Have to say my work has been fantastic. Had multiple problems over last 5 years with knee/ankle and their patience has been more than i could have wished for from an employer
Not really about myself. A horrible but somewhat hilarious case about a colleague working at a call centre - A guy I was working with hadn't been paid for 2 months because of an admin cock up. He was so out of pocket he couldn't afford a bus to work So he had to walk to work and was late. The manager argued that he could have skated 4 miles to work despite having an injured leg and him being late was no excuse. He was docked an hours pay for the hour he was late and the company wouldn't help him pay his travel fees despite ****ing up his pay. Needless to say I resigned quite soon after that. I also had to travel up to 4 hours a day in total if the traffic was bad.
I am self-employed and am fortunate to be in the position now to pick and choose when I work and for whom.
At my wife's school (she's a teaching assistant in infant school), she teaches a class of 29 three afternoons a week, unsupervised, when the teacher is away from the classroom, planning. She also writes the children's progress reports, sometime until 9pm at night. She has just had a £2000 wage cut to bring her on par with dinner ladies and lollypop staff (as she's classed as non-teaching staff ha ha) Sadly for me, she loves her job and won't leave. My biggest moan is that we can only take a flight to sunshine where the prices are top whack, as the schools are off.
To be fair my teacher friend was saying what she did in lessons and it sounded like she had to be a children's entertainer as much as a teacher. And she does a lot of extra hours. I think people appreciate the work teachers do more than you might think mate. Working for the government never did sound too great considering the ****ers we've had in charge over the years. My impression is salaries were improved considerably by Blair/Brown but worsened a bit by Cameron/Osborne (possibly more in the area of the pension?). I mean, I don't think I've ever met anyone in my life who didn't think they should be paid more, but is the overall pay not decent these days considering the pension and holidays? Job satisfaction must be pretty high too also?
My oldest is a primary school teacher and I wouldn't fancy her job, no way. Could be worse though, she could be teaching 11-16 year olds <nightmare>
I think my biggest gripe with schools is that they generally seem to forget that very bright children also have special needs. Special needs action always seem to be centred on those with "negative" needs. I'm not saying the children with that type of disability shouldn't receive extra help but let's not forget the other end of the spectrum. Also think schools, teachers and education have been for too long a political football kicked backwards and forwards by the respective political parties. If you stop and look at it we've been teaching children for centuries. You would have thought we'd have been able to get a perfectly working school system by now.