Displaying items by tag: teachers

As the country experiences the largest rail strike in modern history, and staff at Heathrow Airport have voted overwhelmingly to strike in July or August, unions representing health and education have warned of future industrial action. The teachers’ union said 450,000 members would be balloted unless the government agreed to a pay rise closer to inflation. Unison said the Government could make a sensible pay award or risk a potential dispute in hospitals. The chairman of the NHS Confederation warned that a pay rise for the lowest paid NHS staff was needed to avoid ‘ worsening the NHS workforce crisis’. Transport secretary Grant Shapps dismissed calls for direct negotiations. The RMT general secretary has predicted industrial action could spread, as ‘people can’t take it any more’4269283). When the TUC demanded a pay rise for all workers, Shapps said there had been 40% salary increases over ten years. The Government plans to change the law so that employers can use agency staff during strikes to limit their impact on society.

Teachers in Haiti have refused to return to classrooms, even taking to the streets to protest a lack of pay and safe working conditions. This was already a problem and the pandemic made it worse. Haiti runs in cycles. Their government gets money. Sometimes it doles it out and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, police work for months without payment. Teachers can work for the entire school year without payment. Theft has become an expected part of the culture. Haiti with Love has been sharing the Gospel with parents who bring in their children for burn treatment. People are very open to listening when they realise that the reason people are helping their babies is the love of Christ. They ask, ‘Who is this Christ who provides all of this help? Tell me about him.’ Pray for the Burn Clinic, and also for Pilgrim House which provides homes for homeless people.

As schools across the UK reopen, teachers could face an influx of children facing an emotional and mental health crisis. Pray for teachers, parents, churches, and agencies who will be working to alleviate an expected emotional health crisis. Pray for the teachers, who will already be aware of the specific challenges that their community faces. May God anoint each one as they draw on their skills to provide emotional and academic guidance. Some children may not have held a pen or got up at 7am since March; consequently different pupils in the same class will have had different experiences of the lockdown period. They will also have varying levels of coping skills and resilience in dealing with those experiences. Teachers attempting to help these children may feel overwhelmed themselves. Pray that they are wisely supported by outside agencies and community groups. Pray for children displaying challenging behaviour to receive appropriate extra mental health support.

For newly-qualified teacher Maya, sexual harassment started in her first week at a prestigious London state secondary school with a culture of misogyny thinly veiled as banter. Senior colleagues made inappropriate comments about her body, and she and her female colleagues experienced a barrage of abuse from male students. Many times over, female staff who reported problems saw no action taken. Maya’s close friend had her phone stolen by children, who rang her father saying, ‘We’re going to rape your daughter outside school.’ She wasn’t supported by the school at all. A year later Maya left the school, and soon afterwards she left teaching altogether. A recent study of over 1,200 female teachers by a teachers’ union revealed that one in five has been sexually harassed at school by a colleague, manager, parent or pupil. Nearly a third of these were subjected to unwanted touching, two-thirds to inappropriate comments, and over half to inappropriate sexual remarks.