I've just read the piece by Cristina Odone and applaud her for her stance. While I don't agree with every tiny detail, the central thrust of her piece can be cut and pasted across virtually every part of the Public Sector in the UK today.
Stripping the argument right back to its roots, we find that greed has thrived at the expense of vocation and altruism. Perhaps this is a legacy of the Britain we have now created. We now have a minimum wage and I'm still not clear how exactly the figure was ever arrived at or costed. Much has been written about poverty in our country since the 2008 crash. Absolute rubbish. We need to wake up in this country. Cast your eyes abroad and you will begin to appreciate what true poverty means. Granted, we now have food banks in most towns and cities but that just means that we are affluent enough and lucky enough to have them.
Speaking after the David Cameron speech at the recent Conservative party conference, a prominent Tory cabinet member revealed that he understood fully the hardships being faced by Britons every day. To demonstrate his point, he said that in his childhood he had experienced the demise of his father's business which meant that they had to do without a new car or a foreign holiday for a couple of years. With the utmost respect, that is not poverty. The amount we pay our teachers today is not poverty. It might well be low when compared with house prices but that is a completely separate matter. By definition, anyone with a roof over their head, food on the table and clothes to keep warm has got the bare necessities. That is not poverty.
Instead of that, we have largely lost sight of reality as the consumer society takes hold of our common sense. Teachers have a reasonable amount of annual leave (understatement). They still enjoy a final salary pension scheme which the country can't even afford to pay. Almost to a man, they are all union members ready to down tools at the drop of a hat. Since the dark days of Brown at the Exchequer, Public Servants such as teachers are now better paid that their Private Sector counterparts.
Cristine Odone is absolutely correct. The problem is that human avarice dictates that they don't want to cede any of their existing privileges for fear some people might have more than they have. While I loathe league tables, I recognise the falling standards of literacy and numeracy and fear for the legacy. As an extension of the argument presented today, I would strongly suggest that parents also need to be taking a more active role in the education of their children.
We have become a docile load of consumers all too willing to turn to the state to run our lives for us. I don't really understand why because we are all quite capable of doing more for ourselves and our families. The State doesn't owe us. We owe things to ourselves. In their defence, teachers are all too often being measured on children with appalling skills. Teachers are at their best when dealing with a child who has had the right nuts and bolts put in before they get to school. This is the single most important area where we need to learn as a country and as a society. The State should augment our lives - not run them!
As employees like any other, teachers know full well that the job required of them is open to change from time to time. In Scandinavia, their counterparts are luckier because a succession of governments have all been singing of the same hymn sheet. In the UK, a new government means another bout of "All change!". I don't envy the teachers their jobs but then I didn't choose to be a teacher. If they are not happy, other jobs are available - only not as many as before 2008...As such, my advice to them and their unions is this: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't". No, I'm sure its not perfect but in the great big scheme of things, its not a bad life. In the end, their job is to try and optimise the education of the children in their class. How that is delivered can be debated ad infinitum. The bare minimum though is that they can read, write and mentally calculate. If we can't even achieve these, we are all in trouble.
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