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@General_Strike
I haven't been balloted on the strike as I'm a private sector worker. However I fully support the strikes and my fiancée, a teacher, is striking today. Ironically she's spending the day marking (unpaid), because otherwise she'll never get caught up with it as it stands. The Worm, Gove has handed high-achieving state schools like hers huge budget shortfalls, which are intended to force them to take academy status (since he had failed to attract many schools to his plan without coercion). This means that in addition to higher pension contributions and lower pensions, she is dealing with a pay freeze, non-replacement of colleagues leading to bigger classes and more classes per teacher, erosion of planning time, and continuous shifting of responsibility for assessment from exam boards to teachers, and it is no longer possible to either maintain appropriate standards or even deliver everything expected of them. The strain upon teachers is currently enormous and completely unacceptable - so in addition to all this my fiancée is now also having to deal with her colleagues' breakdowns. The difficulties facing teachers go far beyond the pensions they are currently struggling for.
[edit] Ought to acknowledge that I don't think that teachers are unique in having had additional pressures piled upon them; I'm sure that there are similar stories in many areas of the public sector. By referring to the particular example of teachers, I was not intending to dismiss public sector workers in other areas. Just re-reading the above rant made me feel like I might be giving that impression.[/edit]