Returning to teaching.

As you say Soutra they don't want old foggies like us , and that's just the young head teachers.

My sister a adult education teacher took redundancy two Year ago rather than have a nervous breakdown. She was sick of being assessed, of paperwork, of changing policies, of the bad behaviour of the disinterested 16/17 year old she was expected to teach. I would think that by the time teachers are in their 60's their burnt out(no disrespect intended) but teaching isn't just sitting reading lovely books to sweet children . What's wrong with David Cameron. Is it that he knows nothing about the real world. It's a bit like 60+ firemen running up ladders & nurses lifting patients after a life time doing it and the stress on their bodies. nob idiot!

Don't think he has much experience of inner city comprehensives. Probably thinks that all pupils sit in lessons desperate to learn . I was only saying yesterday how sad it is that young people go into professions with such optimism only to be burnt out and disillusioned years later [I was thinking mainly of teaching and medicine].

...made me think of an article that the S.O. showed me the other week; a letter to a newspaper from a lifelong Labour voter who said that no politicians these days [Labour ones included] had any experience of the real world . How can people control our lives when they don't know what our lives are?

It perhaps gives an indication of the large, and increasing, number of teachers who are leaving the profession. Cameron and Gove should see that many teachers feel overworked, under appreciated and thoroughly demoralised and that they need to address that issue before coming up with any new initiatives.

I doubt that many older people would want to teach but some with specialist knowledge or skills might welcome the chance to do a limited number of sessions on specific topics. Pupils might view them differently from younger teachers and recognise that they have life and work experience that may be valuable to them (OK, I know that's being very optimistic). However, if it's thought to be a way of getting untrained or very under trained teachers on the cheap, then I think it's a very bad idea.

Reminds me of the bright idea 20 years ago that anyone with management experience, including retired forces, would be able to go straight into a senior NHS management post. One week the non-unionised hierarchical army. Next week the multi professional, multi unionised NHS including the consultants who definitely were not going to do as they were told. Didn't last.
No idea where he has got this idea from.
Needs to pay teachers a bit more money maybe?

And what happened to soldiers going into the classroom .... did that ever happen?

Total nonsense, as everyone else already said.

Sadly, it confirms how far from ordinary life these folks are.

I really do think that teaching is for the young - I know what he is saying as experience is so valuable - but the way schools, especially large comprehensives, are constituted now, I do not think that many retired people would have the energy - I know I wouldn't!

He wants retired people who were not teachers to train as teachers and be parachuted into problem inner city schools (that is how I interpreted it anyway).

Who the hell on earth would want to do that? Perhaps if people retired earlier than normal and were looking for another challenge they may possibly consider it but who would want to give themselves all that added stress when they have left the stress of a working life behind?

DH thinks it might be a ploy to give pensioners so much stress and anxiety that they end up not picking up their state pension for very long. But he is just being cynical.

Being parachuted in might be fun though It worked for HM at the Olympics opening ceremony and she is in her 80's!!!

Soutra I need to whisper something to you....,it wasn't really the QUEEN! Aw, sorry,another myth debunked for you.
I really can't imagine that somebody aged 60 and over, who has never taught a class in their lives, would either want, or be able to do well, something like this.It takes experience to manage a class.I once asked my DH, who taught in a boys school, if he was a sort of Father figure to them; he thought for a second or two and then said 'No, more a sort of tyrant figure.' He is an amiable sort by the way, but he knew how to manage a class.

Oh dear my sister can't wait to retire, 2 years to go, from teaching.

I think Mr rosequartz has it right. Send pensioners into classrooms and they won't be collecting that pension for long. Sure that is the idea behind making teachers work until they are 67 too
I finished full time teaching at 63 and those last few months were really tough, not helped by OFSTED in the last month of term. Perhaps Mr Cameron thinks that teaching is a nice gentle job ideal for the active retired? Too many 'Miss Read' stories in his youth perhaps?

He's seen Gove sitting on those silly little chairs and thinks that's what teachers do.
No retired teacher in his/her own senses would go back to teaching. That's why he wants other retirees.
There was reearch done at Ford about the age at which you retire. It was something like if you retired at 60 you lived for another 20 years average, but if you worked until you were 65, you died before you were 70.
There could be method in his idea, but he will not own up to that thinking.

Well, he's hardly likely to recruit many would-be teachers amongst pensioners to achieve any sort of cull, is he?

Yasmin Alhibai Brown thought it was a good idea on the BBC news programme last night. I presume she has never been a teacher.
I do not know if anyone's asked him that, Ana. Maybe Ed will on Wednesday.

This is a typically 'back of a fag packet' idea! Or did it come from a particularly murky think tank?

I can see why Osborne talking about HS3 could be thought to be a vote catcher, but not this teacher idea. That will surely lose them votes.

Might get the odd vote in the N of England if Osborne ditched the vanity project in the south and started focussing on the Leeds - Manchester axis.
Just had a brilliant idea. All retired politicians must re-train as teachers. And all the ones that lose their seats!

Start one of those Facebook campaigns JessM - I'd love to see Gove teaching in a tough inner city comprehensive. Of course, he'd have to be a retired politician first

Pity the poor students if politicians became teachers - they'd spend the whole lesson trying to avoid giving a straight answer to anything.

Or maybe they'd just be getting on organising their own social lives and totally ignoring the politicians Eloethan ....... Do you reckon that the politicians could be "engaging" or invoke "awe and wonder?"

Kiora

Is it that he knows nothing about the real world

Yep, that about sums it up