It seems we are heading for a series of strikes in all walks of life. Teachers are after 10% and their support staff have been offered 2.45% so no doubt they will be next as the true cost of living for normal people has risen way above this. My personal power bills have risen considerably more on their own before any interest rates are included. Now the oil workers are starting to strike in Scotland over pensions. The police are also on the brink.

What do people feel about how they are coping and how things are affecting them personally? I am lucky in that I am not mortgaged to the hilt like many are but despite this the rise in gas electricity has made a huge difference in my monthly budget!! I am sure others have it harder and as interest rates are expected to rise this is gonna put a lot of people in deep trouble.

Teachers are due to go on strike on Thursday for a 10% pay rise. They are claiming that they have to put in more hours to deal with coursework marking, preparation for lessons and exam marking etc etc…. So maybe this is a just demand, and in many cases it probably is. BUT!!

When they had all of the management of the school to deal with then maybe they would have an argument for the rise, as it is they need to get back to reality. Most of the teaching staff that I deal with are in departments teaching subjects that they have know knowledge in. Geography teachers taking ICT lessons. Maths teachers taking science lessons etc. All they do is download lesson plans and follow them, they do not have the actual experience in the subjects to pass on to the children they are supposed to be teaching. If they spent 3 years at Uni learning to be a Science teacher then surely that is what they should teach! As it is they study to be one thing and are suddenly qualified to teach everything!! Should they not even have a grounding in the subject that they are teaching? I sit in on classes quite often (mainly IT) and the teachers often make things up that are totally wrong and also show the kids the completely wrong way to go about things as they have not even the basic grounding in the subject. This has got to be wrong as the kids leave school and go to work or college and are told the way they’ve been taught is wrong yet they don’t believe it as it has been hammered in to them for the last 5 years. Should they not have some knowledge of the subject they teach??


What is not mentioned is all of the responsibilities that have been taken off their shoulders and placed on the support staff. In the last ten years or so the amount of support staff in some schools has gone from 1:10 to 1:1. These staff take the real increase in workload in while the teachers just have a change of duty. While losing one task they gain another, they aren’t working any harder just in a different way!! They forget the tasks they were doing and moan about the new ones, saying they are doing more work but in the end they are doing less.

Another problem with the teachers is that the longer you have been in the job, no matter how good you are at it, the more you get paid. This is wrong. I know of brilliant teachers that are on the lowest grades and do extra work in schools such as dinner duties for minimum wage,when rubbish teachers are getting nearly 50k/year for teaching between 4-8 hours/week for 38 weeks a year and little else. A lot of the work they should be doing is delegated to support workers!! Work it out, that’s a lot of money for the actual work put in.

I have the wage figures from a school to prove this. It includes a headmaster who gets over 70k and is as much use as a chocolate teapot!!

As things stand the general management is up to the support staff (which the teachers used to be responsible for), and in comparison to the megabucks the teachers get they are paid a fraction of the wage.

I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant teachers out there who do deserve a 10% rise but all the VAST majority deserve is a 50% cut and a kick up the ass while being dragged back to the real world.

The government is umming and arring over the classification of cannabis at the moment. Now I am no big fan of it but is there any point in reclassifying the stuff? At the end of the day resources need to be put into smack and crackheads. To stop the robberies and muggings that they make to fund their habits.

How often has somebody spaced out on weed robbed somebodies house to feed the habit? They more likely to crash out in the house!! It is the proper class A addicts that are the problem that need sorting out way before the dope smokers.

On the same point ecstasy and speed is classed in the same bracket as heroin and crack and crystal meth. They are not comparable in any way!! I know people who have the odd E or bomb occasionally at the weekends and carry on a normal life with no addiction*. None of them would touch the ‘dirty’ stuff. Stuff that ruins your life and all of those around you. Taking the pills and speed and weed does not lead to a path of taking smack crack and meth.

There is an obvious omission in the above, and that is cocaine. That again is ‘Class A’ but it is only brought to light due to celebrities being hooked on it. The fact is that many normal people use the stuff with no problems or addiction. The reason being that the people with too much money and time on their hands (celebrities) do not live in the real world to start with.

*As with anything there are those that go outside the boundries, as with alcohol, you will get people taking speed through the day and through the week. In my experience it is generally women who use speed as an excuse to lose weight (as it suppresses the appetite). In this respect it does work for weight loss but then does cause an addiction. Even so this addiction is generally a mental rather than physical (I need it to stay thin stays in the head) and is not anywhere near the addiction of smack crack and crystal meth.

The point to all this is that rather than chasing the ‘softer options’ the government should surely be aiming to stamp out the proper hard stuff and the dealers and pushers of it. Yes the rest needs to be sorted also but there is that much of everything available and only so many places available in the prisons. I know of regular dealers of Heroin who actively push it, are caught week in week out and get cautions or fines yet some poor git out for a night out is caught with a couple of pills on them are hammered to the full extent of the law to make an example. Is that not wrong?

It’s like doing the joyrider for no insurance and no licence but only fining them £50 but hammering the person that has been pulled for a dodgy light and got another defect after scouring the car and giving them points and huge fines. (Cases that HAVE happened locally recently)

Often it is the generally law abiding citizen that gets hammered for the most menial of ‘crimes’ while the criminals get the most menial of sentences. After all it is easier to prosecute the people who nothing of the law and its loopholes than the ones that know it inside out (the constant offenders).

OK so they get caught once in a while but the sentences/crime are miniscule to what happens to the man in the street. I have plenty of data to back this up.

Might have gone off on a tangent a bit but tell me I’m wrong!!!

I have just read about how much the speaker has spent on home improvements of tax payers money, nearly £800,000 on the house and near £1,000,000 on the garden. OK a lot of it went on security in the garden but as for the money on the house, it’s disgusting. I know people who earn less than this man spends on art in a year, yet they are taxed on their earnings and he wastes them on art. They struggle to feed their families while he spends £150k on furniture!! This whole situation is really sickens me now. If Mugabe loses this election we might as well get him in to replace Brown because to be quite honest there is not much between the two. OK that’s is a bit harsh but you get where I am coming from.

My local MP’s claims for housing in London were the maximum he could make (think it was about £600k in total) yet he is house sharing with another MP who also made the same claim on the same property!!

If I had the money to campaign at the next election I would, just to get in there with real issues, stop waste of taxpayers money and get real peoples views put across. Yes that is what your MP is for, but does it happen? Probably a tenth of the time.

As things stand there is very little choice in who you vote for either the good the bad or the ugly. None is much better than the other just slightly different. When it comes to votes in the commons they are generally told to toe the party line, that is not exactly democratic is it? If I had my way I would have every MP independent and once elected they would vote in the government. Not ruling parties that can change their minds and exercise their will on the nation. That would be a true democracy.

Even the County councils are as bad. I have a friend in finance in our local council and some of them are proper people out to look after the electorate but there are more bad eggs in there than not. Some of the good ones have the attitude that they had to eat anyway so they don’t even put a claim in for expenses at a meeting yet others put in a £100 food bill for the same meeting!! There is one thing taking advantage and another taking the absolute piss.

Things have got to change and the sooner the better, they cannot continue robbing us like this when there are so many struggling. (Not on about the smackheads and scum who don’t work, that is a different story, mean the families who work to scrimp a living yet taxed to death one way or another) then these people just waste their taxes.

The government is pushing ahead with BSF (Building Schools for the Future) which sounds like a good idea in theory. The plan is at different stages in different parts of the country but the idea is to end up with private companies being given control of the spending over a whole county in order to procure items in bulk so providing better value for money. Sounds good!! Gets more equipment for the same money surely, or gets the same amount of equipment for much less!! IF ONLY. The FACTS are that that the system has gone back 20 years to the days of the LEA’s having to use approved suppliers which are chosen by some faceless people in the councils and who knows how and why they are ‘preferred suppliers’ and how much someone has had their pockets lined because they are certainly not the cheapest or even give the best service.

18 months ago we were supposed to receive some equipment under this scheme, since then a private company has been sat on the money (£60,000 in the case of our school, times that by the rest of the schools in the county!! A LOT of money!!) After complaining about the delay and having a very tough bursar we were able to opt out of the scheme and get the money allocated to procure the items ourselves. Only 2 other schools opted out. Today we were given the breakdown of the equipment and prices that the ‘preferred bulk supplier’ actually supplied.

This scheme is to supply laptops for use by underprivileged students, we were awarded £60k like I say and exactly how this was calculated and for how many pupils it was supposed to help is a bit vague. The fact is that the company came back with a specification and price for the products that it is supplying to the schools that didn’t opt out. On finding out what they supplied we went off to see how competitive the prices were in order to see if we had made a bad decision in opting out. We could not find the makes and models anywhere to get a price, apart from on some Spanish websites from South America and the like so we rang round some of the suppliers we currently use. It turned out that the models supplied were base models that were discontinued in this country 2 years ago!! The company supplying them has been trying to break in to the local authority market for some time and has a terrible reputation for service and support.

For the same price they have quoted we have bought the required amount of latest spec laptops with full accidental damage warranty and full support contract for £200 less per unit. This allows us to either help more pupils or supply broadband for a year for the ones that have no internet access at home. I think the internet access was part of the original grant deal, but all the other schools have no money left over for this as the supplier has conveniently used the full allowance just supplying the agreed minimum amount of laptops (which we have now sourced from abroad for £300 less than the charge made to the schools).

Bearing in mind they have sourced probably 50+ times the amount that we have how can that possibly be classed as saving money by buying in bulk?? How is this moving forward and who approves these companies to supply us? Oh and a point I forgot to mention was that there was a big meeting to decide the way forward 6 months ago. One of the speakers was a representative from Dell, now I am no big fan of them but they were offering to supply everything including connection and support and everything else but with mega security and if any unit was stolen or missing they had the technology to ‘spike it’ and render it useless and then supply a replacement still for less than the cost of the units supplied. Somewhere the powers that be still went along with an inferior product, inferior support, and inferior service, for a dearer price and no security or accidental damage cover. WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

None of it makes sense to me unless there is either somebody with a conflict of interests making decisions or money changing hands somewhere. This cannot be a decision made on the merits of the supplier. I am really not happy that the small glimpse that I get into the spending of taxpayers money is so wasteful at least and probably illegal. I mentioned going back 20 years because I know for a fact that these dodgy deals WERE going on then. The county council employed companies and one that had a HUGE contract to supply the counties schools was run by the son of the man heading the council and charged 3 times legitimate what companies were quoting. I understand that if there are 60 people doing purchasing that you are going to get a fraction of that taking kickbacks off companies in order to get their business, I have been offered them myself, but at least the companies have been pricing competitively and just adding freebies on top (not taken any for personal gain). 5 years ago though we were forced to use only approved suppliers and all were around 50% dearer than stuff we could source elsewhere. Now we are free and the government is going to force us back to using ripoff ‘preferred suppliers’ it makes no sense to me.

The Government is currently in the process of rebuilding all of the schools and either replacing them with academies or upgrading what currently exists with up to date facilities. This is fair enough, where the work needs doing,

In many cases though the councils are being given a huge wad of money to replace infrastructure where it is not needed, the councils then are using the money to consolidate several schools on 1 site and selling off the remaining land. This is like selling the family jewels in many cases, selling off the land now and having nothing to fall back on.

Another problem here is that as the upgrading occurs much of the facilities are being out sourced to private companies. The main area here is the ICT departments. There is a LOT of money in the pot here and companies who get a foot in the door tend to gain a monopoly and take the piss with their charges.

In my county companies such as CAPITA were given the buying rights for the whole county under certain schemes. One scheme was laptops for teachers, this meant that the money each school was awarded was pooled together (many millions) and they went out and sourced the cheapest option as a huge bulk buyer, hence supposedly saving many thousands of pounds of taxpayers money. They sourced these and supplied them at a cost of £800 each at the time (remember cheap cos of big bulk buyer). Our school received around 25 of them as did every other school in the county. As it happened we needed to order in 5 laptops for ourselves, so in order to keep all the models standard we went for the same model/spec/warranty etc. as a bulk buyer we got them for £350. this was within a week of the county order going in.

The same thing has happened this year. A similar scheme, laptops for pupils has been operating and again CAPITA was given the money. They have been sat on it for 18 months then offered us 39 laptops, somehow we opted out of the scheme as they had held the money for so long and bought 72 laptops (same spec but we had cashback warranty and they didn’t) and 16 macbooks for the same money????

We still have to fight against the county against using ‘preferred’ suppliers. These are always charging way over the odds for goods that we can get for a fraction of the price elsewhere. How can councillors tell me where to buy from? Or even the government when their suppliers are always so much more expensive? My guess is that big incentives are offered somewhere to become a preferred supplier. I do realise that there are buyers out there that will take the odd freebie in exchange for a sale but it is nothing like the companies that are going to take over in the long run.

The old days are returning, it is our money being wasted, don’t let it happen. If the outsourcing goes ahead you might as well put your money in my pocket (please do!!!)

We had some network problems earlier.

The very smart engineers in the datacentre got to the bottom of the issue and the site is back.

Thanks to them.

Welcome back and sorry for the downtime!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23258978/?GT1=10856

Seems disrespect is a universal sickness.

In 1999 I was at a Vietnam Memorial where 3 teenagers were caught red handed sort a speak. There were well over 100 Veterans milling about talking after the ceremony.

To make a long story short, when the police got to the 3 teens, they were within seconds of becoming girls. It took quite a concerted effort on the part of the police to rescue these boys. I guarantee we put the fear of God into them and an ever great fear of ever pissing on any Veterans Memorial again.

The sad part is that heir parents were fined thousands of dollars for the cleanup and the teens involved had to do the clean up under armed guards that just happened to be a Veterans. I bet many a toothbrush was worn out on that cleanup....lmao.

Right, I am going to just dip a toe in the water of the arguments of the Sharia law argument.

The UK laws over the years have been eroded down to allow minorities to have exceptions to very valid laws. For one reason or another certain religious groups are allowed to do what the masses are not. An example would be wearing a turban instead of a motorcycle helmet.

If there is a law it, should stand for 100% of the country. No exceptions.

If I go to a foreign land then I expect to be treated by the law of that land. If I am in Saudi Arabia and I steal I lose my hands. If I drink then I take the consequences. If in the US and I commit murder I will be executed or die in jail.

People coming to the UK should accept the laws of the country they live in and accept them and abide by those rules.

As things stand the way the law is starting to work is that if enough of that section of the community move here we start to accept their laws, then we change our laws to suit.

So if enough of us move to Saudi maybe it will be the party capital of the world!!!

Being a disable person this enough to infuriate me!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23144420

I hope this man sues the Sheriff's Department blind! There is no need of this type of treatment! The man is paralyzed from the armpits down. What kind of threat could he be to a Deputy?