General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
Giving them back their agency and not leaving them to the pack of wolves known as parents would prob do wonders. Maybe don't hold them to higher standards than politicians, religious leaders, doctors
They used to be pillars of the community now they're just punching bags for the insecurities of bad parents
Part of the issue was the league tables
Doubt it very much. I know a few teachers who left the UK to teach elsewhere. They don't make an enormous amount more, but enjoy it a lot more.
So maybe there's something else rotting in the UK education system, that merely throwing money at isn't going to solve.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tyra Packer, 29, a primary-school teacher in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, for seven years, left the profession last summer, to protect her physical and mental health.She had been feeling anxious, at home, often in the middle of the night, and then at school, despite the support of her colleagues.As a classroom teacher but also phonics and PE lead, Miss Packer felt unable to properly fulfil any of her roles - often working well into the evening.“You're tired - you're also mentally drained," she says.
Miss Packer had “mixed emotions” when she quit her job but has since seen marked improvements to her health.She now runs a small baking business, making "chunky cookies" and celebration cakes and hosting children's workshops.“My anxiety has probably completely faded since leaving school, something I noticed instantly," she says.“I definitely sleep like a baby now.”The annual figures, external, released by the Department for Education on Thursday, cover the academic year 2023-24.On top of rising vacancy rates, they also reveal the proportion of state-school teachers leaving the sector is at its highest since 2010 - 39,971 (8.8%) left in 2022-23, not including those who died or retired.In a report in May, external, MPs on the Education Select Committee said teacher recruitment and retention had been a “persistent challenge for over a decade” and “while there have been welcome increases in absolute teacher numbers, these have not kept pace with pupil numbers”.
"There are teachers at Springwest, making a difference, who could earn triple the salary and work from home,” Mr Hart says.He hopes the next government will help schools make teaching more attractive, supports other schools trialling a nine-day fortnight and wants teachers to be able to enjoy a three-day weekend “by the time I retire”.Springwest is fully staffed - but this year, filling some roles in specialist subjects - such as religious education, history and geography - has been “difficult”, Mr Hart says.English teacher Hafsa Yusuf says early Friday finishes help everyone's mental health.
"It leaves students and staff refreshed and ready to come in on that Monday knowing that they've got a little bit of elongated weekend ahead of them," she tells BBC News.The school's culture of kindness also protects her mental health.She had found lesson planning "really daunting" - but sharing plans, and a rigorous behaviour policy run by senior leaders, have kept down her workload.
"But it would be naive of senior-leadership teams to think that that is going to completely solve the issue of teacher stress and wellbeing.”National Foundation for Educational Research lead economist Jack Worth said the number of empty teaching posts, and those being filled temporarily, was now "the highest it's been since comparable records began, in 2010".And a key challenge facing any incoming government would be making a teaching career more attractive, financially and otherwise, to ensure there were enough high-quality teachers in schools.
The government raised starting salaries at the beginning of this school year, as well as having “levelling up” payments of up to £3,000 for some teachers in shortage subjects.Labour has announced plans take forward the recommendations of the Teacher Workload Reduction Taskforce, external, “to give staff a better work-life balance”.Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said Labour would "put education at the heart of national life" by "valuing the school workforce".Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Munira Wilson said: "Every child deserves the chance to flourish - and that means investing in great schools and teachers.
The original article contains 945 words, the summary contains 566 words. Saved 40%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Teachers, doctors and nurses should be getting paid like bankers.
It's a nice idea, but where would the money come from?
Your thinking is constrained by what you're accustomed to. The reality is that as time goes on, more and more jobs are going to become obsolete but we'll continue to need teachers, doctors and nurses. Without them, either we die or society dies. If you closed the tax loopholes, you could easily pay for doctors, nurses and teachers without an issue.
But the reality is we need to pay for more than just them because more and more jobs will cease to exist, so in the long-term, we need to end monetary wealth as a concept.
Honestly, as a teacher I'd take more planning time over more money
How would you go about it? Shorter teaching days? Shorter teaching weeks? Half the load (so double the teachers)? Something I haven't thought of?
Double planning time - it's currently half a day a week, but I'd bring it up to a full day a week, so, yes, you'd need to employ a few more cover teachers.
So then we're back to making the occupation an attractive one and quality of life is a massive part of that. Nobody will want to teach if it means they have to struggle to pay their bills.
I would say it's fairly well paid, most teachers (outside of London) don't struggle to pay their bills. But we do massively struggle to have a reasonable work life balance that doesn't suck all of the life out of people.
This is what I get for only befriending and dating London based teachers.
The exact same way the government pays for anything else, be it subsidies to artificially lower the cost of corn or milk, more equipment that the US military has asked Congress to stop buying, forever wars over oil procurement, world class unlimited healthcare for politicians, subsidies to the ultra wealthy and corporations by way of waiving their tax liability, bloated contracts for projects that still end up exceeding their budgets, increased pay for members of the military who quit with the goal of immediately getting rehired as a civilian contractor doing the same job for more pay, roads, teachers, conservation efforts, airport security, border security, disease research, energy research and nuclear materials transportation, space research, etc.
Taxes
You're gonna pay taxes regardless. The government uses that to pay for so much stuff--some shit, others useful. Wouldn't it be nice if we diverted some of the shit spending to nice spending?
Edit: I realize this comment is US centric, and this ain't exactly the right community for it, but we have the same problems in the States and the same oft-repeated ill-conceived retorts about paying for stuff. My final point remains true. You'll still pay taxes, why don't you prefer they go to good things?
The same magic money tree that pays for all the bombs and missiles?
Taxes