To strike or not to strike?
Teachers up and down the country have been forced to make a real stinker of a decision. They’ve had to choose whether or not to go on strike to make their point in a row over below-inflation pay rises. For a group of key workers that has not gone on strike for 21 years, it’s not an easy choice, especially when it goes against almost every teacher’s instinct to leave their children and associated families in the lurch.
Many teachers feel as though they’ve nowhere else to go. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has said that ‘enough is enough’ and its members voted overwhelmingly (75%) in favour of the proposed strike action (for a 24-hour period on April 24). But, as with any industrial action, individuals are faced with a real moral dilemma, and they don’t come any harder than when children’s education is at stake.
Without wanting to belittle other industries, there aren’t many other sectors that would find the decision over whether to strike or not quite so taxing. More often than not, if a worker supports the union’s stance, they will go on strike. But in this instance, even teachers who feel aggrieved over their levels of pay are not taking part in the industrial action.
Most think they should earn more
Suzie Coddington, who teaches Year 5 (nine to ten-year-olds) at a school in Milton Keynes and is a member of the NUT, said: “Most teachers think they should earn more because it is a very demanding profession and because of the hours we put in outside of school. I don't think we are financially rewarded for the job we do, especially in the first few years of teaching, although after a few years the pay is much better.” The average staring salary of a teacher is £20,133 and after ten years in the profession someone could expect to earn about £34,000.
Although she sympathises with those who are striking, Miss Coddington (and a number of other teachers at her school) will not go on strike because she doesn’t want to jeopardise the good relationship she has built up with the parents. She explained: “It would be very inconvenient for the parents if we were to strike - they would need to find child care for that day. Teachers who remember striking 21 years ago said it took a long time to rebuild the relationship with the parents and gain their support and trust. As a school we don't want to lose that.”
She added: “It should be all or nothing to really have an impact and make a difference. We shouldn’t be given a choice because if we all had to strike then parents couldn’t blame individual schools or teachers.”
Moral responsibilities
Her decision highlights the moral responsibilities of those who have chosen a career in teaching. While they may not be entirely happy with their pay, a majority of teachers chose their career for reasons other than money. Although NUT members voted to strike, other teacher unions are expected to turn up to work as normal. The NUT members who voted to strike represent about 10% of teachers in England and Wales, but the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), the largest UK-wide teachers' union, said the majority of its members had accepted the review body's recommendations for pay, recognising that compared to other public sector workers they had ‘fared relatively well’.
But there’s more to the pay issue than just rewarding those who are currently working as teachers. Teaching needs to be made an appealing career prospect. The NUT believes that ‘teachers’ pay should be sufficient to recruit and retain a quality workforce and avoid teacher shortages. It should be comparable to that of other graduate professionals. There should be no cuts in living standards. Instead, teachers have suffered pay cuts in real terms every year since 2005’.
It’s a very valid point. Education is crucial for any society and the government needs to attract the best people to work in the sector. The current dispute over pay will not exactly have graduates queuing round the block to sign up as teachers, but then again, many teachers are not driven by money.
Rachel Garrick, a former London-based primary school teacher who now teaches in the Philippines, said: “There are a lot of people out there who teach, who have always known that this was the profession they wanted to enter regardless of the salary.”
Teaching is a valuable, worthwhile job
Another primary teacher, Bill Sawyer, who swapped an inner-city London school for one in Nairobi, Kenya, at the start of this school year, thinks that while some money-motivated people might be put off entering the profession by the salaries offered, everyone that does decide to become a teacher does so for the right reasons. He said: “People choose to become teachers and they know the pay is rubbish when they go into it. I could rake it in being an electrician or a plumber, but it is not mentally stimulating enough for me. The government needs to convince people that teaching is a valuable, worthwhile job.”
There are teachers out there who teach for the love of the job. There are also potentially great teachers who have been put off by the salaries offered. While the current salary levels go some way to ensuring that people only get into teaching for the right reasons and not just for money, they do exclude intelligent, hard-working people who are a little more ambitious on the financial front. It’s essential that a happy medium is found soon as further strike action and undesirable media attention might put a permanent dent in the number of people who wanted to become teachers in future.
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