"Teachers-to-troops scheme attracts 102 recruits"

From the BBC:

A £2m scheme to fast-track ex-teachers to the frontline has sent 41 trainees to England's army bases in its first year. A further 61 trainees will start in September on the Teachers to Troops programme which offers two years' on-the-job training for ex-teachers. Trainees are paid a £12,000-£16,000 yearly salary.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said entry requirements were deliberately high to ensure top-quality recruits. Candidates on the officer programme need GCSEs at grade C in English and maths and a degree in an academic subject. Would-be squaddies need a science GCSE.

An MoD spokesman said: "We expect the Teachers to Troops programme to go from strength to strength and train exceptional soldiers for many years. Ex-teachers have invaluable skills and experiences to bring in to the armed forces. They know how to earn respect, motivate and communicate.

"As long as they don't start throwing bits of chalk at the enemy or asking them to sit down and be quiet, they'll be fine."

"People paid to take heavy workload want to quit under heavy workload"

From the BBC:

More than two-thirds of people paid to deal with a heavy workload and who also have a generous early retirement package are considering taking early retirement with most blaming an excessive workload, a survey suggests.

The research from the Association of Leaders and their in-house magazine was based on 900 senior staff.

AL leader Brian Lightman said they faced a "frenetic pace of change".

A Department spokesman responded: "Heavy workloads have been around since the dawn of time. They ought to have known this before they took the job. They'd probably still be complaining if their work was mundane and repetitive."

The survey, published as the AL union was gathering in Birmingham for its annual conference, also showed that few of these people were prepared to take on an even heavier workload.

Only 25% are considering a promotion - with fears about workload again being blamed.

Teachers: old habits die hard.

When your kids are very little, you hold their hand(s) when you are walking along the road.

As they grow and become more sure on their feet, you walk alongside them, dangling your hand fairly near theirs so that they have something to grab onto if they stumble, or in case you need to grab hold of them quickly. The distance between your hand and theirs becomes larger and larger as they grow up, and this instinct sort of fades to nothing by the time they are ten years old or so.

It's the same with teachers. On my way to work, I see a lot of school classes going on their school trips. When the kids are little (four or five years old) the teachers or responsible adults hold the hand of one child, followed by a few pairs of little kids all holding hands, and then comes the next adult with another little group of pairs of children and so on.

Teachers go through the same progression as parents, with seven or eight year old children, the teachers will walk alongside the crocodile with their child-side hand slightly outstretched at waist or hip level, making waving motions to encourage the children to stay on the pavement, to wait at the kerb or to speed up when crossing the road.

So the hand-holding with small children morphs into a hand-dangling gesture, which morphs into a sort of shepherding-arm-waving gesture, but the funny thing is that with teachers and school classes, it never seems to wear off. I see classes of teenage school children where the teachers and responsible adults are still making the vague arm-waving gestures as if they are trying to "push" the children along the road using some sort of force-field which the waving generates, even though they might be walking several feet away from the nearest child, and even though teenagers are the last people the teachers would dare physically push around.

Even the teachers bringing up the rear do the vague hand-waving, despite the fact that the teenagers in front can't see them. If you are watching from a distance, it all seems rather comical.

"Teacher lied about involvement in killing spree to get day off"

From The Metro:

Derek McGlone once told his school he would be able to come into work as he was being held in custody after having shot and killed a dozen people in the cinema. He claimed to be at the police station using his one phone call and was heard shouting "No cell can hold me!" just before the line went dead.

After admitting the lie, the 42-year-old head of music, who played lead guitar on Led Zeppelin's 2008 reunion album, said he was "embarrassed and sorry" about his actions and insisted he still wanted to teach. McGlone appeared at a General Teaching Council Scotland hearing where the panel found his fitness to teach was impaired.

His other excuses for skipping days at work included telling a deputy head that he had to go to the airport to plant a bomb, despite being at home in Glasgow. He had also gone on drunken Facebook rants, threatening to kill other staff "in cold blood".

McGlone made false statements about his absence from Calderhead High School, North Lanarkshire, between June 2008 and May last year. He admitted three charges brought by the GTCS, including lying about being a senior Al Qaeda commander in the Syrian civil war.

On his return, he was excluded from the staff biscuit club for a year.

Maths puzzles in yesterday's Evening Standard

Question One

Public sector workers are paid almost eight per cent more than private sector workers - and the gap is widening, according to official statistics... TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "Hourly pay has been higher in the public sector for over 30 years. This is because public sector workers tend to be more highly skilled doing jobs like teaching and health care."

Question - out of seven or eight million people on the public sector payroll (directly or indirectly), how many are actually teachers, nurses or doctors?

Clue: about three-quarters of a million.

Question Two

Diamorphine - pure heroin - has been given to addicts in a third of London boroughs over the past three years. They take it under medical supervision several times a day. The annual NHS bill per addict is put at £14,000.

Supporters of prescribed heroin say this is dwarfed by the cost of crime users might otherwise commit to fund their addiction. Experts estimate an addict spends £45,000 a year on average on street heroin.

Question: How many junkies inject heroin "several times a day"? I though once or twice was normal.

Supplementary: An ampule of heroin costs tuppence ha'penny. The other £38 cost per day is presumably "several" times a made-up figure. Why don't they just give the addicts a prescription for a couple of ampules a day and let them collect them from the dispensing chemist?

Question Three:

When Lehman failed, banks refused to lend or even transact with each other for a period, threatening a collapse of the entire banking system. On average, more than £250 billion changes hands between UK banks in so-called large payments every day. The system handles more than 40 times the UK's gross domestic product each year, but individuals encounter it rarely, perhaps only when they buy a house.

Just 18 banks are members of the real-time settlement system CHAPS which ensures that large payments are completed immediately. Salmon called it one of the "most systemically important payment systems in the UK". But the vast majority of banks - running to several hundred - choose instead to route their large payments through a member of CHAPS and so do not receive settlement until the end of the trading day.

That effectively means they are taking out enormous, unsecured loans with the 18 CHAPS banks. More than 50% of CHAPS payments are made by the 18 correspondent banks on behalf of customer banks, leading to potentially very high risks. If more banks joined CHAPS the risk would be spread more broadly.

Question: If all the cash machines physically stopped working, because of a technical failure, would that lead to a 'collapse' of the banking system? Nope. It would be a bloody nuisance but not the end of the world. Ditto if the inter-bank payments system grinds to a halt.

Supplementary: What sort of idiot multiplies an unfeasibly large number like £250 billion by the number of days in a year? Why not multiply the number of grains of sand on a beach by the number of MPs in the UK

Surely the point is that these transactions net off to about 99.99%, i.e. by the end of the year Barclays will have paid Lloyds £10,000 billion and Lloyds will have paid Barclays £9,999 billion, so will end the year owing Barclays £1 billion more than it did at the start.

Supplementary: Why didn't they (or why don't they) just run these payments through the Bank of England as intermediary to eliminate counter-party risk? There's no need for the BoE to actually ever make any payments, it can just chalk them all up in a spreadsheet and then sort out any accumulated differences at the end of each month or each year (i.e. in the example above, at the end of the year Lloyds would have to pay Barclays £1 billion).

Fun Statistic To Start The Week

From The Telegraph*

Retired civil servants drawing gold-plated taxpayer funded pensions now outnumber those employed in the civil service for the first time.

Official figures show there are now 17,000 more people drawing civil service pensions than are currently employed as civil servants.

The civil service pension bill has risen 30 per cent in just four years, and now costs the taxpayer £7.4 billion – a situation described by pensions experts as "unsustainable".

The escalating costs derive from substantial final salary pensions, retired people living longer, and the number of civil servants taking the option of early retirement.

Retired teachers could outnumber those in the classroom within the next three years, according to analysis of official accounts.

* Spotter's Badge: MBK.

Porn star outed as school secretary dons drab office clothing again... despite promising to give up her unglamorous double life

From The Daily Mail:

A porn star school secretary who promised to give up her tedious double life has donned her sensible two-piece again again after being sacked from her evening job.

Julie Gagnon, who goes by the stage name Samantha Ardente, made headlines around the world after being outed by the father of a 14-year-old pupil from her school who recognised her at the reception desk.

The young mother was finally released from her contract with Adult Productions Inc in Quebec City last week after news of her humdrum desk job reached the film producers.

Miss Gagnon, who had starred in five adult movies, had agreed to give up her day job in a desperate bid to regain her part time one, but the company's board claimed her uninspiring clerical role 'was not compatible' with any sexual positions.

Despite being hopeful of restarting her film career after launching legal action against for breach of contract, Miss Gagnon has covered all with a nice M&S two-piece with a buttoned up blouse and cardigan in the latest edition of "Office Supplies Monthly".

They could just buy a big chair...

At the end of an article about changes to teachers' pensions:

Teachers at the conference also challenged the idea of having to work beyond the age of 65.

"Can you imagine being a reception teacher and trying to get on and off those little chairs at 68? I think not," said history teacher, Alice Robinson.

Eagle Eyed Pedant Of The Week

From The Daily Mail:

A Government television advert to recruit teachers was ridiculed today after a 15-year-old boy spotted that a maths question has the wrong answer.

Chris Coombs, 15, noticed the mistake in the 30-second advert, which is regularly shown on Channel 4 and ITV. The Government-funded clip shows a teacher writing '(g²)⁷ = g^?' on a whiteboard and later 'solving' it with the answer 'g² x g⁷'. But the correct answer for the algebraic equation is g¹⁴...

NB, g² x g⁷ = g⁹, not g¹⁴.

FakeCharity Du Jour

The BBC wheels out its template yet again...

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is proposing to reduce unannounced workplace inspections by a third, the BBC has learned. A leaked letter from the HSE outlines plans to withdraw inspections from entire sectors of industry, including some where "significant risk" remains...

The move has caused concern among health and safety campaigners. Professor Rory O'Neill, editor of the safety magazine Hazards, believes it signals a fundamental departure from the HSE's role as safety watchdog. "The HSE's job is to make the workplace safe, but now it's being explicitly instructed not to do that job right," he said, "The implication for health and safety is that workplaces will become deregulated."

The HSE are in my bad books for perpetuating myths about white asbestos, but who be the publishers of Hazards?

Ah... their website says "Sponsored by National Union of Teachers, Unite The Union and Unison - The Public Services Union.

Public sector pensions

There are two ways of looking at the cost of public sector pensions.

One of them is to look at the total accrued liability as ably and entertainingly explained by Neil Record. His figure of £1,000 bn-plus is perfectly reliable but it's all a bit technical for a 'blog such as this.

The other, more simple way is to look at the current cost, and ask, if the government were a normal private sector employer, how much would it have to put into a pension fund every year to totally cover the future cash cost?

All this clever discounting that Neil Record does can fall by the wayside - you can safely assume that your salary will increase by 2% more than inflation each year, and equally that the appropriate discount rate to apply to future Government liabilities (i.e. those backed by the UK taxpayer) is about 2% above inflation, so let's ignore inflation/salary increases on one side and inflation/discounting on the other.

Right, let's take Teachers' Pensions. If you check the box for new joiners, you will see that after thirty years, your pension entitlement is exactly half your final salary.

Let's assume you start teaching at 25 this year and pack it in at age 55 (the minimum pension age, except in cases of ill health). By that time, your average life expectancy will be another thirty years, according to the Government's Actuary's Department . So really, you will be paid half as much again in retirement as you earn while you are working.

So a teacher on a nominal salary of £30,000 is really earning £45,000. OK, you could knock that current salary down by 6.4% to account for the deduction from the teacher's salary, but I doubt that this goes into the official statistics.

Right, let's assume that all the other civil service and public sector pensions are the same, this means that the true cost to today's taxpayer of the public sector is an extra 50% on top of the official cost of public sector salaries.

There are anywhere between 7 million and 8.2 million public sector employees, depending on whether you believe column E or column M of this, call it 7.6 million for sake of argument, on a median salary of £498 a week as at a year ago*, call it £508 as at today, makes total annual salaries £200 billion, so half again on that is £100 billion.

Each and every year.

To be paid by 30 million taxpayers, so that makes over £3,000 a year each.

In perpetuity. Because for every one that retires another one joins.

But that notional contribution of £100 bn doesn't go anywhere in real cash terms, it just gets put on the never-never. Turning back to Neil Record's actuarial approach, the net present value of an annual £100 bn liability discounted at 2% is £5,000 billion, or about three or four times gross domestic product. So his estimate of £1,000 bn is pretty much at the lower end.

* Scroll down to the very end of this - rather interesting is the fact that the median private sector salary was only £439 a week. Hmmm.