We are being regaled with information about how many teachers take time off for illness or stress.I am delighted that the figures are as low as 15,000 a day.
Teaching is an incredibly difficult job at its most basic level and teachers need to be supported - but they are not and the situation is made worse by the twin fifth columns within the profession, the unions and the promotion seekers.
Remember that in the average school, all staff are achievers and most are capable of doing the top job - given time and experience.
Promotions are many in schools and are nauseatingly used to make staff work 20% harder to gain a salary increase of 5%.
School staff rooms can be like an overcrowded cage of rats with many jockeying for positions.
Some of the promotions can be quite absurd.What of the teacher on two promotions for filling the vending machine?
Others may be working themselves into the ground to achieve an extra grand a year.
Eventually, your promotion becomes more important to you than your teaching - which is, believe it or not, your real job!
In addition you are assailed with pointless meetings, bureaucracy, government interference, interference by so-called experts and decreasing numbers of the free periods needed to make the system flow.
Most will admit that their teaching becomes secondary to their promotion jobs.
It is all frustration, you are not trusted as a professional, you are treated like a recalcitrant child by OFSTED and the unknowing and terminally ignorant point out how well off you are for holidays and incredibly seem to believe that you work fewer hours annually than they do.
Children don't help. They are in a war of attrition with you - and that is just the nice kids.
There are plenty of others - disciplined only by you pretending to have authority - a bluff which is too often called!
Your self worth is constantly undermined.
I would not recommend this job to my worst enemy! I had 16 years full time in a reasonably good comp and a further 12 years working part time.
It made me ill - leaving was the best decision of my life.
