WASPI Campaign .... State Pensions

bowlhead99

I can see where AnotherJoe is coming from. One of the better things a teacher can teach is not some quirky fact learnable by rote in their subject area of specialism, but just instilling the sense of needing to apply critical and analytical thinking to concepts presented, or 'having an enquiring mind'.

If you have an enquiring mind, you can wonder about whether you will live to age 65 or 85 or 105, and you can ponder about where on earth you would get enough money to do that if you had stopped working.

When you come to the realisation (or learn by rote) that the answer is probably 'however much you have put away plus however much the state and teacher pensions pay out', you could then wonder how much those schemes would pay out in what circumstances and what might happen if the rules were changed and whether it was worth keeping on top of how it all works and what your current entitlement is, as part of your planning to get through your later life.

If you read the terms and conditions of the teacher's schemes and found them gobbledegook, you should probably use your enquiring mind to find out what the terms meant and not stop probing until you were entirely satisfied that you understood whether they were a good deal or not, whether you should put in extra, how it would affect your state pension, etc.

Or you can sit back and think that finance like knowledge of medicine or experience of travel planning and visa/permit requirements is something that only needs to happen to someone else, because your specialism isn't in those fields.

People talk about getting better financial education into schools, but it would be a great waste of school time if people had to learn by rote how to fill in a tax return or make a pension contribution. It would be a decade out of date before the teenagers got to use it. Whereas equipping someone with the general concepts that they should question stuff and find out about stuff rather than having it land in their lap, is more useful.

So, if that is a good thing to preach, then teachers would be setting a good example by practicing what they preach; i.e. teachers should endeavour to spend a few minutes or hours here and there to find out about things that have scope to drastically affect their lives (like how their own pension scheme works or what the UK tax and benefits system is all about)

atush

I agree. Teachers should be able to learn what they dont know, and use critical thinking to work things out. Should be part of their skill set so to speak.

No one needs to be an expert to learn and understand basic principals. I would expect the average teacher to be better at this than the average Joe.

xylophone

No one needs to be an expert to learn and understand basic principals.

You knew some uninspiring headteachers?:)

AnotherJoe

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So, if that is a good thing to preach, then teachers would be setting a good example by practicing what they preach; i.e. teachers should endeavour to spend a few minutes or hours here and there to find out about things that have scope to drastically affect their lives (like how their own pension scheme works or what the UK tax and benefits system is all about)

^^^^^ exactly. Not expecting them to learn to be brain surgeons, but if they can browbeat a classroom into learning calculus or ancient roman emperors or other stuff that will be of lzero use to 99.9% of all their students, they can surely spend a few hours learning about their own damned pension scheme !

colsten

The ability to take care of one's own financial affairs, including how one's own retirement will be funded, should be an unspoken given for anyone who feels they could take care of children's education, in whatever faculty. So yes, I think teachers should be expected to know more about pensions than the average Joe.

mumps

Jackieboy wrote: »

I certainly neither said nor implied that.

Well you might not have meant it that way but the comments about "my family didn't do benefits" and references to the "indignity" of appealing certainly came across that way.

mumps

I don't think teachers should be expected to know more about pensions that other people, but I do think everyone should try to educate themselves about pension, tax, NI etc.

It is a pity there is nothing about all that in the school curriculum but even if there was I don't think all teachers would be expected to teach it.

bigadaj

Jackieboy wrote: »

I think that's an extremely tenuous suggestion. By that definition, teachers should not only be finance specialists but medical experts and skilled travel agents, all of which affect them personallty and all of which involve learning a certain amount of knowledge.

You can argue about the suggestion but that's an extremely poor analogy used later in the sentence.

It's a little more difficult to become a medical expert than a 'skilled' travel agent, I've never used a travel agent because I have more knowledge about travel than they have, or at least as much and can do things more cheaply and appropriately.

I wouldn't have quite the same confidence with medical issues,

xylophone

I have to admit that in the days of my youth ( and a lovely thing I was too:D )while I knew that I had been put into an occupational Scheme and then transferred out to another occupational scheme, the niceties of the fact of their being DB, having GMP etc passed me by "like the idle wind I regarded not":eek:

It was only much later when circumstances required me to learn the facts that I put my mind to it all.....

mgdavid

bigadaj wrote: »

.........
I wouldn't have quite the same confidence with medical issues,

But without necessarily having a recognised First Aid qualification one hopes you know basic first aid, can staunch arterial bleeding, can clear an airway, peform CPR....

I certainly would expect teachers to be able to, as they are in loco parentis for such long periods of time.