Teacher's Strike
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tiffinboys
- Posts: 8022
- Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2011 11:00 pm
- Location: Surrey
Re: Teacher's Strike
According to BBC, only 40% of the NUT members took part in strike ballot and 92% of those voted for strike action. That makes it only about 36% of NUT members who voted for strike.
Looking at the large organisation I used to work, mostly the poor performers were engaged in active union politics, voted for strike / work to rule / tools down and had the loudest voice. Others were scared of some of them.
I hope that in case of teachers, it is not the same and that their grievances are really worth to go for strike.
Looking at the large organisation I used to work, mostly the poor performers were engaged in active union politics, voted for strike / work to rule / tools down and had the loudest voice. Others were scared of some of them.
I hope that in case of teachers, it is not the same and that their grievances are really worth to go for strike.
Re: Teacher's Strike
My schools were shut. Nearly every teacher who was striking is rated good or outstanding as are the schools.
Judging by the number of emails that were initiated/responded to during the morning, my guess is that most took an unpaid day and worked from home. Hopefully, this will give them a Sunday off this week.
Working hours are a particular issue, with many teachers in school for twelve hour days. Teaching is an exhausting job; imagine giving a presentation all day long. I worked a 60 hour week quite regularly during the last couple of years with very little holiday, but out of school. It was much less tiring.
Judging by the number of emails that were initiated/responded to during the morning, my guess is that most took an unpaid day and worked from home. Hopefully, this will give them a Sunday off this week.
Working hours are a particular issue, with many teachers in school for twelve hour days. Teaching is an exhausting job; imagine giving a presentation all day long. I worked a 60 hour week quite regularly during the last couple of years with very little holiday, but out of school. It was much less tiring.
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pheasantchick
- Posts: 2439
- Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 10:28 pm
Re: Teacher's Strike
If teachers were catching up with marking at home during the strike, then they are not really striking but working!
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DIY Mum
- Posts: 744
- Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 10:08 pm
- Location: Not in a hole in the ground but in a land where once they dwelt-the Beormingas
Re: Teacher's Strike
From the NUT website- 3 reasons to strike:
Workload
EduFacts
•It is a popular misconception that teachers only work from 9am-3:30pm.
•The school day may be shorter than the standard office day but teachers put in extra hours before and after the school day and at weekends. Teachers spend many extra hours planning lessons, marking work, assessing pupils, inputting data, organising and running extra-curricular activities and taking on wider-school roles and responsibilities.
•Research carried out in 2012 by tesconnect.com 1showed that amongst 1,600 primary and secondary teachers, 55 per cent regularly spend more than 56 hours a week engaged in their work during term time. Even taking into account adjustments for school closure periods when teachers continue to work an average of 13 hours per week, the findings show an annualised average of 48.3 hours per week.
•The DfE’s own 2013 workload statistics2 show an increase in working hours for all categories of teachers compared to 20103. Primary classroom teachers hours have increased by more than 9 hours a week to 59.3, while secondary classroom teachers have experienced nearly a 6 hour increase to 55.6.
•Working hours of 55-60 hours a week, combined with continual change and upheaval and denigration of the profession by politicians makes for a stressful mix.
•Teachers’ working hours are also inflexible. It is very difficult for teachers to take time off during term time, for example to attend an event at their own child’s school.
•An ETUC(E) survey4, the findings of which were published in May 2013, showed that out of 37 European countries, UK teachers scored highest for ‘burnout’. This is bad for pupils and schools as well as for the teachers themselves. It also gives lie to the idea that teachers only work from 9am-3:30pm.
•The findings of the latest TUC Biennial survey of union safety reps5, showed that stress was one of the top concerns for 80
Performance Related Pay in Schools
EduFacts
Michael Gove wants to impose performance related pay (PRP) on all teachers. He tries to argue that his proposals are all about paying good teachers more.
NUT members oppose PRP in schools - they think it is unfair and won't work. The evidence suggests they are right.
•PRP will not improve educational standards or outcomes. OECD research on the impact of PRP in teaching has concluded that “the overall picture reveals no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes.” 1 A wide range of other research including from the USA2 and Portugal has suggested that it has no overall impact on achievement or may even reduce it.
•PRP does not motivate teachers either. Professor David Marsden’s 2009 study, ‘The Paradox of Performance Related Pay Systems: Why Do We Keep Adopting Them in the Face of Evidence that they Fail to Motivate?’3sums up its conclusions in its title.
•PRP will undermine and disrupt effective school improvement. It encourages teachers to work for themselves rather than pooling their expertise. Schools are learning communities - good teachers build their students’ achievement on foundations laid by other teachers and support staff. Teachers work best when they work collaboratively.
•Imposing PRP will damage collaboration in schools. If we are serious about school improvement, we should instead focus on the lessons of proven successes - such as the City Challenge model in London and the Midlands, declared by researchers to have produced school improvement which is not only “measurable and sustainable” but also “more cost effective than other strategies”4
•PRP will distort teaching and lead to narrower choices & opportunities for students. Research on PRP proposals for teachers in Canada concluded that teachers focus on matters relevant to their pay at the expense of other matters, “whether those are different subject areas or soft skills or relationships with students”5 As the Local Schools Network has argued, PRP will encourage teachers towards the ‘best’ classes (the easiest to teach and highest achieving) rather than the hardest to help succeed6.
•Quality of teaching cannot be measured, quantified or ranked in the way PRP demands.Teaching is a professional skill rather than an exact science. The Sutton Trust says that schools should rely on a combination of approaches to gain a full picture of teacher effectiveness and should never assess teachers on data from a single year7.
•PRP will make it harder to recruit new teachers and retain teachers in the profession. Over 90% of NUT members under 30 told us they think PRP will mean that graduates will in future be less likely to enter teaching.
•PRP is an unnecessary and bureaucratic burden. School leaders and governors will find themselves involved in lengthy discussions and time consuming appeals - diverting time away from the key challenges of securing improvements in teaching and learning.
•PRP will turn Ofsted into the Government’s pay police. Ofsted inspectors are expected to ask school leaders to justify pay progression decisions. This will undermine the already tenuous trust between schools and Ofsted - and school leaders are bound to be tempted into failing a quota of teachers for self-protection purposes.
•PRP will lead to discriminatory outcomes. It is well known that PRP favours men not women, while evidence from the performance threshold system in schools showed that black and minority ethnic teachers were disproportionately likely to fail to progress. The Government is promoting pay practices which will lead to further discrimination against older teachers, women teachers and black minority ethnic teachers alike.
•PRP will not lead to "the best teachers being paid more". Pressures on school funding mean faster pay progression for some will only happen at the expense of others. In schools where every teacher is performing well, that will make no sense at all.
•Finally, teachers reject PRP, whatever the Government and its supporters say. Over 90% of NUT members have told us that they reject linking pay to performance, seeing it as arbitrary, unfair and unlikely to motivate or raise outcomes for students. Even studies carried out by PRP’s proponents confirm teachers' opposition to PRP.
What does work is paying all teachers better. Another study looking across OECD countries in 2011 concluded both that “higher pay leads to improved pupil performance” and that the highest performing countries have well paid teachers whose status in society is high. We won’t achieve this by focusing on PRP for the few.
PRP in teaching will not help raise standards. It will undermine professional co-operation and hamper school improvement. It will be unfair, promote inequality and make pay determination costlier and more bureaucratic. It is actually all about cutting the pay bill for teachers - which is why the NUT continues to oppose it.
Teachers’ Pensions
EduFacts
•The Government wants teachers to pay more towards their pension, work longer and receive a smaller pension when they retire.
•Ministers say that pensions cost too much but they have failed to prove their claim that public sector pensions aren’t affordable. The Hutton Commission report found that the cost of the existing structure of public sector pensions would fall from 1.9 per cent of GDP currently to 1.4 per cent by 2060.1
•The Government has failed to carry out the long overdue 2008 valuation of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme that should have informed any changes to the scheme. Without the valuation, changes to the Scheme are being made by Ministers on an uninformed basis. The increases in employee contributions that the Government has implemented are in truth a thinly disguised tax on teachers.
•Since the TPS was set up in 1923, £46.4bn more in contributions been paid into the scheme than has been paid out in pensions. The Government has had a long cheap loan from teachers, but now baulks at paying the pensions due.
•Most teachers will not be able to work successfully in the classroom to age 68 so they will have to retire earlier on substantially reduced pensions. Those teachers that do retire from the classroom at age 68 can expect less than a decade of good health in retirement. The Office for National Statistics has found2 that men at age 65 can expect to live for 9.9 years and women for 11.5 years in good or very good health. Increasing the normal pension age to 68 would thus cut into the length of time in retirement that will be spent in good or very good health.
•Teachers will also lose out because the Government has changed the way pensions are increased in retirement. In April 2011, the Government changed annual pension indexation from Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation to Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation. RPI inflation is normally higher than CPI inflation. The Union estimates that a teacher retiring with a £10,000 pension will lose over £30,000 during the course of a 25-year retirement due to the switch.
•The real pension problem is in the private sector. Two-thirds of private sector employees aren’t in any employer-backed scheme, compared to just over half of employees ten years ago. Employer contributions to newer “defined contribution” schemes are less than half those for final salary schemes. Too many employers are simply seeking to abandon their responsibilities to their employees. The cost of supporting them in retirement is simply passed back to the State and future taxpayers. Cutting public sector pensions won’t help private sector workers – it will just make everyone poorer in retirement.
Workload
EduFacts
•It is a popular misconception that teachers only work from 9am-3:30pm.
•The school day may be shorter than the standard office day but teachers put in extra hours before and after the school day and at weekends. Teachers spend many extra hours planning lessons, marking work, assessing pupils, inputting data, organising and running extra-curricular activities and taking on wider-school roles and responsibilities.
•Research carried out in 2012 by tesconnect.com 1showed that amongst 1,600 primary and secondary teachers, 55 per cent regularly spend more than 56 hours a week engaged in their work during term time. Even taking into account adjustments for school closure periods when teachers continue to work an average of 13 hours per week, the findings show an annualised average of 48.3 hours per week.
•The DfE’s own 2013 workload statistics2 show an increase in working hours for all categories of teachers compared to 20103. Primary classroom teachers hours have increased by more than 9 hours a week to 59.3, while secondary classroom teachers have experienced nearly a 6 hour increase to 55.6.
•Working hours of 55-60 hours a week, combined with continual change and upheaval and denigration of the profession by politicians makes for a stressful mix.
•Teachers’ working hours are also inflexible. It is very difficult for teachers to take time off during term time, for example to attend an event at their own child’s school.
•An ETUC(E) survey4, the findings of which were published in May 2013, showed that out of 37 European countries, UK teachers scored highest for ‘burnout’. This is bad for pupils and schools as well as for the teachers themselves. It also gives lie to the idea that teachers only work from 9am-3:30pm.
•The findings of the latest TUC Biennial survey of union safety reps5, showed that stress was one of the top concerns for 80
Performance Related Pay in Schools
EduFacts
Michael Gove wants to impose performance related pay (PRP) on all teachers. He tries to argue that his proposals are all about paying good teachers more.
NUT members oppose PRP in schools - they think it is unfair and won't work. The evidence suggests they are right.
•PRP will not improve educational standards or outcomes. OECD research on the impact of PRP in teaching has concluded that “the overall picture reveals no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes.” 1 A wide range of other research including from the USA2 and Portugal has suggested that it has no overall impact on achievement or may even reduce it.
•PRP does not motivate teachers either. Professor David Marsden’s 2009 study, ‘The Paradox of Performance Related Pay Systems: Why Do We Keep Adopting Them in the Face of Evidence that they Fail to Motivate?’3sums up its conclusions in its title.
•PRP will undermine and disrupt effective school improvement. It encourages teachers to work for themselves rather than pooling their expertise. Schools are learning communities - good teachers build their students’ achievement on foundations laid by other teachers and support staff. Teachers work best when they work collaboratively.
•Imposing PRP will damage collaboration in schools. If we are serious about school improvement, we should instead focus on the lessons of proven successes - such as the City Challenge model in London and the Midlands, declared by researchers to have produced school improvement which is not only “measurable and sustainable” but also “more cost effective than other strategies”4
•PRP will distort teaching and lead to narrower choices & opportunities for students. Research on PRP proposals for teachers in Canada concluded that teachers focus on matters relevant to their pay at the expense of other matters, “whether those are different subject areas or soft skills or relationships with students”5 As the Local Schools Network has argued, PRP will encourage teachers towards the ‘best’ classes (the easiest to teach and highest achieving) rather than the hardest to help succeed6.
•Quality of teaching cannot be measured, quantified or ranked in the way PRP demands.Teaching is a professional skill rather than an exact science. The Sutton Trust says that schools should rely on a combination of approaches to gain a full picture of teacher effectiveness and should never assess teachers on data from a single year7.
•PRP will make it harder to recruit new teachers and retain teachers in the profession. Over 90% of NUT members under 30 told us they think PRP will mean that graduates will in future be less likely to enter teaching.
•PRP is an unnecessary and bureaucratic burden. School leaders and governors will find themselves involved in lengthy discussions and time consuming appeals - diverting time away from the key challenges of securing improvements in teaching and learning.
•PRP will turn Ofsted into the Government’s pay police. Ofsted inspectors are expected to ask school leaders to justify pay progression decisions. This will undermine the already tenuous trust between schools and Ofsted - and school leaders are bound to be tempted into failing a quota of teachers for self-protection purposes.
•PRP will lead to discriminatory outcomes. It is well known that PRP favours men not women, while evidence from the performance threshold system in schools showed that black and minority ethnic teachers were disproportionately likely to fail to progress. The Government is promoting pay practices which will lead to further discrimination against older teachers, women teachers and black minority ethnic teachers alike.
•PRP will not lead to "the best teachers being paid more". Pressures on school funding mean faster pay progression for some will only happen at the expense of others. In schools where every teacher is performing well, that will make no sense at all.
•Finally, teachers reject PRP, whatever the Government and its supporters say. Over 90% of NUT members have told us that they reject linking pay to performance, seeing it as arbitrary, unfair and unlikely to motivate or raise outcomes for students. Even studies carried out by PRP’s proponents confirm teachers' opposition to PRP.
What does work is paying all teachers better. Another study looking across OECD countries in 2011 concluded both that “higher pay leads to improved pupil performance” and that the highest performing countries have well paid teachers whose status in society is high. We won’t achieve this by focusing on PRP for the few.
PRP in teaching will not help raise standards. It will undermine professional co-operation and hamper school improvement. It will be unfair, promote inequality and make pay determination costlier and more bureaucratic. It is actually all about cutting the pay bill for teachers - which is why the NUT continues to oppose it.
Teachers’ Pensions
EduFacts
•The Government wants teachers to pay more towards their pension, work longer and receive a smaller pension when they retire.
•Ministers say that pensions cost too much but they have failed to prove their claim that public sector pensions aren’t affordable. The Hutton Commission report found that the cost of the existing structure of public sector pensions would fall from 1.9 per cent of GDP currently to 1.4 per cent by 2060.1
•The Government has failed to carry out the long overdue 2008 valuation of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme that should have informed any changes to the scheme. Without the valuation, changes to the Scheme are being made by Ministers on an uninformed basis. The increases in employee contributions that the Government has implemented are in truth a thinly disguised tax on teachers.
•Since the TPS was set up in 1923, £46.4bn more in contributions been paid into the scheme than has been paid out in pensions. The Government has had a long cheap loan from teachers, but now baulks at paying the pensions due.
•Most teachers will not be able to work successfully in the classroom to age 68 so they will have to retire earlier on substantially reduced pensions. Those teachers that do retire from the classroom at age 68 can expect less than a decade of good health in retirement. The Office for National Statistics has found2 that men at age 65 can expect to live for 9.9 years and women for 11.5 years in good or very good health. Increasing the normal pension age to 68 would thus cut into the length of time in retirement that will be spent in good or very good health.
•Teachers will also lose out because the Government has changed the way pensions are increased in retirement. In April 2011, the Government changed annual pension indexation from Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation to Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation. RPI inflation is normally higher than CPI inflation. The Union estimates that a teacher retiring with a £10,000 pension will lose over £30,000 during the course of a 25-year retirement due to the switch.
•The real pension problem is in the private sector. Two-thirds of private sector employees aren’t in any employer-backed scheme, compared to just over half of employees ten years ago. Employer contributions to newer “defined contribution” schemes are less than half those for final salary schemes. Too many employers are simply seeking to abandon their responsibilities to their employees. The cost of supporting them in retirement is simply passed back to the State and future taxpayers. Cutting public sector pensions won’t help private sector workers – it will just make everyone poorer in retirement.
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wonderwoman
- Posts: 511
- Joined: Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:07 pm
Re: Teacher's Strike
I don't understand the details of it either and head teachers can already prevent teachers moving to the upper pay scales and progressing.mystery wrote:I don't really understand the details of it. I don't know if it is true PRP involving a bonus pool each year to be share out according to great things having been achieved by individuals, or if headteachers can prevent teachers progressing up the payscales.
.
I don't want prp and have no idea how of how it will work. If I was paid according to previous ofsted inspection gradings that would be great, or attainment by pupils in my previous jobs that too would be great. But as a talented teacher I was encouraged to apply and was appointed to a job working with challenging pupils with a history of low achievement. Now if someone wants to pay me by pupil achievement by results I may struggle - now they may have to look at improvement in truancy rates, or reduced exclusions or the fact that instead of spending a lesson writing ' I hate maths' all over their book a pupil has actually completed some calculations. Will there be any incentive to work with such pupils - probably not. And my own children have been taught by some shocking teachers at their grammar school - but they still get reasonable results. If those teachers are paid more than me purely because of the results their pupils attain, it will be a very sad day indeed and an absolute disaster for education.
Re: Teacher's Strike
Agreed. But the nut info on reasons for striking does not clarify matters either. It doesn't help the strike cause if the information given to the public is so poor. And the fact that people maybe do not know what really they are striking about is baffling too.
I don't think that complaining first on the nut list about workload is going to be a winner with anyone either. Yes the workload is high. But it hasn't changed just prior to the strike. New teachers go into the profession with their eyes open. It is not a secret. How then can it suddenly become a reason to strike?
I don't think that complaining first on the nut list about workload is going to be a winner with anyone either. Yes the workload is high. But it hasn't changed just prior to the strike. New teachers go into the profession with their eyes open. It is not a secret. How then can it suddenly become a reason to strike?
Re: Teacher's Strike
New teachers go into the profession with their eyes open? I'm not at all sure about that. Retention rates are shocking. 40+% leave within the first five years.
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wonderwoman
- Posts: 511
- Joined: Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:07 pm
Re: Teacher's Strike
I'm not a member of the NUT, but workload is a real issue - I've been teaching for 25+ years and work longer hours than I ever have. I don't think the quality of my teaching has improved by the same proportion, but I do have stacks of paper work, records, evidence etc that anyone could look at without giving me any notice. Some of the extra things I do compared to when I started teaching - policy writing / reading; lengthy risk assessments for trips; far greater number of parent evenings / information evenings; more moderating meetings; things outside normal school time - residential trips, supporting sports fixtures, plays, musical evenings, summer schools etc. All worthwhile and I think valued by parents and pupils, but if I'm watching pupils in a play, I'm obviously not marking and in the past I might have thought a quick tick and brief comment would do for those odd times - that is not acceptable any more.mystery wrote:I don't think that complaining first on the nut list about workload is going to be a winner with anyone either. Yes the workload is high. But it hasn't changed just prior to the strike. New teachers go into the profession with their eyes open. It is not a secret. How then can it suddenly become a reason to strike?
I'm also not thrilled that my conditions of employment have been changed and I don't think I'll be a great teacher at 68.
And I think new teachers are often deeply shocked at the workload. I have had students every year for a very long time. I ask them all why they want to teach and the most common 2 answers are: to fit in with family life and because they like children. All ask me during that first practice if they will have more free time / does it get easier / do I rewrite my plans every year? My answer is always a disappointment - they are not teaching every lesson, doing anywhere near the amount of record keeping / paperwork they will do for their own class or going to all the meetings. Many teachers leave soon after entering the profession - I know an NQT who has handed in their notice this week.
Teaching is a the most fantastic way to earn a living, but it is a very hard job which requires great commitment and energy. We need to encourage the very best into the profession and then make sure we hold on to them - the evidence is that we are not succeeding on either front at the moment.
Re: Teacher's Strike
Regarding family life, I am rarely home before 8pm and often significantly later. Work life balance; I wish!
