After the summer holidays the army of obese and semi literate feral horrors who make up the nation's school age population should be heading back to classes today. But they reckoned without the overpaid bunch of idlers who are the teaching profession for across the land many kids face an INSET day.
An INSET day is when the kids stay at home, forcing parents to arrange costly and inconvenient one -off child care, but the teachers wander in for training on how to ensure that the A* rate in GCSE basket weaving goes from 101% to 103%. There are five INSET days a year which must explain why, in an Orwellian sense, standards are rising
The teachers have, of course, just finished a six or seven week summer holiday. In a normal world they would have had an INSET day last Friday so inconveniencing no parents and giving the brats an additional day of high quality education. But these are the teachers we are talking about.
I pointed out HERE how very well paid teachers are these days. Luke Johnson emailed me to say I was being too generous. For a person in the private sector to be as well off as a teacher one needs to account for the extraordinarily generous pension scheme provided for the teachers. Effectively you should be adding another 30% on top of their already generous pay.
I note that on the Mumsnet website some poor mum had the nerve to suggest that teachers should organise INSET days in their annual holidays which are - depending on the school and including public holidays at least 13 weeks a year but in many cases 14. Force teachers to have INSET days during school holidays and then the shirkers would have just 12 weeks a year which is a about 150% more than than the rest of us.
This poor mum was flamed by hoards of angry teachers who clearly had time on their hands to vilify this poor soul who raised a legitimate point. One teacher explained how after arriving at work at 8.30 she rarely left before six and if you add up that monstrous workload and spread it over 48 weeks ( the non holiday year of the rest of us) it still equates to 37 hours a week which , she stated, was more than the average "office worker".
You can hear the contempt as this middle class Guardian reading leftie spits out the words "office worker". For teachers view themselves as more than office workers. They are "professionals" like doctors, lawyers and accountants. Clearly when you demand pay parity with the doctors you are always going to look like a relative pauper but what of those lawyers and accountants, folks who work in the private sector where market forces not just the black hole that is the State purse, dictates pay?.
The crass naivete of the teachers and most folks working in the public sector about life in the public sector is all too apparent. Perhaps it is because they spend all their lives at work and outside of work mixing with other public sector workers moaning about the Tories, Thatcher and how fucking stressed they all are. In the private sector your contract might say 35-40 hours a week but in the white collar private sector you try sticking to those hours and see how far you get? Hint: nowhere.
Lawyers, accountants, managers, IT consultants, wicked City folk all take their work home with them, they work weekends, they work hours that teachers would regard as a breach of their human rights. They face job insecurity and are slated as evil capitalists by the angels who work for the state who demand we praise them for being such fucking angels. The wicked folk in the private sector throw fewer sickies and have normal holidays than those who work for the state. And it is clear that teachers, lecturers and all those other Guardian reading idlers just cannot conceive of a life like that. They have no idea of what life is like in the productive economy and just how cushy an existence they enjoy.
Enjoy your INSET day you greedy, lazy and self righteous bastards.