General Chat

OKAY ONE QUESTION
IF YOUR CHILD HAD VITAL EXAMS THAT DAY
WOULD YOU STILL THINK THE SAME WAY.

The people I feel most sorry for are the ones that have vital exams during the disruptions.

I sometimes wonder if 'strike action' ever produces a settlement the strikers/unions are aiming for.

Dizzy I would be interested to know where you are getting your information from.

Secondary teachers work an average of 55.7 hours each week.
For primary teachers it rises to 59.3 hours per week.

Classroom teachers earn a minimum salary of £21,804 pa.
That equates to £419.31 a week.
Or £7.53 an hour for secondary teachers and £7.07 for primary teachers.

Unqualified teachers earn a minimum of £15,976 pa.
That equates to £307.23 a week.
Based on the above figures (although granted, they probably work slightly less hours) that works out at £5.52 for secondary teachers and £5.18 for their primary counterparts.

The national minimum wage is currently £6.31 per hour.
The average salary in the UK stands at around £26,500.
Just out of interest, childminders are paid an average of around £13,000.

In addition, I know of at least two supply teachers (both highly qualified) who get paid a meagre £10 an hour out of which they have to find their travel expenses, tax and NI contributions as well as pension etc.

MOST PARENTS WORK PART TIME TO FIT IN TIME WITH SCHOOL TIMES
AND DO NOT USE TEACHERS AS MINDERS,AND EVEN WITH BOTH PARENTS WORKING THEY ARE NO WHERE NEAR THE PAY A TEACHER GETS MIN WAGE MEANS YOU CANT AFFORD TO USE CHILD CARE ALSO BY NOW ALL A/L DATES ARE TAKEN UP WITH TEACHERS TRAINING DAYS

private education does not equal good education

There is a widespread misconception that private schools provide a better education but this is not necessarily the case.

Indeed, because there is no standardised pay scale in the private sector, rates of pay are very often lower than in state schools. What this can mean is that private (public) schools can, and often do, attract a lower calibre of teacher.

Not necessarily Maggie :-0

A relative moved from teaching in the State sector to the Private one. They have worked in 2 schools, both with small classes.

At the the first school the students were engaged with their work - the relative was taken aback that there were no discipline issues.

Its completely different at the current school - half the time is spent settling the students.

Many parents send their less academic children to Private Schools so that they can get the educational attention. Many of the students at the current school have as bad an attitude to 'authority' as some State school students. (The relative blames the school ethos and the lack of Managerial support)

What really pees me off, is that, if caught early enough, and with the right encouragement, these children can actually enjoy school life, instead of seeing it as a way of putting them down.
Why can't state schools be run like private schools? Having a maximum of 16 children in a class must be heaven!

Why is it, that in the workplace you rarely have one manager managing 30+ ADULT employees on their own, yet a teacher (okay, usually with a LSA/teaching assistant) is expected to manage 30+ CHILDREN?

Applauds Maggie :-D

Rollo has also made a number of pertinent observations from the perspective of an employer/industry.

There is no such thing as 'Thick' - the child has a 'learning disability'. Never mind that s/he has lent the brain cell to his/her sibling that day! Never-the-less, differentiated learning material and one-to-one support can enhance his/her learning experience.

The rule of thumb for a 'Statement of Education' based on literacy used to be 'can they read the Sun newspaper?'. That publication used to considered accessible to someone with a reading age of 11.

I agree. Much of the problem stems from the home environment. Schools are seen as childminding institutions and parents do not provide home support - in many cases they even encourage their offspring by telling them that homework is not necessary or pointing out that they have rights and should remind their teachers of the fact on an hourly basis.
Literacy and numeracy are dire - partly through dumbed down examinations which probably wouldn't even stretch the intelligence of a baboon.
I might point out that all baboons I have had the pleasure of encountering have displayed better manners than the vast majority of young people and quite possibly a higher intelligence quotient.
Then there is the attitude that it is ok to get things wrong and that spelling and grammar are not important.
It seems to be a popular current attitude for adults to relish in the fact that they use "text speak" and say things such as "should of" instead of "should have" etc etc.
Since when has it been ok? If it is wrong IT IS WRONG!
But as soon as one alludes to that, one is accused of picking on people - and then the dyslexia/problems card is dealt.
As for ADHD, I totally agree with Maggiewinchester. It is purely a badge in many cases and a means to get more money. I have spoken to both teachers and paediatric specialists who concur that in a vast majority of cases the only thing that is wrong with the child is that they are thick!

When I worked in a school. it was the parents, not the teacher, who (generally) wanted their child diagnosed with ADHD - they got extra money!
I decided to fill in a 'claim form' once. I managed to tick all the right boxes to get my child diagnosed with something she didn't have.
Not only that - I also knew what junk food to feed her so she behaved like she had ADHD. It's not rocket science!

I was also threatened once or twice at a secondary school. One rather large 14 year old said to me 'You're safe enough here, aren't you miss, but what about at home?....'. I could have panicked, but just thanked him for the forewarning, as, if anything suspicious happened anywhere NEAR my house, the police would be around to see him.
'You don't know where I live' was his response'.
I pointed out that I was just off to the office to find out.
I was only a LSA -not responsible for discipline as such, yet this little sh*te thought I was worth threatening - just because he could!

BUT this was the only way he knew of 'achieving' anything. He could hardly read, so had spent nearly 10 years of his young life in school, unable to participate properly. His frustration and feelings of failure must have been horrible.
I started making a bee-line for him if he was in any of the classes I was in, which scared him initially. I gave him a copies of the simplified lesson plans I'd made for the Down's Syndrome child I was looking after. He, who'd previously said nasty things to children who were 'different' started to work with the child I was with - he too needed extra help, but no-one had bothered before.
The joy he got from being able to understand what was going on was a delight - but sadly it was too late for him to achieve very much.

He is one of many. The cause? Apart from a disruptive or dysfunctinal family life/ parents who couldn't read, there is too much interference from various governments. Too many children in classes. Too much focus on exam results, not enough focus on children as children, as individuals with needs, instead of 'exam' fodder.


*steps off soapbox.

It is a basic conceit of the teaching profession that all kinds of bad things will happen if a child misses a day's "education" whether from illness, an out-of-time week in Tenerife or of course a strike. The proposition is false. The employer knows that, the teachers know it too so why bother with such a charade ?

Teaching is the last of the large scale professions which has not yet been dragged, screaming and kicking, into the C21. Indeed in many ways it is still stuck in the late C19. Why is this?

That most of the ( up to age 18 ) education as delivered to most of our young people is not fit for purpose is the root cause of the country's dire economic performance and ever shrinking manufacturing / IT base.

Lots of reasons have been given for the mess of which the current favorite is that teachers are inefficient / lazy without the goad of Oftsed. This is nonsense it is a very tough job, unbelievably hard work and with scant vocational or financial reward. Not surprisingly then a good chunk of the best teachers leave.

For employers in other walks of life teachers are a happy hunting ground. It is difficult to impossible to find a numerate software engineer or analyst for much under £ 50-60K pa and like as not they will be off at a moment's notice. OTOH a maths/science teacher will bite yer arm off for £ 45K, be up to speed in no time and far less likely to disappear. Life outside "skools" is so relaxing they don't notice the drop in paid holiday to 5 weeks.

Looking first at outcomes expected from the educational system the prime need is what it has always been - literacy and numeracy.

By far the majority of the UK population has little idea as how to construct a sentence, spell or express themselves in writing. That the problem now extends deep into the BBC and not-very-civil service suggests very deep rooted problems.

The success of such drivel as Harry Potter is alarming as we now know that even those who can read are not very good at it.

I guess the average person thinks that numeracy and mathematics are the same thing as arithmetic. This is not so. Maths is the science of number and gets you into such interesting things as irrational numbers, pi and impossible things such as the square root of -1 and the uses thereof ( de Moivre). From numeracy all kinds of interesting things appear such as Dyson vacuum cleaners and fans, mobile phones and all kinds of health gadgets.

Yet men - by and large the most effective at teaching maths - have pretty well disappeared from primary schools. This is having all kinds of bad impacts one of which is that essential early maths teaching is mostly abysmal as the teaching staff dislike the subject with vigour.

One popular fix has been large scale immigration.

Government and industry have also tended to paper over the cracks by "offshoring" the IT and manufacturing gap paying for it by ever larger property bubbles and balance of payments deficits. The current bubble/bop deficit is the largest ever and will cause real pain.

Sticking 30 kids and an adult in a room for 45 minutes with a prescriptive curriculum is not education and will not educate anybody except in the skills of wily coyote. It is about time the NUT and others worked out a radically different approach.

Both parents and the state should also understand that wall to wall child minding from the age of two is not the job of the teaching profession.

If parents need two full time incomes to pay the rent/mortgage the problem may just lie with the wildly unrealistic property valuations in the UK and the terrible real money take home pay by historical standards.

So good luck to the teachers but they are p-g in the wind.
:-|

I totally agree with you, DetEcTive.

In the private sector a manager might have a confrontation with an employee about once a week. In a secondary school, a teacher is more than likely to have one with students ever hour!
The introduction of league tables puts tremendous stress on key-subject teachers, which they then impose on their students. If results don’t improve year-on-year, the teachers are at risk of being eased out. In some cases, they can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Each year cohort is different – one year group might have a number of good performing students which will raise the A-C percentages; the next doesn’t.
The Government keeps tinkering with the curriculum, meaning that additional preparation work has to be undertaken before it can be ‘taught’.

Is it any wonder that so many have ‘burn out’??

The classroom environment is nothing like it was in the 50s/60s.

It is not at all unusual to have a class where some of the pupils are standing on tables, some are kicking a football, some are sending text messages, some are throwing things at the teacher, some are running round in circles etc etc - all in one lesson.

I know of a teacher who recently had their hair set alight by a pupil brandishing a cigarette lighter.

Another had a pupil square up to them and threaten them.

The list goes on and on.

These are events that occur on a daily basis and teachers are expected to carry on regardless - they are pretty much powerless to do anything.

eRRolSheep - 'hell bent on causing disruption and are often antagonistic, violent and disrespectful'.

I don't remember any of those traits while I was a student at a country school in the 50s/60s. The classroom environment must have changed dramatically since then.

'Respect' is a word gone out of fashion, it would appear. What a shame!

Because PRP is very difficult to incorporate in a teaching environment as there are too many variables.

Comparing teaching to the financial sector is quite ludicrous.

The proposed industrial action is over pay, hours and workload - all of which are pretty poor and well documented.

Unlike the fat cat financial sector, teachers do not receive huge payouts and bonuses for their 60-odd hour weeks. On the contrary, they are expected to take a lot of flak in what are often potentially dangerous situations for no recognition.

Pushing a pen and adding up numbers may be important but it is not forming young people's lives or endeavouring to control 30 kids who are hell bent on causing disruption and are often antagonistic, violent and disrespectful.

Teachers already come under very close scrutiny and have done so for many years.
It is called Ofsted !

Underperformance is not an option in education either and maybe the financial sector should come under the same sort of microscope as education - now that would reveal a great many interesting facts!

Personally I don't think the teachers do have a bad deal in the current climate and many of the people I speak to echo those very comments made by Misty. If they are ill informed views then the teachers should be working to alter that perception, not voting to go on strike.

The changes happening now is no different to what was taking place in many parts of the private sector 10-20 years ago. For example I worked for 37 years in Financial services and Banking sector. PRP was already there when I joined in 1969. Guaranteed pensions gradually withdrawn and finally scrapped in 2009. Productivity targets went up year on year, under performance was not an option.

So, why are they any different?

Mistycat - how hackneyed and ill-informed is that!!!???

That is exactly the attitude and misguided comment that can perpetuate the myth that teachers are nothing more than child minders.

Do you really really think that teachers only work during school hours and during term time?

You might like to read this - it is based on fact and not mere opinion...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27087942

'Education is not filling empty buckets - it’s about lighting fires in the brain'.