Here's why UK teachers are striking

                        UK teacher Rob Price explains in this FB post why we should care about and support the upcoming joint strikes of the country’s two biggest teachers unions.  (My post tomorrow will discuss why this is a strike over much more than pay and pensions.) You can tweet messages of support to @nutonline with the hashtag #teacherroar.

                             I work in a beautiful old Victorian school. Every day I climb three flights of stairs to my classroom. Hundreds of members of my profession do this. Here I heft tables around before personally greeting up to a hundred teenage students. At break times and lunch we supervise a busy playground which this government would probably like to turn into housing for foreign investors. We will do this until we are 68, and in the last five years we have taken a 15% pay cut. In the meantime some estimates reckon on 25% of London children not having a school place by 2016; the Local Education Authorities can do nothing, as the government have removed their powers to open new schools and given them to private, non accountable boards. I have witnessed the confusion of parents and teachers alike shut out of the future of schooling; most are too exhausted by their responsibilities to ask where their power went. Meanwhile the UK is sold off to the highest bidder. To all my brothers and sisters here and worldwide: support our strikes.