Inland Revenue Hell

I got a letter this morning, from the Inland Revenue. It was posted out to me on the 1st December but due to my ex-flat-mate not forwarding it onto me as my present address that speedily I got it this morning. The upshot is that they aren’t demanding any money from me in the near future however, as I didn’t pay enough National Insurance contributions for the tax year 2004/05 then I am entitled to pay voluntary NI contributions so that  get a state pension. This payment has been estimated as around £350 (I can’t remember the exact figure) to be paid by April 2011.

That’s right, April 2011. £350. For a tax year when I was a student. I feel like ringing the Inland Revenue and stating that they can take £100 off that for the amount of money I was taxed in the summer and they can stop taxing me now because although I am no longer a student, there is no way I will earn £15,000 by April. Also, these are voluntary contributions, which means I don’t have to pay them, but if I don’t then I won’t get a very substantial state pension.

All this is to do with a government white paper in 2006 stating that the amount of state pension people were receiving was minimal if they hadn’t earned enough in the years they were classified as being of a working age because they hadn’t paid enough NI. Or that is what the government would like me to believe. They would like me to think that they are helping me out by making me contribute to my pension at 21.

Of course, this has nothing to do with Gordon Brown plundering the pensions of people to spend on other causes has it? Or is that just my cynicism?

Work… at long last

The supply agency (number one i.e. the one I have a CRB check through) finally found me some work last week, admittedly only one morning and a full day but it is better than nothing. Trouble was on Tuesday they found me a whole day of supply teaching, in one of the worst schools in the country, teaching English. The school hadn’t been told that I wasn’t a qualified teacher, there hadn’t been any work set for the lessons and the kids frankly didn’t want to be there. None of them would do any work for me and just kept shouting at me or telling me that there was no point in them working for me as they had no work set and anything I would set had no relation to their coursework/curriculum. It was a fair point. I also had the added problem that I am a Geographer, that is the subject I studied at degree level and that is the subject with with I am fully acquainted. I did study English at A-Level but that was back in 2001 to 2003, almost 4 years ago and I had such an airy-fairy English teacher that I have no idea how you would actually teach the subject.

I also got reduced to tears by a Year 7 class. I looked at the afternoon timetable in the staff room (as some child stole my timetable, registers and cover sheet in lesson 2 – although god knows what they wanted with it except to cause me hassle) and thought I had an easy afternoon, Year 7 followed by Year 11. The Year 11’s were fine, although they had no work set they just sat quietly and either read through their poetry anthology or played noughts and crosses. Personally, I was at the point of not caring if they did any work or not so long as they did it quietly. However, the class I had presumed to be the sweet little Year 7s turned out to be a group of beasts. One child ran out of the lesson and tripped over my foot in the process (the classrooms were so small that I didn’t have enough room to teach at the front of the room without practically sitting on the front desk of pupils) and then accused me of tripping her up deliberately. I then followed her out of the classroom whilst having her abuse thrown at me to collide into the vice principal of the school who stopped the girl and myself and asked what was going on. By this point I had suffered enough abuse, misbehaviour and obnoxiousness from the pupils and started to waiver, so much so that I walked back to the classroom (without the girl who was being ‘spoken to’ by the vice principal) almost in tears and the Year 7 class picked up on this and started taunting me with “miss is crying”. In the end, I retreated to the stationery cupboard and cried, whereupon I was rescued by another teacher and taken to the staff room to calm down.

The morning’s work on Thursday was better. It was just invigilating a GCSE and GNVQ exam at the new city academy in this area. Very nice new school and well behaved pupils. Not one of them tried to talk to another one in the exam and I only got a few stupid questions asked of me in the course of the exam including these gems:

“miss, this exam is too hard… could you do it for me?”

“miss, if the question says list 2 advantages and 2 disadvantages, is it OK to just list 2 disadvantages?” to which I replied “I think it’s better to write something rather than leave the question blank”.

“miss, can I go to the toilet?” which was asked about 3 minutes before the exam ended.

Aside from finding more work this week, so I can possibly pay my phone bill next month, I also have to attend the occupational health department at the university on Wednesday. This is because I was fairly honest (although not totally open) on my medical declaration form for the PGCE and now the OH dept want to ask me some questions about my history. I am quite nervous about this, and without going into too much detail on this blog, I don’t want to talk about it with people. I am also nervous because I have to see the OH doctor, not just the nurse which makes me think they are going to be fairly thorough about waht has happened in the past. I know the only thing I can do is be honest and say that everything I worte on the form is behind me and I haven’t had it interrupt my work or life for nearly 8 months and since I left university and returned home I have been coping fine. Of course, this may beg the question by the doctor that it was uni that started all the problems, but I know it was my weird flatmate that caused a lot of the problems and I should never have lived with her in the first place, we just weren’t compatible.

I guess the best approach is honesty and putting my point across calmly and clearly, as well as convincing the doctor that the future is much more different from my past.

Being led up the garden path

I am sick to death of the supply agency. I went in yesterday to read them the riot act about taking £40 off me for the CRB check and when I initially registered being promised that I would be found work within the week and 6 weeks later still being £40 down and jobless. Unfortunately I got fobbed off with a whole load of crap about how this time of year (i.e. the first week of term) was very quiet for supply work and how next week things should pick up. They also suggested I registered with another agency so I went along to register with them, only to find out that I am being led up the garden path by the original supply agency.

The woman from supply agency 2 gave me a much more honest viewpoint of why I wasn’t getting any work. Naturally when a school rings a supply agency they firstly want a qualified teacher, if they cannot get one of these then they want an unqualified person with shed loads of experience, then they move onto the dross like me. This is why I aam not getting any work, because I have little curricular knowledge of working in a school. I have helped out in an extracurricular role (in fact for an entire academic year) but this is of little benefit to a school wanting classroom experience. The woman from supply agency 2 suggested that I go off and find some voluntary work within a school, as she needs a minimum of 6 weeks experience before she can look at placing me in a classroom environment.

So here I am, typing a general cover letter explaining how I wish to observe lessons to gain experience for the PGCE I will be starting in 9 months time, and updating my CV in the hopes that in 6 weeks time I may be able to earn paid work. Trouble is, for the next 6 weeks or so I have no idea how I am going to fund myself… minimum wage bar jobs and general dogsbody work looks my only option. Plus I have the student finance company breathing down my neck to let them know how much money I am earning so I can start repaying my loan in April.

It’s a fun life being a graduate!

The new year starts with a mission

I have made a resolution to myself. Not a New Year’s Resolution, because I hate those and always feel obliged to make silly one’s that I know I will be able to stick to rather than the much larger resolutions that I should make in my life because I always think I’ll break them (or usually do end up breaking them) and then feel terrible upset and sorry for myself. No, this is more a mission, an embracement of my power and also a necessity.

I need to find a job.

There, said it. Not that difficult at all.

When I say job, I mean anything that will give me payment. Whether this means putting a rocket up the temping agency and telling them that now I have a CRB check and have been accepted on a PGCE course, “could you pleeeease find me some work, any work”, although that does sound a little desperate. Or maybe looking for a permanent teaching assistant’s post in a local school. Anything that will give me an income because my finances are as such this year that I need to do something before I become overdrawn.

Preferably I would like to do some form of teaching work, rather than slaving my arse off as a barmaid for the minimum wage, and I would prefer to work as an instructor through the temping agency because at least they accept that I have a degree and the experience to manage a group of pupils (well, not school based experience but I helped out the the CCF as an assistant training officer for a year so can do ‘authority’ and ‘commanding respect in a classroom’ when it is needed). Whereas if I work as a teaching assistant I know that I will soon get bored with picking up pencils and handing out paper.

The trouble is, I want to teach and unfortunately until I get the little letters PGCE after my name then I cannot work as a full-term, contracted teacher. As a teaching assistant though the small letters BA (Hons) after my name seem to mean nothing as all schools are interested in now with TAs is whether you have an NVQ in teaching assistant-dom. Never mind the fact that I spent 3 years at university earning a degree, I don’t have a NVQ and therefore cannot apply for a large proportion of the jobs I have seen advertised. I also don’t have at least 6 months experience teaching in a school, which also counts me out for a lot of the job adverts.

In short, I’m screwed looking for a full-time job, so it looks like I may be borrowing a rocket launcher for the temp agency and firing a rocket at them (down the phone of course) tomorrow.