Tomorrow's school strikes.

Obviously this is a gigantic pain in the arse - although it did lead to the amusing side-effect of me, on Monday, asking Eavie's teacher, who is a red-hot baby-sitter on the side, if I could now pay her to have the kids on Thursday for the day.
But you do have to wonder - how clever ARE these teachers; these custodians of our children's minds? Anyone with half a brain would have scheduled the strike on Friday, leading to a nice long weekend for everyone. Tsk. Maybe we should have a word.

Read Eleanor Mills's blog post on the strike

Comments

[j]

"I was affected by the work-to-rule in the 80's, as my teachers refused to tutor me for the Cambridge Admissions Exams (extra to A levels). This meant that I couldn't apply to the vast majority of Cambridge colleges. "

Why, Mo2? I taught myself for that exam anyway (Oxford in my case). My school didnt teach it, full stop.

[Gipsy]

BoB - I suspect that there was a lot more to it than you're outlining here. From what you've written here, I think you're far more of a sharp thinker than someone who does things on a knee jerk reaction.

Sometimes, there are very good reasons not to go on a strike that everyone else is joining in on. And I do believe that people should have the right to choose in these matters. I don't like it when I hear of union meetings where people have felt 'pressured' by their co-workers into a course of action they didn't believe in or agree with. But then I've always been totally against peer pressure for the sake of it. Strangely, this comes from the Irish nun who taught me most of the way through primary school - her mantra was to always question, never take anything at face value, to make sure that you understand the value and repercussions of your actions.

For all the downsides of unionisation (such as the potential for corruption), I believe there are far more upsides. As workers, we all deserve basic rights, and if we don't get them then I personally believe we've a duty to stand up and make a stand for those rights otherwise we fail those who follow behind, and these could be our children or our grandchildren.

To Helena, I am rather surprised we don't have laws like this already. In fact, don't we have something in law about imports and the use of child labour overseas? Maybe it just doesn't have enough teeth.

[Baggofbones]

Gipsy - yes, you're absolutely right about life not being black and white. As I said, I haven't thought this through at all, so can't really comment intelligently. When I was a university teacher, I refused to strike "on principle", but that was probably really because I don't like doing what everyone else is doing. As I say, not an intelligently thought-out view on my part!

[helena]

Gypsy - Hear hear! Unions get almost a universally bad press, but employees rights are not granted through the benevolance of the government (certainly not this 'Labour' ha ha government - the rich just get richer under New Labour, and the poor poorer - see Sunday Times) or employers.

The latter are obligated to their owners and shareholders to minimise costs, and it takes legislation and force majeure through industrial action to actually enable them to justify higher wages and more expensive employees to their own shareholders. As Engels, I think it was him, put it, Capitalists have no choice but to be capitalists. If you are a nice, kind, generous employer, and your rival is not, then guess who goes bankrupt? This is why, throughout history, if employees cannot exert collective financial pressure on their employers, they cannot get decent wages or conditions.

Additonally, those conditions also have to be legally codified via the government (eg, health and safety legislation to insist on safe working conditions, working day lengths, holidays etc), in order to give employers a level playing field (ie, so that those increased costs of employment are shared by all their competitors.)

However, all this 'niceness' breaks down when foreign competition arrives. We now have the disgrace of importing goods that have been produced in conditions that would be illegal in this country, and their employers jailed. Yet they are allowed to export to this country. We can't, for example, employ children in bond-slavery in the UK, but we can buy goods made by such children abroad. It is a national disgrace, and until we ban such imports, forcing foreign employers therefore to improve their employees' working lives if they want our custom, it will continue, until and unless democratic and worker pressure can change things in those usually highly repressive or corrupt countries. The West utterly fails in its responsibility to the rest of the world, just so our population can have sweat-shop trainers, cheap clothes, etc etc.

[Gipsy]

>>I'd say that people on the whole accept a job on certain terms, and if they don't like those terms, they shouldn't be doing the job.<<

Life is never black and white though is it? What if you like your job otherwise? What if you can't simply leave because you're tied to an area and it is the only employment there, or because there aren't that many jobs in your field and you can't afford to be without pay for a while? There's lots and lots of reasons why it isn't as easy to simply ditch one job if it doesn't live up to your expectations. Not to mention how it looks on your resume - why were you only there for six months?

Striking is always the last resort - who really wants or can afford to give up a whole day's pay, or longer? Unions are about the only way that employees can ensure that their rights aren't walked all over, and that they do get at the very least what they're entitled to. Often just the bare legal minimum. Or to ensure that the bosses don't cut corners so much that lives are at risk.

My other half worked for one employer who didn't pay them for bank holidays - it took two years of fighting by the union and two court cases,and two one day strikes, before they got what they were legally entitled to in the first place.

This isn't about the terms of the job - legally they were entitled to their bank holiday pay, and it was also clearly stated in their contracts that they should get bank holiday pay. So they stood up for it, and got it.

[mumoftwo]

I was affected by the work-to-rule in the 80's, as my teachers refused to tutor me for the Cambridge Admissions Exams (extra to A levels). This meant that I couldn't apply to the vast majority of Cambridge colleges. I found one very good college which was prepared to consider A-level results only, had an interview, and got in. So, in the end, it was probably better for me! (not sure why they were on work-to-rule anyway).

[Baggofbones]

"BOB - out of interest, why are you opposed to strikes?"

Um, good question. The result of having been brought up thinking that Margaret Thatcher was the Queen of England?

Now I'm challenged, I have to say (rather shamefacedly) that I don't have a rational answer to that one. Off the top, I'd say that people on the whole accept a job on certain terms, and if they don't like those terms, they shouldn't be doing the job. Plus I feel that strikes don't achieve much anyway, and just tend to make the public feel unsympathetic anyway. But as I say, I have no well-thought-out answer to this one. Sorry!

[helena]

BOB - out of interest, why are you opposed to strikes? Do you think only the bosses should have power, and their employees be powerless slaves? Striking is the ONLY way for employees to collectively put financial pressure on their employers, and equalise the balance of power. It's a vital, vital right in any democracy, and I'm actually quite shocked to here any British citizen disaprove of strikes. Strikes are always a sign of a failure in industrial relations, but they are a vital last resort to protect employees against the otherwise condign power of employers.

As for one day strikes harming children, well, seems to me it's the teachers who will have to do the most catching up, and cram the information from missed lessons into the next one.

And if snow days don't harm children, why should one day strikes? They are, and only can be, sadly, token protests. They would need to be sustained for weeks to have any real impact on employers (via their impact on children)

[Baggofbones]

I don't think the odd day off does children any harm at all. It's not as if they spend 7 hours per day Learning Things at school - a lot of it is playing outside and eating lunch (yes, I know they are learning vital social skills in the process, but...).

I certainly wouldn't be a teacher (not in a state school, anyway). The pay really doesn't reflect the amount of work that teachers do (out of school hours as well as during the school day), and the paperwork must be horrendous.

That said, I'm opposed in principle to strikes of any kind! (Unless it's me going on strike as a Mummy, which I have been tempted to to do on occasion).

[Lazy Mummy]

There were strikes & work-to-rule (ie no extra-curricular activities) when I was at 6th form in the 80s; didn't affect anyone's studies or grades at our level (though would have been a bigger impact on families of younger children, and losing some extra-curricular clubs for a while was not good) & we all understood the whys & wherefores (can't remember whether or not we agreed with them).

[Lucy]

Um ... I hate to get back to the schools issue, but does anyone here think that the odd day off is actually bad for kids (as opposed to annoying for parents)? I've heard it stated in the media that the teachers are being deeply unprofessional and uncaring for striking, and I can't help remembering the teachers' strike in about 1995 or so, when I was still at Primary school. My memory is hazy as to which was which, but my brother and I between us had a teacher who went on strike and a teacher who didn't, and it didn't do us any noticeable/ memorable harm. What's the problem? And re. parental difficulties - yes, it obviously is tough, but teachers do get paid a pittance, don't they? Or am I naive?

[helena]

In defence of creches, mine went to a very good one when I worked full time. Starting Reception was actually an educational step down, especially when it came to reading. It annoyed the hell out of me.

[Baggofbones]

Chilling is the word!

If the parents are really lucky, their care-homes will be staffed by the scruffy, smoking, slovenly teenagers who "look after" the children at our local battery-farm day-nursery (beloved of all the high-earning parents around here who are so busy at work that they never see their infants being ignored in triple buggies by said slovenly teens!)

[helena]

Cross-shades of Molesworth qv here, but I always remember an old Punch cartoon of a middle aged chappie driving his doddery and fearful ancient Mater up to a ghastly gothic cobwebbed Twilight Home with fearsome looking nursing staff, and saying to Mater 'Nothing to it Mater - just like when you sent me off to boarding school, eh?'

Chilling.

[Baggofbones]

"creche can teach very useful things to the children dumped in them."

I can only imagine that the children dumped in creches/battery-baby-farm nurseries spend their time planning what they will do with their parents when said parents are OAPs...

[helena]

Yes, we need to differentiate between nursery, which is primarily for the child's benefit, and a creche which is primarily for the parents' benefit.

Though I agree that a couple of hours at nursery is a welcome break as well. And also that creche can teach very useful things to the children dumped in them.

[Kieransmum]

I like pre-school. It keeps me sane.

[mumoftwo]

There's quite a difference between sending a well-developed three or four year old for two and a half hours a day to pre-school than putting a tiny baby in nursery with lots of other babies from 8 til 6. Children's need to socialise and their need to be constantly attached to their parents/carer changes enormously during this time, from utter dependence on carers to enjoying playing with other children. There has certainly been a point with us where I realised that staying all day with me or my husband just wasn't really quite enough for her (she was pinging off the walls!), perhaps as I don't love constantly socialising with other mothers/groups/children and that was quite a sad point in time! However, even though pre-school has been utterly stimulating for her, and she is desperate to go in the afternoons too (like in 'Big School'), we've kept it just to mornings as I still think the opportunities to do other things (swimming, playing with her sister, playing with other families) are too good to miss whilst we still can (and 'Big School' looms...)

[helena]

I think that says it all. It doesn't matter who is educating pre-schoolers, parents or nursery teachers, the point is they ARE being educated. It's the poor, brain-dead, under-educated parents who can't, literally, teach their own children who should be sending their children to nursery to compensate for their own failings.

(I'm not saying their failings are necessarily their own fault, as their own parents were doubtless under-educated as well - but somehow we need to break the cycle of under-education just perpetuating down through the generations (every fifteen years or so), and starting such children off at nursery school is one way of levelling the playing field at that age.)

[Lazy Mummy]

The US research on this is basically: children who attend a nursery/daycare are slightly more aggressive once they start school than children raised by parents, but the difference is really negligible & disappears by age 9 (if not before - can't actually remember details). But children raised by their parents until school age do better in school than their peers do.

The other piece was (paraphrasing here): children of Alpha Parents (defined here as professional parents with at least a bachelor's degree) are talked to / communicated with 3 times as much as children of high-school-graduate parents (I think that's about equivalent to leaving school with a few GCSEs). At all ages when they were tested, the children of the more educated parents had 3X the communication skills of the children of the least-educated parents. And these children did better in school.

BUT. Children of less-educated parents did better if placed in a *quality* daycare/nursery setting than if they were with their parents full-time.

[Annamac]

Hmm, BagofBones, have you met many children with diagnoses of ADHD/ADD? When I was a teacher, I met rather a lot of them and I can assure you that in the cases of the ones that are properly diagnosed it is absolutely nothing to do with "unrealistic expectations on the sitting still and behaving front". I taught at secondary level and encountered several boys statemented for ADHD and it's a very disabling condition. The symptoms in girls tend to manifest in a different way and they do not tend to be disruptive in the same way, so the condition is often not picked up.

[Kim]

Bagofbones - it's an interesting point, and I have some sympathy. I'm all in favour of children running round and playing a lot rather than sitting and listening.

Having said that, I think pre-school did my own daughter a lot of good. She was there from 9.15 to 12 noon, so there was a lot of time for running around the rest of the day. But what I liked about the pre-school was that it was very calm and ordered (no shouting - not like at home!!) and the children did learn to sit quietly and listen to what other people were saying, and to take their turn, and to learn about sharing toys with other children. There was some playing, of course, and some of that was outside, but I think the requirement to sit down quietly for some of the time was more valuable than not.

[Baggofbones]

"I guess the advantage of nursery for some children is that they learn how to sit still, listen and concentrate, which again some children may not be learning to do at home."

I'm sure they do learn these things at nursery. But should they be learning these things at all? I believe that boys in particular benefit far more from long walks and lots and lots of physical activity. "Sitting still" isn't normal, and if children are having to be taught how to do it, then it's too early for them to be there. It smacks of crowd-control to me.

I am convinced that the huge increase ADHD (etc) diagnoses is connected to unrealistic expectations on the "sitting still and behaving" front (I say that as quite a strict Mummy who does expect her children to sit at the table and so on - not as a Mummy whose children run amok in cafes).

[Kieransmum]

"I guess the advantage of nursery for some children is that they learn how to sit still, listen and concentrate, which again some children may not be learning to do at home."

Yes, as far as I recall I think that was what the research suggested.

[mumoftwo]

AnnaMac, I also agree pre-school seems to be different experience than many nurseries. We didn't put either of ours in a nursery having visited quite a few and not been impressed, so we decided to have one of us at home til they were about three (doing part-time work as well, full-time SAHM wasn't an option). My daughter then entered pre-school at three and hasn't looked back, despite only being with her parents as carers for the first three years. It is ace, really good one to five ratio, lots of activities/water play/painting, all the things you describe. She has flourished socially at this time which was a bit of a concern before. Although many countries don't start formal education til 6 or 7, most do have a pre-school system where children go from about 3 (e.g. France, Denmark) mainly to socialise. Personally I felt this was the right time for my daughter to spread her wings, staying home with me didn't seem quite enough for her extremely lively nature, but if I had a child who I felt wasn't ready for pre-school at three, I would keep them at home til a bit later.