Please Sir can I have more!!

[P.K.]

4 minutes ago, HeliX said:

No they don't. They seek to have their pay/conditions improved. If teachers working to their contract damages children's education then teaching contracts aren't fit for purpose.

If teachers are damaging children's education then they shouldn't be teachers.

Mind you, villa with pool in the South of France for 6 weeks in the summer won't come cheap....

[x-in-man]

24 minutes ago, HeliX said:

No they don't. They seek to have their pay/conditions improved. If teachers working to their contract damages children's education then teaching contracts aren't fit for purpose.

They should cut their cloth and stop expecting everything from the second they leave teacher training.

[Harry Lamb]

So many government shills on here these days...

[HeliX]

14 minutes ago, x-in-man said:

They should cut their cloth and stop expecting everything from the second they leave teacher training.

What's your plan for when we have not enough teachers to staff the schools because the salaries are pisspoor and the conditions are pisspoor?

[x-in-man]

4 minutes ago, HeliX said:

What's your plan for when we have not enough teachers to staff the schools because the salaries are pisspoor and the conditions are pisspoor?

Stop handing out points to every teacher for pointless positions to keep the money 'at the coal face'.  Reduce the number of managers who never see the inside of the classroom once they reach 'Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Assistant to the Deputy Head' positions. 

Stop newly appointed senior staff re-inventing the wheel every time they get a new job by starting yet more paperwork trails and spreadsheets.  This frees up more time for teaching rather than trying to ensure pointless paperwork and form filling.

Reduce the head count in the department who seem to soak all the money up by having CEOs, HR departments, Managers upon managers and legal teams who see it as their job to make teaching as difficult as possible in schools.

Stop job duplications - some school employ people to do functions but then sub those functions out to others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Asthehills]

23 minutes ago, Harry Lamb said:

So many government shills on here these days...

Just for info I despise nearly everything the government do, they have screwed me over a number of times.

I have zero support for the teachers here.  A few months ago they kind of had a point.  If you actually read the release from DESC this week then their current action is appalling 

Edited September 21, 2022 by Asthehills

[Ham_N_Eggs]

10 minutes ago, Asthehills said:

Just for info I despise nearly everything the government do, they have screwed me over a number of times.

I have zero support for the teachers here.  A few months ago they kind of had a point.  If you actually read the release from DESC this week then their current action is appalling 

Working to the terms of their contact is appalling? Why?

[Banker]

35 minutes ago, HeliX said:

What's your plan for when we have not enough teachers to staff the schools because the salaries are pisspoor and the conditions are pisspoor?

1 sixth form for island & stop all the small classes for subjects like French to free up several teachers, cheaper to bus students to central location.

[Asthehills]

14 minutes ago, Banker said:

1 sixth form for island & stop all the small classes for subjects like French to free up several teachers, cheaper to bus students to central location.

Worst of both worlds at the moment.  The sixth forms are already bused all over the island yet we are paying for duplicate staff and facilities at each school.

 

[Asthehills]

31 minutes ago, Ham_N_Eggs said:

Working to the terms of their contact is appalling? Why?

For escalating things right now when there is a clearly defined path that DESC are following and when kids need to be in school.

Again.  What’s the aim of escalation now when government have responded with a perfectly sensible press release?  No one has answered yet and I doubt they will

Edited September 21, 2022 by Asthehills

[Mercenary]

18 minutes ago, Ham_N_Eggs said:

Working to the terms of their contact is appalling? Why?

Because it is the real world. If you have an agreement that is unrealistic or unsustainable at some point things will flex, such as :

- in private sector you could have a pension that underperforms your expectation or is transferred from defined benefit

- pensionable ages have raised several times despite this being a change to original terms

- in private sector you could even have a contract and still get stiffed for payment

This is also why things like public sector pension reform are inevitable at some point, regardless of what's in a contract if it's unsustainable change will come (at best for new entrants only).

The median salary for a teacher is £45k+ for contracted hours of 50% less than normal professional roles. Of course it is 'built in' that there are additional activities/hours beyond this, the salaries are relatively high compared to overall pay here and still reasonably high for degree educated.

[Asthehills]

36 minutes ago, Mercenary said:

- in private sector you could have a pension that underperforms your expectation or is transferred from defined benefit

Good point.  Ours, which we pay into with money taken from our salary, have dropped 25% of the pension fund value in the last year.

Imagine the uproar in civil service if that happened to their salary linked pensions which barely exist in the real world 

Edited September 21, 2022 by Asthehills

[AcousticallyChallenged]

2 hours ago, P.K. said:

If teachers are damaging children's education then they shouldn't be teachers.

Mind you, villa with pool in the South of France for 6 weeks in the summer won't come cheap....

Those 6 weeks you don’t get paid for? Anyone with an understanding boss could wrangle themselves some unpaid leave if they really wanted it and they were valuable employees. 

[AcousticallyChallenged]

1 hour ago, Mercenary said:

The median salary for a teacher is £45k+ for contracted hours of 50% less than normal professional roles. Of course it is 'built in' that there are additional activities/hours beyond this, the salaries are relatively high compared to overall pay here and still reasonably high for degree educated.

Yet in the real world, most teachers work 50 hours a week or more. That’s a tad more than the 37.5 contracted hours many professional roles have.

The only local figures you can find talk about NQTs or self reports via indeed. But for many, that 45k figure you quote is a pipe dream. The majority of teachers on the island, as of 2020, earnt between 30 and 35k. 

The average salary for someone with a computer science degree is 57k. Depending on which figures you look at, starting salaries can be in the realm of 40-50. It’s not unheard of for them to be even beyond that. Pay rises moving between roles can be significant beyond that too, with plenty of company benefits often available, from stock options, to onsite gyms and training bursaries. Plus, inflation matched pay rises each year in your contract. 

[Meoir Shee]

The current dispute appears to be proxy for the chronic ills of the education system, both here and across.  Put the extra holidays and all to one side, just park it and move on just for a little while no matter how difficult that might be.

Funding has reached embarrassingly low levels.  A decade or so ago education was relatively well funded, those days are long gone and funding, in many ways, lags well behind England.  Investment in new technology appears to have been frozen for the past 5 years.  The IoM used to miles in front of England, it is now miles behind, both in terms of hardware and software.  Schools often get hand me downs from firms replacing their PCs and monitors, most equipment is 10+ years old.  Some Design and Technology equipment is 20+ years old and essentially obsolete as the parts are discontinued.

Investment in the fabric of the buildings has also declined.  Rooms not painted for 15+ years, carpets not replaced for 15+ years, desks and chairs in a terrible state, photocopiers often hand me downs from other government departments, sometimes 10+ years old and chronically inefficient.  Look at the disgraceful progress with Castle Rushen and then imagine working there every day, the place is falling down.

Investment in staff has essentially evaporated, staff training has declined to almost zero in recent years.  Secondary staff hardly ever receive specific training from exam boards, either on island or across, this used to be very regular.  Investment in teaching assistants has declined considerably and numbers have dropped alarmingly.  This has had a knock on effect on progress and behaviors of kids with various challenges.

School canteens have seen budget cuts, portions have shrunk, quality has suffered despite the best efforts of the kitchen staff.

Staff turnover appears to be accelerating and recruitment is becoming increasingly problematic.  Many staff are recruited from around the world, often via a zoom type interview.  Gone are the days of flying people in and meeting them, appointing the best candidate with confidence.  Very often recruitment is a shoe in, just one applicant.  Sometimes there are no suitable applicants.  Sometimes people accept and then give back word when they realize the cost of living but the schools still have to be staffed somehow so the standard gets compromised.

Morale is on the floor.  Behavior has significantly worsened since the various lockdowns.  Parents are increasingly less supportive of the education system, their child can do no wrong.  Society is often disrespectful, just look at some of the comments on here.  Staff are increasingly doorstopped at weekends, in supermarkets, living their own lives by parents unhappy with the school system, this is simply unacceptable.  Kids increasingly e-mail staff at all hours, evenings, weekends, holidays, complaints then come in from parents when staff don’t reply almost immediately.  Kids increasingly secretly record interactions with staff and share on social media, this can be devastating.  Staff get abused in the street and even in their own homes.  Parents often openly complain about staff, by name, on social media.  Many staff may have taken kids away, often patrolling corridors in a hostel in the UK or Europe at past midnight or running a sports event at a weekend, away from their own families, but sadly too many people have chosen to forget this, despite the fact they may well have benefitted themselves.

Yes, there are the holidays and the pension but real terms pay has genuinely fallen by almost 30% since 2010.  The holidays are somewhat soured by the extortionate cost of transport at peak times, especially off island.  People have simply had enough.  There are few tools to express dissatisfaction and industrial action is one.  

People might casually say just move on then but people have built their lives here, they have their kids in school here, it isn’t that easy.  There is a ticking time bomb in education, it is in a right mess and has been kicked down the road too often.  Healthcare is probably no different.  This isn’t a race to the bottom, my terms are worse than yours so yours should worsen, it should be a race to the top, what is the best we can do?  If people don’t want to work their breaks, fine as long as they do their core job, that surely can’t be unreasonable?  But a wider, strategic review is needed or the system might simply collapse under itself.