If I were you Mr Balls, I would put my tin hat on right now

THIS IS THE GREATEST THREAD TITLE EVER

It did seem to lend itself to a thread, yes.

I don't see doctors and lawyers giving a flying fuck what other people think of them. Or for that matter the concessions staff at sports and concert venues. Public sector staff should be able to put food on the table. UK & US govt's use of the completely invalid CPI index to set raise targets is practically fucking criminal, but that belongs on the shitbin threads.

Yes, they're underpaid, but their pay has improved vastly over the last ten years compared to, say, lecturers' (professors') pay.

half-truth ahoy. they've casualized the shit out of lecturing/university teaching, which is another tale. professors seem to get by alright.

Public sector staff should be able to put food on the table. In a reasonable world 10% would be just the start of it. (I am public sector UK btw, and we just got 4%. They slipped in performance related pay as well, the bastards). But 10% is just unrealistic in the current climate, and even if it wasn't, this kind of posturing and bluster is more likely to set back any progress than advance it.

Banriquit, you have a point - casualisation is another side to it. Professors, in the UK sense, do ok, you're quite right. -i.e. senior academic staff. Lecturers in the UK sense (i.e. lowlier university teachers) do less well. Researchers, well, that's even more problematic as you know...

teaching: the one profession about which EVERYONE is an expert

i'm more concerned about the architects of the 'current climate' than teachers tbh. the government has been positively jizzing cash over the city the last nine months: the big battalions ask for it, and they get it. who's to say what's 'unrealistic' when £50bn can be flushed down the pisser by the treasury out of sheer incompetence?

moonship, yes, but that's half the problem: because the whole country thinks it knows all about teaching and schools, the unions ought to have learnt, by now, to be measured and not play up to it.

Yes, we should be concerned about that banriquit, but why can't unions do realpolitik? Given that there is this disrespect for the public sector, how can that be addressed? By using language guaranteed to provoke tabloid winter of discontent comparisons? It just won't work.

the unions ought to have learnt, by now, to be measured and not play up to it.

thuggery is the point of a union?

Is that a Billy Bragg song?

i agree that in general the teacher's unions (or at least the union reps and union movers & shakers) can go fuck themselves.

but this: “Strike action can only achieve one thing - disruption to children's learning." is truly ridiculous.

And support staff numbers had doubled over the last decade, freeing teachers from a range of administrative duties.

also ridiculous.

the government had invested in cutting class sizes and the ratio of pupils to teachers been "substantially" reduced, ensuring children had more individual attention

somewhat ridiculous

You are right. I thought the lecturers' strike last year or the year before or whenever it was was probably justified. As far as I remember it didn't have this kind of rhetoric attached. And re admin duties, ho ho ho yes (lots of my family teach, so I get some sense of the admin situation from them).

Ratio: I guess this depends on classing teaching assistants as teachers...

if the UK is anything like the US, the majority of people in educational policy are in educational policy because they have some interest in education but like to avoid actually being anywhere near classrooms and students. so they have a basic lack of understanding of the ways in which running a school is a different enterprise from running, say, a health-care provider or a retail chain.

so they end up doing things piecemeal: OK, we'll reduce the class size, but to do so we'll also cut back on professional development, so that students have lots of "face time" with undertrained, unqualified beginners. or we'll add a bunch of support staff so that teachers won't have to worry about supporting students w/ special needs, but we'll forget that this means one more stakeholder for a teacher to communicate and coordinate with.

Yes, pretty much. Guaranteed 'non-contact' time has been introduced, but this means teaching assistants taking classes. Teacher training is now possible on-the-job, and those teachers too can be unsupervised. A shortage of educational psychologists (= school psychologists in the US, I think) but a shortage of training places for ed psychs due to lack of funding.

Are you a teacher moonship?

i have taught three times at schools where the teachers are not represented by unions, and i have come to strongly support and believe in them in all areas but for striking

I'm a union member, but have never had to call on them and would be very nervous about doing so. But would be equally unhappy about not being a member. I believe in the idea of unions, and support unionised workforces - just very disappointed in them, most of the time.

What do/did you teach remy?

i was, i'm in school now, but will be teaching full-time again next year

maybe i've spent too much time in bad public high schools but everywhere i've been (six different schools now) the most involved union teachers are also the most checked-out people in the school. the union meetings i've seen were basically just massive bitchfests w/ students, parents, administrators, district people and other teachers as the faculty. i'm not sure if the unions create an adversarial tone or they just attract people w/ that personality but it was enough that i've sworn the union off for now.

"as the faculty" should have read "as the targets"

i basically refuse to be part of any organization whose purpose is to complain about your job -- bad for morale and more or less useless to my professional development

Where I work it does seem to be the case that adversarial people go for the positions. Of course if was going to put my money where my mouth is I'd become a rep and go and have a try myself, on the basis of negotiation rather than just whiny complaint. But I'm too busy exceeding the European working hours directive.

i have taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade in all subjects, as well a private remedial lessons and one-on-one work with special-needs students. since i lack official teacher credentialing (at this point i would need to volunteer for one thousand unpaid hours of observation before i would be eligable) i have had to seek work exclusively at independent schools. i can think of some instances where a union would have helped me - (1) shady termination and (2) unequal benefits - but also hate dealing with old biddy teachers who are either officially or unofficially tenured to positions they neither care about nor perform

ack, sorry about the terrible editing ^

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f49/a1b2c3_Poster/tinfoilhat.jpg

Vahid's on the list, come the Revolution.

I'm a union member precisely to guard against that kind of dodgy treatment. Just wish I thought they'd come through for me if I needed support, rather than mess it up further. I reckon it would be 50-50.

Have you encountered school psychologists at all? I am interested in this as a career change but it's probably entirely unrealistic (would need to go and get teacher trained first, or get other experience with children for 2 years, then 3-year doctorate). And teachers seem to say: these people have no idea. I would not want to be that person who comes in, runs a test or five, hinders things somewhat, then buggers off. But it still interests me.

Mr Balls is not such a bad name for a cat. Or indeed simply Ed.

remy just go get a credential already

"that person who comes in, runs a test or five, hinders things somewhat, then buggers off" is a pretty nasty stereotype, don't you think??

there's no reason to think that a teacher who's spent 100 hours working with a psychologically disturbed teenager is 10x more informed as someone who's only spent 10 hours on it. you could just as easily say that the experiences teachers have w/ these students in their classrooms is what *ruins* their judgement. otherwise people wouldn't need "couples therapy" - you'd be the best person to therapize your wife and vice-versa, because you spend so much time together, right?

but being a school psychologist is *completely* different from being a teacher. you'd basically want to look into the career track of what we call an LCSW (a licensed clinical social worker), a family therapist, or a psychiatrist w/ a specialty in adolescent psychiatry, and then commit to working in an institutional setting rather than in private practice or at a hospital. it's not necessarily an unrealistic career change. i've met a lot of doctors who switched into it late. my therapist (who is in his residency) was an electrical engineer before he went to medical school. and he's quite good at it!

Yes, it's a stereotype, but sometimes they can be good clues to what the problems can be, at their worst, in a profession. The worst-case why-did-I-do-this scenario, which when you're considering retraining is important.

Over here, up until 2 years ago you had to be trained to teach in school in order to be an educational psychologist. Now not, though you do need experience working with children. I would need to go and get that, starting from the bottom, then there is a shortage of training places (training lasts 3 years), so it's a risk. But I'm seriously looking into it.

in the US as a school psychologist you'd be taking referrals from teachers, checking to see if and what sort of issues are present, and then arranging for care, treatment and accomodations as necessary. then there are teachers who are specially credentialed to work with those students in sheltered instructional contexts if their behavior is so outside of norms that it wouldn't work to mix them with rest of the students. but in that role you're very clearly working as a teacher and not as a psychologist, and your role is only to provide tailored instruction and definitely not to provide care or therapy. in fact it'd be considered totally unprofessional to try to do both.

so i'm not sure if school psychologists in the UK have a different job description that makes the educational practice part more important.

Broadly the same, but in practice this can sometimes boil down to 'statementing': running tests to see whether a child can get a 'statement of special educational needs (SEN)'. The local authority will want to give out as few of these as poss to save money. The parents will be pushing for it (generally speaking) to get provision for support.

Because the prevailing trend is to teach children with SEN in mainstream schools, the idea is that ed psychs ought to understand what teaching in mainstream schools is all about.

as Tombot says, the use of CPI for this is terrible, but this 2.45% pay 'increase' is less than even that!

But the NUT claims this is a pay cut in real terms because it is below the true rate of inflation

claims? its below even the bullshit offical rate of inflation!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7332251.stm

:-(