Work/Life Balance in Teaching

aunt aggie

Hi lads,

I'm currently teaching in the UK and I'm really enjoying it. Love my subject, the students are lovely and the school is excellent. But one thing is increasingly obvious in the term I've been here... these teachers have little or no lives outside of school. I have met several teachers at primary and second level, with mental health issues and anxiety. I took over from a graduate teacher who may or may not have had a nervous breakdown. The school doesnt want anyone to talk about this situation.

Did I have my blinkers on when I was teaching in Ireland, because I never noticed any similar circumstances there? Do you think teaching in Ireland will go the same way?

Because in the school I'm teaching in at the minute, hardly any young teachers see this as a long term career because of the pressures and stresses involved... Its been a bit demoralising working in this kind of atmosphere and I'm starting to wonder how long I can stay here before it gets too much for me. Really interested to hear other people experiences!!

Mardy Bum

I have heard from a few teachers who taught in England and returned within a year that the work/life balance is weighed totally in favour of work because of the paper work involved and the more hands on approach management and the education authorities take regarding teachers who slip up which puts increasing pressures on the teacher.

Seanchai

Why the teachers' unions in Britain accept their profession being a yellow pack one is beyond me - but what a horrible place and system in which to teach.

I'd rather be on half hours in Ireland than full hours in that system; in fact, I already did that when given the choice some years ago. Whatever about teaching in one of the independent schools where numbers are often smaller, teaching in a rough school in that system of horrendous paperwork, offensively short holidays and unnecessarily long days would destroy the mental health of most sane people. And in the context of these working conditions, don't even mention the cost of living in a hovel in London. If the British system is the future, it's time to abandon teaching and get a profession which respects your skillset, inspires your creativity and values your time.

Like the Irish people deserve to be paying the debts of private corporations, teachers in Britain deserve that system: allow powerful people to walk on us and they will.

All Irish teachers must resist our education system imitating the egregious British one - and there are forceful obscenely overpaid myopic idiots in the Irish Department of Education pushing that utterly repellent, yellow pack system on us already. Moves towards this is the real, unspoken spectre haunting Irish education in 2013.

If Ireland's system is reduced to one where teachers are treated like dirt and the culture of learning, teaching and pastoralism is replaced by a culture of bureaucracy, overwork and administration by people who should have nothing whatever to do with educating young people, we are infinitely and ineffably more condemned than we are already. Ní neart go cur le chéile.

/rant over.