Apologies to anyone who has checked this blog and not found anything particularly interesting! I wanted to have my own blog to express my views but realise that most of my life is ‘data protected’. I have three part-time jobs all of which I can’t really blog about! This is quite right and proper because in all 3 jobs I work with young disabled people/children. It would obviously be completely inappropriate for me to blog in any detail about what I do during the day, and I don’t do much else (sad I know but quite true)! All I can say is that I work for a charity called Time2Share and a large college in Bristol.
I’m not very impressed with said college – I’ve worked there since 2001 and have gradually got more and more disillusioned with it. The staff I work with are really nice and friendly but we are all over worked and under paid, which I guess is fairly standard in the public sector. The problem is that there is a clash of cultures at work. We all care about our students who we know personally, and end up doing a lot for free. Today I was paid to teach for 5 hours but I got to College at 8:45am and left at 4:30 with no break (7:45 hours) which doesn’t even factor in having to plan beforehand and that I haven’t finishing marking the tests or filled in the paperwork I’m meant to do. This is all well and good but the Principalship seem to live on a completely different planet to the teaching staff. At the end of last term we had a staff engagement day (I think there was feedback that staff were unhappy so they appointed an unpopular member of staff to sort it out!). We were all filed into the refectory to hear the Principalship speak. They thought the way to engage staff was to talk about ‘branding’, competition and general neoliberal claptrap. You can imagine how this went down with a room full of teachers! The worst part was that this was going on in the same time period that many staff had recently been told that they could lose 30-50% of their income with 2 weeks notice, or that their job roles and faculties could change due to the restructuring of the college system and funding cuts!
Anyway, enough on that icky subject. I do like my job roles at Time2Share. In fact, I would like to publicise this charity to anyone reading in Bristol, Bath or North East Somerset. Would you like to volunteer some time to support a disabled child or young person? You can do this through 1:1 volunteer befriending or helping with one of our social groups. See www.time2share.org.uk . We could also do with fundraising for activities, if anyone would like to help with this (at the moment we’re collecting mobile phones to raise money).
Post Protected
April 27, 2007 at 9:15 pm (cultural comment)
Apologies to anyone who has checked this blog and not found anything particularly interesting! I wanted to have my own blog to express my views but realise that most of my life is ‘data protected’. I have three part-time jobs all of which I can’t really blog about! This is quite right and proper because in all 3 jobs I work with young disabled people/children. It would obviously be completely inappropriate for me to blog in any detail about what I do during the day, and I don’t do much else (sad I know but quite true)! All I can say is that I work for a charity called Time2Share and a large college in Bristol.
I’m not very impressed with said college – I’ve worked there since 2001 and have gradually got more and more disillusioned with it. The staff I work with are really nice and friendly but we are all over worked and under paid, which I guess is fairly standard in the public sector. The problem is that there is a clash of cultures at work. We all care about our students who we know personally, and end up doing a lot for free. Today I was paid to teach for 5 hours but I got to College at 8:45am and left at 4:30 with no break (7:45 hours) which doesn’t even factor in having to plan beforehand and that I haven’t finishing marking the tests or filled in the paperwork I’m meant to do. This is all well and good but the Principalship seem to live on a completely different planet to the teaching staff. At the end of last term we had a staff engagement day (I think there was feedback that staff were unhappy so they appointed an unpopular member of staff to sort it out!). We were all filed into the refectory to hear the Principalship speak. They thought the way to engage staff was to talk about ‘branding’, competition and general neoliberal claptrap. You can imagine how this went down with a room full of teachers! The worst part was that this was going on in the same time period that many staff had recently been told that they could lose 30-50% of their income with 2 weeks notice, or that their job roles and faculties could change due to the restructuring of the college system and funding cuts!
Anyway, enough on that icky subject. I do like my job roles at Time2Share. In fact, I would like to publicise this charity to anyone reading in Bristol, Bath or North East Somerset. Would you like to volunteer some time to support a disabled child or young person? You can do this through 1:1 volunteer befriending or helping with one of our social groups. See www.time2share.org.uk . We could also do with fundraising for activities, if anyone would like to help with this (at the moment we’re collecting mobile phones to raise money).