Anyway, just to clarify the system as it currently is doesn't work. There should be a system by which if your attendance is over a certain amount it is not an issue to get some time away provided it is all declared and has benefit. There would need to be some caveat for medically recognised absences to not disadvantage unwell kids but that would surely be doable. What's the point in punishing good parents who are trying to play by the rules and whose kids have good attendance?
I can't believe anyone criticises teachers. They are providing a massively valuable service to society but are hamstrung by policy makers who've never worked in education (e.g. Michael Gove).
Surely you are all educated enough to be given a handout/email to familiarise yourselves with ? What a typical self excusing load of twaddle. You'd get 28 days holiday like everyone else for me......oh, your jobs harder. ... I forgot !
No mate, I'm more for Nurses, Police and other services, just my opinion tho, teachers not my cup of tea . Some are good others very poor, only judging on the ones I met through my kids schools, the vast difference between a good one and a poor one wouldn't be tolerated in any other profession. Don't you think ?
I don't know when your kids were at school but these days they're scrutinised to within an inch of their lives. Like in any walk of life you get people that are well suited to their chosen career and others who aren't. And as a parent you'll meet teachers that you get on with better than others. Despite what people tend to think, it's a pressurised job. And like @haslam says, a lot of what they do is more like social work than teaching.
I find they are more concerned about satisfying Ofsted and than just getting on with the job, my brothers a teacher and he'll say the same, mind , not being suited, you spot the institutionalised ones who went school- training college-school, kids have no chance being taught by these.
They would all say that they spend too much time satisfying OFSTED but that's not their choice, that's what they have to do stay in a job. Its over-regulated and a lot of what OFSTED expects of them is ridiculous if not counter-productive.
Where to start. Yes we could indeed just have a hand out, to clarify the training days are days which used to be holidays for teachers. They aren't "days off" for teachers any more. As for holidays, I'm not averse to cutting them back but if someone wants to cut my holidays back I'd expect a pay rise. Teachers are leaving in droves, you can mock how hard you think the job is - shock horror, people think other people have easy jobs, what a cliche - it doesn't really matter how hard you think the job is. Number of teachers who quit in the first few years? 50% Number of teachers? Dropping nationally Number of pupils? Rising Your solution to a teaching crisis would be to make the job worse for the sake of childcare for the parents. Well done, we'll end up with anyone with half a brain not chosing to do the job OR rates of pay will have to be higher (which the country cannot sustain). I'm a qualified solicitor who also went on to get a first class degree in mathematics (the subject i teach), if I want to earn more money I'll do something else. 28 days holiday? Sod that, I got more than that as a solicitor and I'd get more than that in finance too pus I'd get paid significantly more. Make a choice, either teaching is a traditional public sector job with poor pay, surviving on the goodwill of it's members to work extra hours to make it work but with the pay off of good perks (pension most notably!) or is it a private sector comparator in which case if you want to compare holidays you need to also compare pay, working week, etc. Can't have it both ways.
Almost exacty what i was going to say. I was 30 before I got into teaching and had done 10 or so jobs previously, a couple of which I'd call 'professions' and none of my previous jobs have had anywhere near the level of scrutiny i have now. There's great teachers, poor teachers and a vast majority of just average ones - that's the same with any job. The sad part is that, as with pretty every job, the parents I speak to most are the ones whose children are problematic. The kids who turn up every day and do what is asked of them should be celebrated much much more and that is a failing of myself and everyone really but that's the same in every job, it's just here I'm dealing with people in their formative years and it'd be nice to do more. Every moment of every day I'm a teacher. I come home with bags of work to do, I think about when I'm eating my food, I think about when I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning, come April-July I'll wake up in the night thinking about it regularly. It's all-encompassing to the extent that realistically it is probably detrimental to my own children but that's the job and I actually really enjoy it.
How many hours does a teacher work ? Clock In to Clock Off and what is the annual sickness levels ? There are much worse jobs. Its a glass half full half empty the ones I speak to, teachers who go from school to training college back to school seem to struggle with full time employment , thats all I find. There are brilliant teachers and diabolical ones, I don't think there are many other professions with such varied competancies . I agree the wages are pants but the 55 retirement and pension over compensates that.
Excellent post mate. No one understands what I do for a living and lots of people that I encounter in my working life think its a load of old ****e. If they think that it's up to them, I don't care. But I can walk away from it at the end of the day. My wife, on the other hand, puts her heart and soul into teaching. She's often still working until 10 in the evening, attending school events out of work hours, and we even have family days out based around things that she needs to do for school. She hardly ever switches off from it and it's a constant theme in our lives. But she loves it and she's very good at it. Because she cares so much, I find it very difficult to ignore it when people belittle what is, after all, an important service to society.
Of course there are worse jobs, there can only be one worst job so you can use that line for everything else. Honestly. I'm on site from 8:10 (obliged to be there by 8:25) to 5:00 Monday to Friday but I'd easily clock in 10-15 hours of marking/planning/extras each week. I used to do 60+ hours in my first few years of teaching but you get more efficient and most weeks nowadays I'll just do more like 50-55 in the first couple of terms. Gets worst after Easter though. Add in report writing, evenings (there's 14 evenings a year i need to be in), weekends (4 weekends a year), etc and I'd confidently say I work as many hours a year now as I did as a trainee solicitor and most people used to tell me that was a lot of hours and yet seem to presume teaching isn't. The other thing which is hard to get across really is that (and this will vary school by school) I don't really get breaks. Pupils come to see me every single day during morning 'break' and at lunchtime with multifarious issues - previous jobs i used to be able to leave the office and have some time off, I don't even get 5 minutes like that in my job. When they did a monitoring exercise (which they have done for the past few years taking in data from thousands of sources and studies) they have found that teacher workload is going down i think. It was 54ish hours in 2015 and is 53ish hours in 2018. The main issue really is that it is worst in the first few years so people just quit. In their droves.
55 retirement? Wow, 68 mate. If I retire any younger my pension takes a sizeable hit and i mean like half the pension pot if i go at 64. Anyone able to retire at 55 has retired already, people under the age of 40-50 will not have that option. The pension is very good no two ways about that, but i do pay full national insurance and 10% of my wages to get it (but in return get a better pension that if i was in the private sector by some margin i think, I've no complaints about the pension).
I'm sure you are one of the committed ones at the top end, its others who drag the profession down, when I go in to parents evenings the difference is day and night between some . Sorry if I have offended ,its just something I feel let down by.
Variety of jobs. I had to work all my way through my A levels and University as my parents weren't going to be able to afford it otherwise. There were many, I've been busy.
