Kate Hawkesby: I have sympathy for all sides when it comes to teacher strikes

So just as we have rolling strikes beginning this week in New Zealand, the UK has strikes going on too. Nurses and teachers. Today here more than 22,000 schools were disrupted with a mass walkout of Union members. And if you think our strikes are bad, this is the fifth time this year teachers in England have walked off the job demanding better pay and conditions. And it’s raised the question here of who picks up the slack and looks after all these kids for parents who have to keep working and can’t take the time off. There’s a lot of debate here about what they’re calling ‘Granny day-care’ where grandparents are having to take over the caregiving. Some parents are saying it’s too much for elderly grandparents who may have health issues or not be fit and able enough to suddenly be running round after small children all day. It can cause friction between families who’re expecting too much from grandparents. Others are saying it’s just not fair – it’s free unpaid work, and many busy grandparents with full active lives of their own are having to donate time and energy to little ones above and beyond what counts as being grandparents. So the debate is on. The reality is, and similarly for us in New Zealand, many of these families don’t have the resources or finances to cope with much more disruption, take time off work, or hire extra help. And that’s before we get to the kids themselves who’re facing yet more upheaval. I mean I was feeling terrible about dragging my daughter to London for work when the original plan was to drop her home from New York so she could start the term on time after the holidays, but with plans changing and us coming across to London sooner, she ended up being dragged with us so I had to write to the school and explain – because you need permission from the Dean to withdraw your child or have them off during term time. So I had to write a lengthy email to explain and I was feeling bad about that. But then I realised, between Anzac day, teacher only days, a scheduled half day off for parent teacher interviews and now the strikes all inside the timeframe we’re away, she’s hardly missing a thing. In fact it’s probably more educational for her being here at this point. I do feel for teachers though. Have you been in a classroom lately? I mean yes they get a lot of time off as people point out, and it looks like they technically work shorter hours than most – but do they? The teachers I know are working long before school starts, and long after. They’re marking on weekends, they’re prepping themselves admin wise and they’re dealing with a myriad of extracurricular stuff they have to be responsible for. All the social issues they have to deal with inside their classrooms, kids with issues that even ten years ago would not have been such a big deal. They’ve got absenteeism at record levels, kids missing out, new rules and regulations to stay on top of as curriculums and education standards keep changing. It’s actually a huge toll on many very capable people. And they all get lumped into the same basket of course – the Union ones, the non-Union ones, the capable ones, the useless ones, so that doesn’t help either. So I have sympathy for all sides. Kids facing disruption, teachers still having to battle the system, parents left picking up the pieces, and as they’re pointing out here in the UK, all the grandparents getting roped into this for free childcare too.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.