Teachers retire fully before being re-employed under a new contract. In this scenario, the teachers’ pensions abatement rules need to be considered, as does the fact that upon re-employment you will start to accrue benefits in the new CARE scheme, regardless of your age. For those teachers who are a little (or a lot) further from retirement, the CARE scheme offers new flexibility to increase your prospective retirement benefits via Faster Accrual. This is in addition to the existing Additional Pension Benefit facility open to all teachers, including those remaining in the final salary schemes. Both options offer you the ability to acquire extra guaranteed, inflation-linked pension income, for life – something that is currently extremely expensive on the open market. The other main pension alternative is, of course, a private scheme. Whilst it could prove more expensive to fund a lifelong income via this type of arrangement, it does offer a higher degree of flexibility, particularly since the new pension freedoms were introduced in 2015. For example, a private
scheme could now effectively be used as a ‘bridging pension’, drawn down over the few years between your retirement from teaching and the state pension age.
Senior teachers: beware pension tax! My final comment on pension planning relates primarily to Headteachers and all other senior employees. As the lifetime and annual pension allowances have fallen over recent years, increasing numbers have been snared by one or both of the lower limits, creating large and often completely unexpected tax liabilities. Specialist advice in this area in particular is vital, as once a pension tax charge has arisen there is little that can be done. Conversely, with appropriate forward planning, strategies to mitigate the impacts of these tax charges may well be available. Ian Thomas studied economics at York University and is a director of Pilot Financial Planning.
Two Loves I have Joe Winter is not sure about antiphonal pronominal kisses By the age of 16, everyone should have encountered Shakespeare. A comedy, a history, a tragedy, and two or three sonnets, though in the case of the plays the whole text may not have been studied in all cases. By 18 and the end of school, ideally, more should be known by all. Just as arts students should be further acquainted with the world of linear knowledge and theory, so the scientists and mathematicians Joe Winter.
should be encouraged to develop their intuitive thinking and aesthetic perception. And for the latter aptitudes, there is nothing more enriching or more lasting than the work of the Bard. There is more to be made of the Sonnets, but an introduction is needed that offers a better handle on the store door, so to speak, than has been the case. The academic editions cater for the groves of Academe, for which Swift’s flying island of Laputa remains unmatched as a parodic snapshot, an SCR in excelsis. Recently in one such tome I came across ‘antiphonal pronominal kisses’ (on Sonnet 128), which may well have been what gave the Laputan islanders their strabismus. (It is my favourite stop-off on Gulliver’s itinerary, that crazed Mensa A List community, whirling through the heavens.) The occasional Sonnet book for those who inhabit less rarefied territory tends to be too chatty and whimsical. There is a problem though: the little volume published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 is very clearly about two different kinds of love. The poems to or about the young man (Sonnets 1-126) as a whole illustrate one kind of besotted imprisonment: those to do with the ‘dark lady’ as she is known (127-154), quite another. Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. So begins no 144, which proceeds to torment itself over the possibility that the speaker’s close friend and his mistress are sleeping together. Indeed it seems from other poems they are; and how our narrator deals with that is not far short of a tragicomedy in its own right. There is much of the playwright in
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