT members are striking, it is personal dissicion.

I currently not in the situation as working as a teacher and i am unsure if i would have gone or strike. As for affecting education many schools still had staff to run year groups such as year 11 etc and one day isnt really going to hurt. If anything it is an education in the real world and to voice you opinion - which i think is important!

i worked in a school 2 weeks ago and the children were made extremely aware of why the teacher were striking and how this would affect them. Starting salery for a teacher is 20 k and in cornwall this is a very good wage (average wages are 11-12k). the government currently set the national poverty line at 16k!

I think it is important to realise that as a teacher you are a role model to the kids. I hope to not be living at home and look presentatble - this things all cost money! yes you can live on less such as being at uni 3k a year rent plus food but lgettin on the propertly market is another story.

Also i think as a teacher it is not a career but a way off life! even from my time in school i see kids out and about and talk to them YES IT IS MY CHOICE and i love it but it is a commitment no the less. Teachers work 8 - 4 in term time but lesson plans, marking, parents, offsted all take time and preperation I am in no way going in to the job litely.

That was a ramble any specific question ask

[Holly]

Ferrit has summed it all up

[ferrit]

Thats a pretty enlightening post Ferrit. One question though. Given your other half had to pick up the pieces, and I assume this strike action caused a lot of disruption, were you in favour of the strike? Do you think it was the correct way to go about things?

MMMM intterseting, I support everyones right to withdraw their labour if they feel the cause is fair. We are a democracy after all. Some Unions are more bolshy than others and thats just the way of the world. But heres an interesting fact its over 20 years since teachers went on strike, hardly a bad track record.

Personally I wouldnt be a teacher for all the tea in China, i think they deserve loads more than they get as the grief is astronmical. But then again I am a Surveyor, so I am also classed as having a profession and get paid less than Mrs F. But that is the choice I made, i love where i work and found private practice a pain in the backside. If I was a pushy go getter working out of the "city" I could blow her salary away but as the saying goes "You work to live not live to work".

So all in all yes I probably do support their strike action but I dont think it will change the Governments mind and will inevitablly fizzle out. Teachers have kids that need to be fed too and mortgages to pay and in the current econmic climate who can afford to take unpaid time off work?

[ferrit]

I would like to point out I can actually spell; it’s just my typing that is woeful!

[sazal]

Ferrit has summed it all up very nicely. Teachers do get a lot of grief when they say they dont get paid enough. Everyone seems to think it must be a wonderful job (like ferrit says) finishing at half 3 and having loads of holidays. My tutor is one of the people that was on strike yesterday. He spent all of yesterday from 9 in the morning until 9 at night catching up on marking that he quite frankly hasnt had time to do due to all the other work that is expected from them. He was also telling us today, the strain it puts on his relationship with his wife and daughter, as he doesnt get to spend much time with them as when he is at home he is still working until late into the night and over the weekends. Also because he is a full time teacher, but not earning much, he also does free lance photography which he somehow manages to squeeze into his busy schedule. As for holidays, in the summer, I have an 8 week holiday, 6 of these he spends in college, still working, along with all half term and end of term holidays. My tutor is an absolute legend and an inspiration and is competely dedicated to his job. I personally think that he should be recieving more than £20K a year.

[ferrit]

Ferrit has summed it all up very nicely. Teachers do get a lot of grief when they say they dont get paid enough. Everyone seems to think it must be a wonderful job (like ferrit says) finishing at half 3 and having loads of holidays. My tutor is one of the people that was on strike yesterday. He spent all of yesterday from 9 in the morning until 9 at night catching up on marking that he quite frankly hasnt had time to do due to all the other work that is expected from them. He was also telling us today, the strain it puts on his relationship with his wife and daughter, as he doesnt get to spend much time with them as when he is at home he is still working until late into the night and over the weekends. Also because he is a full time teacher, but not earning much, he also does free lance photography which he somehow manages to squeeze into his busy schedule. As for holidays, in the summer, I have an 8 week holiday, 6 of these he spends in college, still working, along with all half term and end of term holidays. My tutor is an absolute legend and an inspiration and is competely dedicated to his job. I personally think that he should be recieving more than £20K a year.

Every credit for appreciating the work you tutor does for you, you have restored my faith in the youth of today.

[sazal]

Im 19, so not that much of a youth!

[wolfys_mini]

you youngster!

[sazal]

Shurrruppp oldie!

[wolfys_mini]

[yorkshirechris]

You can survive on 20k a year yeah. But like it's already been said, it's an existence, not a comfortable lifestyle.

Yeah your parents may have been ok on 20k a year. So were mine. But this was when taxes were lower, house prices were lower and the general cost of living was pretty low compared to now. So a fairly good "working class" job a few years ago would've given most people a comfortable lifestyle but not now.

More or less every year for the last 3 or 4 years (since I've cared) energy prices have risen dramatically, the latest one was around 15%. Seeing as though my wages have only gone up about 4% (and I'm supposed to be with a decent company) and taking into account the fact council tax has gone up 5%, petrol prices have gone through the roof, this willl in turn push everything else up yet again such as food prices due to increased operation costs of businesses... it's all pretty grim reading really.

20k a year isn't a very good wage if you're wanting to get a start in the real world i.e. getting your own place or even sharing with a partner. The average wage in this country I believe is around 26-27k, a wage I'd consider to be comfortable but unfortunately without a degree there really isn't many jobs around that pay these sorts of wages. This is partly due to, dare I say it, influxes of cheap migrant labour which has pushed everyone's wages down, or should I say kept them from rising at a reasonable rate. The main reason of course is that the trade unions in this country are more or less non-existant in lower paid, unskilled areas of work which enables greedy businesses to exploit mainly younger people and pay them the bare minimum.

Then again I should be grateful that I'm "surviving" (just) because if I were on minimum wage I wouldn't even be scraping £8k a year after tax.

Oops I went a bit off topic there, I agree with the fact teachers should get paid more, as should everyone who provides a service to society, whether they be armed forces, police officers, teachers, electricians, plumbers, binmen, and countless other people we rely on to keep the country going. It was interesting to read about the different pay levels of Professional people, in all honesty if I knew after 3 years of Uni plus another one year doing the PGCE (I actually considered this when I was at college) all I would be on is 20k a year I wouldn't bother going to the effort.

As per usual it's all about businesses and employers being greedy. What they don't understand is that if they treat their staff well, they will be loyal, and if they treat them like this, imagine how demotivated the teachers now feel? Undervalued and unappreciated must be a couple of appropriate words.

Edited by yorkshirechris, 25 April 2008 - 08:47 PM.

[ferrit]

Im 19, so not that much of a youth!

muck fee I wish I was 19 again, I considered myself a youth up until 30