You can stroll into work just before 9am and leave before 4pm. You get 12 weeks holiday, double that of the average employee, a year.
Salaries start at a reasonable level and only get better. Your union appears to have the ear of government to the extent that other lobby groups are starting to complain.
Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher with such perks?
As ever, the details are a little more complicated than helpful onlookers would have you believe.
Take Jim Duffy, for example.
Not the former Dundee FC and Brechin City manager, although the thoughts of a man who coached John Terry at youth level on the best way to help youngsters reach their full potential might have been more helpful than those of the co-founder of Entrepreneurial Spark.
The Jim Duffy who still has hair wants teachers, who he describes as “a vital resource and crucial to the economic prosperity of our country”, to play new roles.
They are not people, teaching pupils the skills required to succeed in life, which should in turn lead to them using their expertise to improve the country.
Teachers, according to Duffy, should be treated in the same way as the jotters or workbooks they sometimes have to pay out for themselves due to a lack of cash within schools.
They are a “resource” rather than human beings.
Duffy’s plan is to make teachers “understand what ‘skin in the game’ means” by making them work with people who have “no guarantee of a paycheck at the end of the month”.
Literally laughable, however, is the assertion that teachers need be to “using many of the skills they have to solve problems and work until 9pm on stuff as no-one else is there to do it.”
Of course, teachers would never have to work as late as 9pm for events such as parents’ evenings, or to carry out work such as marking and lesson planning, which incidentally is quite reliant on problem solving skills to find a way to reach individual children.
Duffy correctly identifies some of the problems with teaching in Scotland at the moment, particularly “curriculum changes; the focus on the attainment of five Highers and the like; lack of facilities; and a general lack of leadership”.
The problem is that none of his solutions address any of these. He would doubtless argue entrepreneurs would provide leadership role models but that is questionable at best for classrooms.
There are 4,129 fewer teachers than a decade ago, according to Scottish Government figures, while the ratio of pupils to teachers got worse last year in every single local authority across Tayside and Fife.
How about, rather than teaching teachers the value of zero hours contract society in the hope that their pupils will start up a business, we focus on having enough people to pass down the skills needed to see children flourish?
Attracting specialists, particularly in fields such as maths and the sciences, into teaching is admittedly tough.
Such an evolution inside schools will lead to a revolution for children, however.
Unsubstantiated and ill-informed sound bites will not.