Teachers strike
 

Gotta admit I'm baffled why teachers feel they have an argument here...most of us have had to accept that the annual pay rise is a thing of the past (unless you're a banker or in the city), and most of us grasp the idea behind performance led pay increases.

Michael Gove says that teachers will not get automatic annual pay rises (join the club guys)....and that pay will be linked to performance. Now to me that means crap teachers get nothing extra and good ones get more.

Ofcom and Ofgem seemingly argue for the consumer but teachers unions are arguing that Ofsted are pawns of government?

To quote the union rep...

"The key issue is the impact of government policy on children and young people, Teachers are concerned that children's rights are being stepped over and there is a real concern about their pay and conditions. Children need teachers who are rewarded as highly skilled professionals."

Hmm...Where are childrens rights being stepped over? and if Michael Gove is rewarding good teachers, doesn't that mean we will have teachers who are 'highly skilled professionals' being rewarded? :confused::confused:

Oh and just for the union rep...we all have concerns over our pay and conditions. That argument is irrelevant...teachers are not a special case!

Re: Teachers strike
 

what i never see addressed is what if you have a good teacher lumbered with a bunch of thick kids.They dont get a payrise because the kids make them look bad.

its about time we strated looking at the real culprits here and enforced performance related pocket money

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And how long before there is performance related pay for Cabinet Ministers and MPs? Don't hold your breath on this one:rolleyes:

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By the time that happens, you will be able to stack your beer supplies on the shelves in hell.......and I'll be knitting angels wings.

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this is actually good news

theres beer in hell :D:D:D:D

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Cracking post Guinness, when I went to school we respected teachers, we had to, teachers can to school looking like teachers can't remember a male teacher back in those days who came to work without a collar and tied, but that all changed in the seventies when teachers started looking like hippies and the word was don't call me sir call me Jim, things went downhill from then on. Now kids don't respect teachers and the nanny state won't let them do anything about it, if I was a little toe rag I got whacked, never did me any harm, teachers from my generation would have been doing life sentences today, a well time clout behind the ear never did any kid any hard, but made us respect the teacher

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i know a few teachers and i recall one telling me about how teachers had to lock themselves in a room because a kids father had stormed in looking to batter the teacher that had told his son to shut up and get on with his work

is it any wonder teachers cant discipline kids when theres parents like that about

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In my day if I went home and told the old lady that a teacher had given me the cane or clouted me behind the ear, she'd have give me another round the ear and sent me to bed without tea.;)

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Yep, and it's all Alcohol free ! :eek:

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Theakstons is only served in the lounge bar of the angels retreat, first turning on the left past the Pearly Gates :D

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i hope the person who inveted that stuff is burning

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To be honest teachers' deserve a medal as well as a pay rise for dealing with that sort of stuff. It's alright people saying they should discipline kids at school but they have no power to do so.

There would be enough money to go around in this country if people like Gove and the rest of the MP cronies didn't keep wasting it.

Re: Teachers strike
 

Hmmm, several points to be addressed here.
Firstly, performance related pay; all teachers are constantly monitored and appraised by senior leaders, if they're no good they are firstly given help and advice on how to improve and then got rid of if they do not improve. Any senior leadership team worth it's salt has the kids' interests at heart first and foremost as a result. So if you aren't performing as a teacher, you are out. Had a teacher in tears on Saturday after giving her the hard word:(not nice but necessary. Good ones may get more, but it does, to an extent, depend on the financial circumstances of the school. Where money is tight and (if "Pob" Gove has his way) national pay scales are scrapped and academies are allowed to devise their own individual pay structures this probably won't happen as upto 150 teachers were chasing one job in a school near me recently.
OFSTED is probably a necessary mechanism, but their brief and frames of reference change so often that it is difficult to make objective comparisons between schools using their judgements. We recently were judged to be good with outstanding elements so this isn't sour grapes, just truth as I see it. To say that they are pawns of government is not accurate, but the parameters that they have to work to are predetermined so not totally inaccurate either.
Gove is not effective as an educationalists, having no expertise in the field himself, but knowing what it was like in his day and attempting to move things back there. Parts of the new curriculum seem to have very little relevance to today's world, a requirement for children to know Roman numerals upto 1000 by the end of year6 whilst abandoning their calculators being an example of this. Bastions of the bygone like the odious Daily Mail may uphold his stand but most of today's actual experts in education ( I'm not an expert, just a teacher) shrug their shoulders in despair at his positively harmful ideas about the direction education should be taking.
I , like you, am confused by the children's rights quotes apart from the management ( NB not leadership) of schools now being open to people without any teaching qualifications. This,I feel, will impact on kids' rights to a good education.
Are teachers a special case? No. No one is. Do teachers have a good case in taking action? Probably I think. Anyone who works in excess of twenty years with a contractual obligation to contribute a percentage of their earnings into a pension scheme then have those contributions independently assessed one year as being financially sustainable for the scheme they uphold, then declared inadequate by a government which is financially bankrupt (and morally and socially in receivership too) needing to grab cash from wherever it can has the right to protest I feel.

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:D and teachers should get their pocket money instead! Lovely idea.

Your post does have a hidden gem accyman. Fewer and fewer teachers, especially leaders apply for jobs in "tough" schools these days. It's very hard work and there are "easier" niches to be had. As a result you get extremes of teaching in the toughest schools, ranging from dedicated, really good practitioners with a vocation to those who just can't hack it and burn out over a couple of years. This obviously exacerbates the kids' problems as school is the most consistent thing that a lot of the poor blighters have in their troubled existences, and ever changing staff teams don't help.:(

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Having said all that, I love teaching. I feel like I make a difference, am paid reasonably and get good holidays (not the twelve weeks that are timetabled, but enough). I've done a few different things and feel that this is the only thing I've ever done that was worthwhile. I just object to teaching being one of the political footballs that get kicked around by so many people who have an opinion because they've been to school and so know what it's about. I think it's partly this combined with populist reportage that helps the more radical elements of the NUT NASUWT etc gain the headlines.

Re: Teachers strike
 

Teaching is a bit like Nursing and the NHS.
Systematic failings in Hospitals and Sir David Nicholson manages to slime his way out of responsibility......next news is David Cameron suggesting that nurses should 'learn' compassion by doing up to 12 months as a Health Care assistant before they can go on and train.

Most student nurses supplement their bursary by working as HCA's........and, can compassion be learned?
If we need to teach compassion to nursing candidates then we are choosing the wrong people to put into Uni.

NHS/Teaching...both political footballs. Directives issued from political leaders who have no concept of the problems at the coal face.

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Teachers assistants are worth their weight in gold and very much underpaid . They may not have the same training to teach , but with them in class a teacher will be able to perform better.

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it always seems to be the teachers that get blamed for kids not learning anything

its never the fault of the parant that lets tehir kid stay up all night playing xbox or watching tv in their bedrooms or dosnt sit down and read with their kids or help them with homework but sit around watching emerdale or dossing on facebook all night.Its never the fault of the parant that feeds tehir kid nothing but junk or allows them to skip meals especially important ones like breakfast

nope its always the teachers fault

god forbid a parent be expected to take some resposability in at least sending tehir kid to school in a fit state to learn and not half asleep or hungry.

theres some schools your lucky if the parents remember they actually have kids and turn up to collect them.

maybe its time to look elsewhere as to where blame should be directed

Re: Teachers strike
 

100% agree that Goves ideas on the curriculum are stifling and archaic. Also agree that if your pensions are being screwed with then you have a right of argument.

However your union guys are focusing their arguments on better pay and conditions and annual pay rises and they are doing it in a high handed manner as though teachers have more right to special financial consideration than, say, the care worker, the receptionist or the kid who works at McDonalds.....this is what winds me up.

Most people know its a tough job (I certainly couldn't do it), but so is working in a retirement home or behind a counter taking abuse from Joe Public on a daily basis.

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Valid, but not wholly accurate AM, some teachers are responsible for the failings of their students because they can't get the subject across or have insufficient grounding in a particular subject to teach it well.

Then as you say some parents certainly don't help with their attitudes towards academia, mainly because they themselves were low achievers if at all they took anything away from their time in education.

And finally the child must also be apportioned some blame for lack of achievement in their studies, not necessarily due to outside influences, but their own basic laziness & disinterest.

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In a past life I worked for the Press Association. Powerful editing is an interesting thing Mr G as I learned when i was with them.
I know that the reps talk about pay and conditions, but it's definitely an issue that needs to be tackled? I do agree however that some of them are not as Google Page Ranking savvy as their position in the media should decree, but there's considerably more to the agenda than gets reported. I know I'm beginning to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but loony lefties sell a lot of right wing columnage.

Re: Teachers strike
 

oh i agree its not completely acurate and there are some duff teachers that cant enforce discipline and get walked over by the kids because they are brainy but dont have communication skills for example.Or to put it better have brains but cant teach

there used to be a thing in place where kids who were slower at learning didnt hold up those that could learn and that was called remedial class

only problem is that now you cant put teh slow learners in a seperate class where they got intensive teaching to get them up to speed so they can rejoin the kids who were learning at a normal rate because someones feelings might get hurt

i know of at least 3 remedial kids that ended up going into the A band and did even better than expected once they had had some dedicated teaching so it can work

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One thing that really bugs me about education in politics is the tendency to compare the attainment of children in different countries by some folk and their campaigning for the implementation of some educational aspects from one country being used by another. To me this is like saying "Look, that eagle can travel much faster than this bulldog. We obviously need to lop off the bulldog's legs and give it big wings instead! ". Context is everything in this respect.

Re: Teachers strike
 

I agree to a point my verdant friend but some are a right pain and strangely are harder to get rid of than teachers. Good 'uns should get better pay tho.

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What's even worse is it's served at room temperature!

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there are some true monsters in this world :(

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And in the underworld, no such thing as like on their web page.

Re: Teachers strike
 

Aye, that was in the days before leftist policies of everyone's the same & there shouldn't be any disparity regardless of the individuals abilities to learn. Insidious & disruptive thinking like this just exacerbated the situation & emphasised the differences between the capabilities of the kids causing further consternation & upset for those not so gifted & quick to learn, shattering their self esteem & heightening their sense of inferiority making them resentful & disruptive.

Net result, no interest in learning, or such a feeling of disillusion that they couldn't get away from education & the chance to make their future better fast enough. And the upshot of this we can see everyday in city centres throughout the Country.

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And to just to cap it all, we now keep 'em there till they're 18 just in case they manage to get a position in a job at 16 that could have done them some good and given them a decent start at a career.:(:(:(:(

Going to go and drink something mind numbing.

Re: Teachers strike
 

Yeh must mean water? Alcohol will do yeh good.:D

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Think we've travelled down that road before Margaret, you can't teach or learn compassion you either have it or not, and its easy to see too, It never takes me long to find out if any nurse lacks compassion, funnily over 30 years off being an in patient in 7 different hospitals I've come across very few thankfully, but it certainly something you can't teach. In a way its the same with people who work for care agencies, I've been quite lucky really I've had the same agency for going on 4 years now and I've had some really genuine people coming into my home, I lost my first carer when he was taken ill himself, since then I've had two more, both top rate and one girl and now I've got another male, so I've been very lucky in with this.

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Great post Dave, spot on with that, there was nothing wrong with brighter kids going to Grammar Schools, they'd found their level, to hump everybody together in comprehensive schools did nothing in the education of kids it held some back whilst making others feel inadequate.

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That's the good news ... bad news is that Hell is a Massey's House.;)

Re: Teachers strike
 

No such thing as bad ale, Eric. And if you end up in Hell you'll not cock your snoot even at a pint of Massey's.

Re: Teachers strike
 

Nope ... Masseys is a circle of hell whose horror not even the fertile imagination of Dante could depict.

By the way ... the education system is beyone fixing; kinda like democracy:rolleyes: "Education" stopped being "education" a while back ... it's little more than job training. In fact, it is failing so badly it doesn't even qualify as job training. Which doesn't matter, 'cause there ain't that many jobs to go around anyways.;) Civilization ... whatever that is ... has got where it is today because of man's creativitity and his willingness to take risks ... wimmin too, of course, they are equally to blame ... or one could say that we and the world we live in is as screwed up as it is because we have too much smarts and not enough sense to handle them right.;)

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Aye but they did a good Bottle Eric.;) The owd Bass Blue.

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You've obviously never had a pint of anything in Blackpool, closest thing to hell for an aesthetic drinker on this planet :eek:

Re: Teachers strike
 

Did they do something called Jennings gold medal at the Elite? It did not taste god.

Re: Teachers strike
 

I can go one better Guinness, Fremlins in Kent. Once called in a pub in Beniden, my mates brother was the landlord and working near by we called on the way to our digs We both ordered a pint of bitter, Trev shook his head saying the Guinness is good. A few minutes later a couple of local farmers came in and he served them bitter, as he put them on the bar he just looked at us and we understood why, there were floaters in it and looked the most appetising drink I'd ever seen:rolleyes:

Re: Teachers strike
 

I occasionally drink a natural beer brewed by Jennings, which is quite tasty

Re: Teachers strike
 

"Thick kids" aren't the problem. Teachers can be assessed on levels of progress so that they're all assessed equally, or at least as equally as possible. You don't assess the teacher on the final grades the kids get, you assess them on how much the kids have improved.

Disruptive kids are a problem, but if they can't be dealt with, maybe teaching is the wrong profession for the individual? I got an IT management job quite early in my career and got walked all over by my staff. I got out and waited another 7 years 'til I had more experience. It happens everywhere, and in all those other jobs you have to find ways of motivating people without the threat of a stick.

Not in my school! I was schooled in the 70s and 80s and the cane was used (at primary), and board-rubber missiles (at secondary, as a precursor to the cane).

Teachers should be able to handle laziness, but the disinterest is the responsibility of parents and, ultimately, government. There are plenty of kids at my son's school whose attitude is "I'm going to spend my days after my school career getting free money and watching Jeremy Kyle - what's the point of working hard now?" That's a problem that can't be fixed in school.

They don't just do it on a nationwide political level. OFSTED compare a school to "similar schools" to make decisions on whether there's a performance issue. It's bad enough comparing one year's results to another, as you can get a different incoming level of education each year, but to compare with another school based on the fact that eight years ago, you got a similar set of results to them is just ridiculous.

Apprenticeships count - so kids can still leave school at 16 for work if that's their plan...

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[QUOTE=Studio25;1050552]"Thick kids" aren't the problem. Teachers can be assessed on levels of progress so that they're all assessed equally, or at least as equally as possible. You don't assess the teacher on the final grades the kids get, you assess them on how much the kids have improved.

True, but my school is still considered as being at risk because of us missing floor targets last year. We did not get a big enough percentage attaining at the right level. This despite being in the top 1% nationally for achievement - the progress they make.:(

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They don't just do it on a nationwide political level. OFSTED compare a school to "similar schools" to make decisions on whether there's a performance issue. It's bad enough comparing one year's results to another, as you can get a different incoming level of education each year, but to compare with another school based on the fact that eight years ago, you got a similar set of results to them is just ridiculous.

Again agreed. It's not the OFSTED judgements I treat with disdain, but the sages at institutions like the OECD whose research is the used by octogenarian press barons to bring back learning sines and cosines by rote. ;)
World education rankings: which country does best at reading, maths and science? | News | guardian.co.uk

Re: Teachers strike
 

Just crossed my mind that teachers used to strike all the time ... in fact, I've been struck by many teachers. Ben Johnson used to make a ritual of striking; and each morning he would announce his intention to strike numerous boys in order to get his day off to a swinging good start:D

I've come to the conclusion, slowly, and over the years, that all one needs to learn is language ... and as the most obvious lingua franca on this planet is English, that would be the language to learn. Once one has a firm grasp of English and an understanding of its almost limitless potential, then one can learn anything else. In fact, one can look at other "subjects" as merely languages that one can access through English. Mathematics is a language ... it just uses short forms. Those daunting words "some assembly required" are not all that scary for someone who can read and comprehend written instructions ... unless, of course, those instructions were badly translated from the original Chinese;) Language is power.:theband: