David Fountain, a teacher for 27 years, didn’t really pay that much attention to the Teachers Pensions Scheme and missed a key element of the scheme. That element could have resulted in a pension that would have been around 10% higher – without paying in anything more.
He found others have also, wrongly, assumed that so long as you keep paying into the scheme the pension will keep going up.
What he found was a small part of the scheme that isn’t routinely mentioned or included on the annual Teachers Benefit Statement. This failure to provide accurate information annoyed him and he decided not to just moan but to do something. That something has included seeking out teachers on forums; the now-defunct TES community was the first and it was there that he learnt much from older and wiser colleagues who shared their knowledge and driven by the sense of injustice delved deeper into the regulations becoming a experienced and respected poster by the name of diddydave.
This is his latest ‘something’.