Teachers strike

[Margaret Pilkington]

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.

[Greeny]

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.

[accyman]

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

[Guinness]

Originally Posted by egg&chips

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 wordnot 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.

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.

[DaveinGermany]

Originally Posted by accyman

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

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

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.

[egg&chips]

Originally Posted by Guinness

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.

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.

[accyman]

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

[egg&chips]

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.

[egg&chips]

Originally Posted by Greeny

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.

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.

[Less]

Originally Posted by DaveinGermany

Yep, and it's all Alcohol free !

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

[accyman]

Originally Posted by Less

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

there are some true monsters in this world

[Less]

Originally Posted by accyman

there are some true monsters in this world

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

[DaveinGermany]

Originally Posted by accyman

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

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.

[egg&chips]

Originally Posted by DaveinGermany

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.

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.

[cashman]

Yeh must mean water? Alcohol will do yeh good.