Good luck to all Teachers on Strike today

' I quite like the sound of kids being in school till 5pm or at least it being optional for parents to request their children stay until 5pm to allow them to work a full time job.'

School isn't a babysitting club IMO. I'm sure there'd be loads of redundant childminders and after school club employees who might agree.

'One thing that I would definitely change if I was in charge would be to scrap the long holidays that teachers get but only for new teachers entering the profession (as per my view at the beginning of this post). They'd get the national standard of 4 or 5 weeks holiday plus bank holidays to be taken any time they wanted outside of term time. In return they would be required to work less in the evenings and weekends. I'm not sure how I'd achieve this though.'

Would you increase the pay by 7 weeks as well ? I do think that it would be unworkable in that a lot of the work is contemporary so unless the schools were open at the same time there'd be teachers at school twiddling their thumbs.

Just my opinion though

 

Great point about ignoring experts. Michael Gove has an Education advisory board and one of the main advisors is an academic at The University of Sheffield. Despite producing a detailed report/review the government have completely ignored the expert advice of a world-leading educator and continued on their path of taking us back to the old days. I just can't believe such liberties are allowed.

I work with a world-class political-economist and he tells me that the Conservatives have read Tony Blair's autobiography, where he claims he should have made more sweeping changes in his first term, because support will wane after that. In his opinion they're hell-bent on doing anything they want now so that they can 'improve' conditions by the time of the next election. E.g. smear hard-working professionals from schools, NHS, local authorities etc - only to talk about how much they've improved by the next election. It's a marketing campaign - not a strategic project to improve standards.

It's a dirty way of trying to stay in power - confuse the voter.

 

I wouldn't mind if teachers were required to be in school from 8am until 5pm without children. We all do that anyway, I presume our pay would go up to reflect the 'increase' in hours and we might get less bashing from Joe public. The reason I don't want it to be extended with children is because not only would I have less time to do all the things I already don't have enough time to do, I would have more to do in that less time (not counting the actual extra hours of being stood infront of the class).

 

"In return they would be required to work less in the evenings and weekends."

If you could do that, there would be no complaints at all if teacher's holidays were reduced to the statutory 28 days. If a teacher could start work at 8:30, leave at 5 and have no work to do at home or the weekend they'd suck your **** never mind accept reduced holidays.

How do you do it? I reckon they'd need two full working days a week to complete the marking and the lesson planning required. Most do much more than that now if you add up the time they spend at evenings and weekends, but if they were doing two full days planning they'd only be teaching for 3, so they'd get it done. In order to achieve that you'd need a 30% increase in teaching staff across the education system to cover the classes these teachers are missing when doing their planning/marking time. It's not 40%, teachers already get half a day for marking and planning, so just another one and a half days would need covering which is 30% of the week. 30% more staff means a 30% increase on the education budget set aside for wages. That's millions if not billions a year. Can the country afford that?

Possibly, but why would they want to when no more work is getting done and nothing more is being achieved? Why not just let teachers plan and mark in their own time, not pay them for it, but give them longer holidays like we do now?

 

If only there was enough money to achieve this (minus the **** sucking part), it would solve all problems. It all boils down to needing more teachers and/or smaller class sizes (less resources to make, less books to mark, less parents to meet, less reports to write etc.) So of course, what does Gove propose? To increase class sizes too... because that's sure to improve standards!

 

I'm glad the Bryant May match girls didn't take this view!

 

How did it work before when teachers didn't refuse to do out of school clubs/teams? You will not get a teacher doing anything out of school time to benefit the children these days (Football teams ect)

 

Teachers don't run school football teams after school anymore?

 

Are you joking? I guess we'd better cancel choir, football, cross country, dance, chess, netball, cheerleading, gymnastics, karate, film, Kidz, sewing, gardening and all the other clubs when we get back tomorrow then! Oh, and the 3 day residential trip that we don't get paid any extra for too.

 

Utter ********. There is at least one club, often more, every day of the week after school at our lass' school, which every child can attend if they want. I believe every teacher does at least one club. There's dance, art, cooking, gardening and christ knows what else. Plus tag rugby, football, athletics and hockey teams.

Why do people post up lies?

 

Both my parents were teachers so I have a natural affinity, but I have to say it is very difficult to sack a teacher, especially if they go on sick. We had a teacher who was on a temporary contract and was interviewed for the job permanently, didn't get it and so never came back for the summer half term even though she was contacted to the end of the academic year. So I take some of this "it's all for the children" with a pinch of salt.

 

I agree with doing away with box ticking. take secondary school for example. If it's anything like it was when I was at school then a teacher will teach 2 or 3 different groups of people from the same school year on different days of the week meaning that they are all having essentially the same lesson just at different times. Take Science for example, everyone learns about photosynthesis at the same time from the same biology teacher so he would do an experiment and work through part of a text book with one class on monday morning, do the same experiment and same text book monday afternoon and then do the same on Wednesday morning. Obviously he doesn't need to plan all three of those lessons because they're the same thing but would I be right in assuming that at the moment he would have to have written and documented proof that all three of these had been planned meaning that he'd wasted time writing the same thing out three times to meet three check boxes? If so then that is crazy.

If the hours could be cut to 8am till 6pm or however it would work I'd have a minimum amount of teachers with the kids (which would hopefully be a tiny number and not the whole school) and the rest of you could all sit and do your marking in quiet without being distracted.

Then again it's nowt to do with me and i'm just guessing at how to solve the problems.

 

I couldn't comment on how it is at secondary school sorry. Every school is different in what it requires teachers to produce in terms of planning. I would presume they would however as every lesson needs to meet the needs of that individual class, so if it was our school we'd have to show how we delivered it differently taking into account the individual children.

 

How about if there was a radical overhaul of the school holiday and term time system? It seems that at the moment you have to work ridiculously hard and long for the whole term and then have two weeks off doing nowt (I know that teachers apparently do school related things in this time off). What if there was a change to maybe having shorter holidays more often? Would this enable teachers to do a lot of their marking and/or preperation then? Or does the lesson planning need to be done in the days leading up to the lesson itself? Would it be possible to instead plan the entire term in one go which could be done during the holidays? Same with a lot of the marking from things like coursework. I used to hand my coursework in on a friday and within a week it was marked. All 60 pages of it. Times that by a minimum of 30 kids and two things spring to mind. 1. How the hell have they managed to do that? Have they worked 24 hour shifts marking it for the last week? And 2. Having to mark so much in so little time you have to wonder what has had to give and whether they had devoted enough attention to each kids work as they should have? I remember that sometimes I'd get my coursework back with comments on and a score at the end but practically no information on what I'd done wrong or how to improve it.

Again I havent actually got a clue how to solve the problems but it seems a little bit stupid that teachers work stupid hours and work at home as well all night and at weekends but then sit around twiddling their thumbs for weeks on end and there must be some way to change that so that they work more days for less hours. It might just need such big changes that it would never be accepted.

I wonder which is easiest from a planning/marking point of view. Primary or secondary.

 

In primary school is it still a case of you teach the same class of kids continuously for the entire year or do you do part time with two different classes? If it's the former then having to prove you've planned every lesson seems silly because most of the time wont classes just be a continuation of each other? Anyway I always found the best classes to be those that seemed to be made up on the spot. Where somebody would say something random and the teacher would go off on a tangent. Before you knew it he/she was teaching you in a bit of a weird way drawing random things on the blackboard and looking back you know it would have been impossible for that lesson to have been planned, or if it was then after 5 minutes the teacher had binned the plan and winged it.

 

Shorter holidays more often would make the term easier. Those last few weeks are hell for both the teacher and the children. 8 week terms are killers. There's no way you could ever do all the planning at once for the whole term, for one thing we have to show how we build on the previous lesson in our annotations. Having to submit a weeks planning in advance is driving us all bonkers, you teach the lesson on Monday and if they either don't get it or find it really easy then bam, 3 hours of planning just went down the drain. You then have to re-do it all via pencilled annotations. We do 'medium term planning' during the holidays that outlines the main objectives we want to cover during the term, briefly how we will cover them and how we will assess it. We also do displays and make resources for the upcoming term. Again, we can't hand books back unmarked (and they have to have a good comment and a next step for the child to complete in the next lesson), so that's 150 books a night unless you have PE, ICT or music on that day.

 

They're my favourite too, especially in topic where you could never plan the questions the children come up with. Except for you then have to scribble what you actually did on the side of the plan. I teach my class all year but we change into sets for maths and literacy. Lessons are one hour each and are defined by the bell; they don't merge into each other.

 

You just loved being downtrodden. Worse they treat you and less they pay you the more you'll like it. What a martyr!