Teachers Next, Pay Talks?

[shouter]

Teachers work and get paid for 195 days a year, so yes, technically you are correct.

However this doesn't take into account the amount of unpaid overtime (marking and planning, writing schemes of work etc) they do at home.

Actually they have paid marking and prep time in school, in addition to which they are paid for a 37.5 hour week, the school day is 6.5 hours, and that includes 1.5 hours of breaks during which time they should be marking and if they aren't they should be making up the time at home.

My comments are made by observing the teachers at my daughters school, the comments from my best friend who worked in an independant school, a close relative who teaches and the experience of my partner who works as an instrumental teacher within several secondary schools.

Yes they leave home early and return late. But many of them work miles from their home and have a sizeable commute. However, many refuse to eat into their dinner break by running extra classes/extra curricular activities. The breaks are supervised by support staff not teachers. The after school clubs are often run by non-teaching staff. There is a degree of 'networking' if you want to be in the right groups to ensure the 'heads' favour and promotion, which isn't about hardwork, but about socialising and chatting with the 'right' members of staff - coming from the right background and living in the right place. Other than that you don't see teachers for dust when the bell goes at 3.30. Many teachers set a class work and then mark other classes work. I have been told that there are teachers who set the class work and then play games on their lap top until the bell goes.

All other public sector employees have a maximum of 41 day annual leave (including BH's), so it's right that their holidays have to be eaten into for prep time. But as my best friend told me after the first year of a new curriculum you don't have to do any other prep work.

The government basically screws any essential 'key' workers, there are too many to pay them a decent wage - the poor MP's may even have to have a pay cut if they paid everyone else decently.

(Edited to broaden my initial comment)

Edited March 23, 2008 by shouter

[The Ayatollah Buggeri]

Ah, the NUT. As a teacher, may I disassociate myself from this shower.

I pay my union subs merely because of the necessity of legal cover in these troubled times - many's the career destroying false accusation I have seen hurled at a talented colleague by a slack-jawed youth, egged on by Mum (who's already been on the blower to Claims Direct).

I'm in precisely the same boat with UCU. In my case, it isn't just the prospect of action from bloody-minded students (egged on by the militant leftie academic failures who populate the elected positions of students' unions - show me a SU sabbatical postholder who got a first and I'll show you a pig lining up for final approach at Heathrow), but also victimisation from politically correct managers. I actually wasn't a member of any union for the first four years of my career, but joined when my boss tried to take disciplinary action against me for deducting marks from essays for poor use of English and lack of evidence of reading.

UCU's posturing about boycotting Israel and the like (I note with interest that they're saying nothing about China at the moment - obviously lots more full feepaying Chinese postgrads in British HEIs than Israelis!) is pathetic, and it makes me embarrassed to be a member: but in this day and age I need to be for the security of representation if anything like that happens to me again. However, if an insurance company was willing to sell a policy which provided me with legal heavy guns in the event of an employment dispute like that (equivalent to the legal protection cover you can buy with home policies, but unlike these policies, kicks in before you're given a final warning or actually sacked), then I'd leave UCU and buy such a policy straight away.

[Cinnamon]

However, if an insurance company was willing to sell a policy which provided me with legal heavy guns in the event of an employment dispute like that (equivalent to the legal protection cover you can buy with home policies, but unlike these policies, kicks in before you're given a final warning or actually sacked), then I'd leave UCU and buy such a policy straight away.

Try this company: https://www.das.co.uk/personal.asp

It looks like they also ensure you for employment problems too.

[Sinking Feeling]

£34k a year for baby-sitting - bloody ridiculous!

[Methinkshe]

Talking about unemployment, has anyone had recent experience of the costs of insuring against unemployment? Could be quite revealing - insurers have to stay ahead of the curve if they aren't going to lose a lot of money. Premiums should have risen by now, I would think.

[ImA20SomethingGetMeOutOfHere]

£34k a year for baby-sitting - bloody ridiculous!

Why don't you give it a go if it's so easy then?

[Guest absolutezero]

Why don't we make use of immigration to attract eastern europeans and Indians, many of whom have excellent qualifications, to work as teachers.

This doesn't usually work.

We've had foreign teachers at our place.

1. They don't stay because the discipline in schools is terrible and they're used to much better back home. So they tend vote with their feet and go back.

2. The kids take the piss something chronic because they have a funny accent, so they never usually last more than a term and don't get much teaching done.

You assume teachers deal with emotionally mature people. They don't. Kids see funny accents or any other difference as a weakness to be exploited.

[Guest absolutezero]

Actually they have paid marking and prep time in school, in addition to which they are paid for a 37.5 hour week, the school day is 6.5 hours, and that includes 1.5 hours of breaks during which time they should be marking and if they aren't they should be making up the time at home.

My comments are made by observing the teachers at my daughters school, the comments from my best friend who worked in an independant school, a close relative who teaches and the experience of my partner who works as an instrumental teacher within several secondary schools.

Yes they leave home early and return late. But many of them work miles from their home and have a sizeable commute. However, many refuse to eat into their dinner break by running extra classes/extra curricular activities. The breaks are supervised by support staff not teachers. The after school clubs are often run by non-teaching staff. There is a degree of 'networking' if you want to be in the right groups to ensure the 'heads' favour and promotion, which isn't about hardwork, but about socialising and chatting with the 'right' members of staff - coming from the right background and living in the right place. Other than that you don't see teachers for dust when the bell goes at 3.30. Many teachers set a class work and then mark other classes work. I have been told that there are teachers who set the class work and then play games on their lap top until the bell goes.

All other public sector employees have a maximum of 41 day annual leave (including BH's), so it's right that their holidays have to be eaten into for prep time. But as my best friend told me after the first year of a new curriculum you don't have to do any other prep work.

The government basically screws any essential 'key' workers, there are too many to pay them a decent wage - the poor MP's may even have to have a pay cut if they paid everyone else decently.

(Edited to broaden my initial comment)

The paid planning, preparation and assessment time isn't enough to do all the work expected of teachers.

SEN stuff, marking, planning, personalised learning, differentiation etc.

If you really want to debate this look up the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document on the web.

It's a hundred or so pages long and forms the main bulk of the teachers' contract.

Read that then come back and debate about what teachers' jobs actually do and do not entail and the working time arrangements.

[Sinking Feeling]

Why don't you give it a go if it's so easy then?

I hate kids - although that never seemed to stop most of my teachers, but at least they did get to beat us with sticks!

[spud999]

if GPs can be paid 250k im sure the goverment can afford to pay teachers more than 25k

The vast majoruty of GP's get paid between 60-120k depending on wether they are selfemployed partners in the business(yes GP's do run their own business as well as do medical work) or employed,salaried GP's.

[Nelly]

Of course, a pay rise is not going to fix the real problem of overwork though, is it?

Well it sort of makes it more worth it though

[Sinking Feeling]

Of course, a pay rise is not going to fix the real problem of overwork though, is it?

I suspect the real problem is the behaviour of the kids. I don't know a single teacher who doesn't say that kids are getting worse.

As for overwork - most people in professions work more than their stated hours.

[Walton Goggins]

This doesn't usually work.

We've had foreign teachers at our place.

1. They don't stay because the discipline in schools is terrible and they're used to much better back home. So they tend vote with their feet and go back.

2. The kids take the piss something chronic because they have a funny accent, so they never usually last more than a term and don't get much teaching done.

Kids see funny accents or any other difference as a weakness to be exploited.

Take your point.

Surely in a multi-cultural society, teachers will represent the changing demographic, ie. Polish children will fit with Polish teachers, and so on.

Leaving aside the argument that currency movements will see many economic migrants return home, we have successfully retained immigrant bus drivers, plumbers, fruit pickers, firemen etc so why not pro-actively increase recruitment of foreign teachers.

This should initially calm wage inflation, and as time progresses there should be potential for lowering remuneration significantly, both salaries and pension obligations. Outsourcing local government work has already begun as we know, there must be ways of massively reducing the public sector wage bill, certainly accepting demands of 10% pay increases isn't likely, remember the police pay row.

The NHS would collapse without foreign workers, yet education is relatively, white, middle-class and static.

We pay far too much tax to continue as we are.

[Guest Steve Cook]

Of course, a pay rise is not going to fix the real problem of overwork though, is it?

Quite true.

however, given the working condition and the length of time and academic study to get to the position of a teacher, the pay is the final piss take

[laurejon]

The vast majoruty of GP's get paid between 60-120k depending on wether they are selfemployed partners in the business(yes GP's do run their own business as well as do medical work) or employed,salaried GP's.

GP's preside over a Monopoly, their pay should be reigned in and they should return to doing the best for their patients, not what is best for their accountant.

[Guest Steve Cook]

Will paying teachers more mean we have better educated kids?

Do teachers really help the bulk of children?

When you do an undergraduate degree in most subjects, the lectures are little more than a basic springboard into a topic. 90% of learning comes from reading and personal study. Why, once a child can read, should it be any different in a school?

Schooling merely bores children and stunts the pace of learning.

When I was at school not one teacher ever encouraged my to improve. AT ALL. I was strong in most subjects, by luck, but the one or two I strugged with just didn't seem to matter. Not one teacher said, 'Hmmm, Crashed, you are obviously reasonably bright, what is it you find so hard about this subject?' Never. 'Just let it slide..' seems to be the teacher's philosophy.

How many kids do you know that can barely string a sentence of French together after FIVE YEARS of study while someone who spent a couple of months in Peru comes back speaking pretty good intermediate-level Spanish? How have teachers, over five years, failed to inspire their students to learn... a damn thing?

How many needed to looks at CVs as part of their job and find plenty of badly written dross from people with As and Bs at A-level or degrees?

I bet if you paid teachers a 50k starting salaries educational standards would not increase one iota. I bet if you got the bright graduate czech au pair to teach your kids they'd be no worse off in most instances.

As for teachers doing the mythical five hours of marking a night it's not true. I've known teachers and have seen them marking working at 3.30pm in the afternoon, sprawled on the sofa watching TV with a pint of Nesquik, with the marking or report cards balanced on their belly.

I would agree with you that there is a lot to complain about in the UK's schooling system. However, you seem to display a singular, if perhaps understandable lack of knowledge as to why this should be the case.

We no longer have secondary moderns and grammar schools. As much as it goes against my liberal instincts to say it, there is undeniable evidence that some children will never progress beyond primarly level academic performance. That being the case, to force them to undergo another 4 years of study is both pointless and disruptive to the education of those children that can benefit. For all of it's easily identifiable faults, the old two tier-system of secondary moderns and grammars adressed the above to some extent.

Then there is the problem of the national curriculum. Partly for the same reason that grammars were phased out, the introduction of the national curriculum was premised on the assumption that all children could access the curriculum equally. This philosophy believes that the only thing that had stopped this historically was the misfortune of birth. Whilst there is obviously strong historical evidence for educational discrimination, it is also undeniably true that all children cannot access the curriculum in the same way. This is not just the level of the curriculum, but also the type of curriculum. A very crude way of explaining this is by saying that some people can think only procedurally, whereas a smaller number of people can think in more abstract ways. This, was essentially the basis of the distinction between the secondary moderns and grammars. I would argue that the modern national curriculum has buried within it, an implicit assumtion that we are all grammar kids now. We are not. Hence the large number of disaffected kids in schools.

On the other hand, what is the government to do when devising educational policy? All of the heavy industry and other manufacturing industries where a lot of the procedural thinking kids could have gone to and made their way in the world, are gone. Everyone has to be a grammar kid now in terms of the type of work that is demanded of them and is available in the economy.

All of the above ideological b*ll*cks has been going on in the background and above teachers heads for the last 40 years. Anyone who thinks that teachers are some group of militant left-wing pinkos are living in a time warp, circa 1973. Even then, it was a relatively small number of people who made a very loud noise. No, most teachers are rather boring, conformist types who just do as they are told by government. A government (because of a growing desperate realisation that all of their ideologically driven policies don't work) that changes the goal-posts with regards to what they want, delivered via initiative after initiative on an almost weekly basis.

The vast majority of teachers go into the profession because they want to help kids. God knows it's not the pay and conditions. Despite this, the vast majority are utterly burned out after only 9 years on the job. You seem to have taken a bad personal experience at school and have erroneously used this as some kind of basis for judging teachers as being responsible for the condition, as you see it, of the educational system. You are wrong.

Edited March 23, 2008 by Steve Cook

[Turnbull2000]

"Should public sector pay be capped at 2%" was a recent 'Talking Point' and the public sector website PublicFinance.co.uk. My lone comment amongst Brown's minion worker that pay caps are now needed was soon deleted.

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/topic_comments.cfm?TopicID=27

[Mancghirl]

Take your point.

Surely in a multi-cultural society, teachers will represent the changing demographic, ie. Polish children will fit with Polish teachers, and so on.

The NHS would collapse without foreign workers, yet education is relatively, white, middle-class and static.

Despite huge attempts to recruit ethnic minority teachers 1980s to now, it remains a white profession. Perhaps you'd care to speculate as to why. My guess as to the relative lack of Asian recruits is the perception of low status and low pay, as opposed to Law/Medicine.

As for overseas trained teachers, they are required to complete our teacher training course when they get here (the government has just brought this in), so I haven't yet come across one who has done so. We have a Russian trained teacher who works as a supply (unqualified) teacher in our school. The kids do, as stated above, make mincemeat out of her (funny accent/lack of subject knowledge were their complaints).

[yawnIHateSundays]

My guess as to the relative lack of Asian recruits is the perception of low status and low pay, as opposed to Law/Medicine.

You are 100% correct in your guess.

[Guest absolutezero]

"Should public sector pay be capped at 2%" was a recent 'Talking Point' and the public sector website PublicFinance.co.uk. My lone comment amongst Brown's minion worker that pay caps are now needed was soon deleted.

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/topic_comments.cfm?TopicID=27

Why should there be a cap?

If you were going to say to control inflation, Mervyn King thinks inflation level public sector pay rises make no difference to the inflation figure.

[The Ginger Winger]

Those who can do...those who can't teach

[Guest Skint Academic]

I certainly couldn't put up with what they do.

I thought of trying to get into it, in a vague sort of way, in a moment of weakness many, many years ago.

When it was pointed out I couldn't bring my sword into class I thought better of it.

I had a similar experience. I was trying on a nurse's uniform one day, admiring myself in the mirror and thinking that I had chosen the wrong career. Then I thought of all the different kinds of body fluids being splashed on the uniform, remembering the kind of smells you have to put up with and then thought of the pitiful wage.

Anyway, things might be different in a few years time what with the rise of knife crime. Teachers have to maintain their authority somehow and what better way to do it but to have a Crocodile Dundee moment with a claymore ...

Edited March 24, 2008 by Skint Academic

[numpty]

I had a similar experience. I was trying on a nurse's uniform one day, admiring myself in the mirror and thinking that I had chosen the wrong career.

What goes on between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home is of no concern to the rest of us who are trying to have a rigorous debate about the current state of the housing market

Edited March 24, 2008 by numpty

[Guest anorthosite]

Those who can do...those who can't teach

I prefer "those who can do, those who can't be bothered teach, those who can't manage".

[toonboy]

You are 100% correct in your guess.

how dare you, asians are just as altruistic as white people

they are not greedy and after money at all