Ed Sec looking to reduce teacher workload to avert strikes (England)

[noblegiraffe]

The Telegraph is reporting that Gillian Keegan has instructed the DfE to look into ways to reduce teacher workload to avoid strike action, because the government is still refusing to look at pay either this year or next.

Apparently teachers spend 22 hours a week teaching and 29 hours a week on non-teaching tasks according to research by Ofsted in 2019.

Suggestions to reduce this include 'websites that mark answers for you in maths' (Are there any maths departments without a subscription to one of these already?), and stopping trying to quantify progress for Ofsted.

Better suggestions would be:
Scrapping Ofsted graded inspections and replacing with safeguarding checks
Increasing the number of qualified teachers (improving pay would help here) to reduce workload for experienced teachers who have to plan/support/pick up after supply or unqualified teachers
Guaranteed minimum one PPA per day (this would need more teachers, see above)
Funding CAMHS and stopping expecting teachers to do this job
Funding SEN provision properly

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/02/15/teachers-workloads-could-cut-bid-halt-strikes-schools/ (paywalled)

No, I'd want the non contact time increased. Smaller class sizes, fewer lessons, meetings zapped = more time for planning and marking.

Incidentally, if you don't have any pre-made resources for your subject, how do you direct a PGCE student to plan? What would they look at to learn how to teach things?

They'd look at mine. But we don't get any anyway. There's some textbooks and some online resources. The exam board has some stuff.

In English, I used to do my own planning and then it was looked over. We didn't have textbooks then either. But we could just teach. An 'outcome' wasn't expected for every lesson and we didn't have to create a gazillion resources.

In my subject, they don't work their way through questions and solutions like maths do: I think that's a major difference. I'd definitely not want to spend hours creating maths worksheets. That's not what I mean by planning.

I suppose, to be fair, it's similar to how I'd direct a PGCE student to plan a practical science lesson.

In most of my practical lessons, I don't use any pre-prepared resources beyond perhaps a method sheet. But I have a clear idea in my head of how I want the lesson to run, and how long I expect everything to take with this class.

For a student, I'd expect them to write timings down in some useful format (I imagine their uni would insist on a lesson plan)- and if they were unfamiliar with the experiment, to practice it until they were confident demo-ing it.

I actually think learning to plan from scratch is really important though- not because we should plan every lesson from scratch all the time, but because if you can't it puts more of a burden on the rest of the department etc.

I live in a bit city and school is near 2 universities. At least 1/3 of our intake is children from oversees PhD students....who don't speak a word of English. It's fine, were used to it but the kicker is......they only stay a year, sometimes only 6 months (short term rent near uni, move out once tenancy is up) so we have this constant stream of children that can't access the curriculum so all of our TA support is used on them which is unfair on everyone else. I wouldn't mind if they stayed as they always do really well but transience is so high. I'm SENCO and constantly fighting a battle as the small amount of SEN support I manage to get being used elsewhere. Last year I refused and taught a SEN only group. It's the first time they've ever made decent progress.

Students have to have a suitable level of English to do their PhD (which the uni received money for) but their with 3-5 children (not uncommon here) have no such requirement.

I'm in a primary in Wales. Our new Curriculum has just become statutory and it is the wooliest, wordiest document I've ever worked with in all my years teaching (25+)

E.g. There are 6 areas of learning. But in the health and wellbeing, the ONLY direction for teaching PE is one statement (this is for prgression step 3 which is for years 5/6/7 and maybe even 8.

"I can develop and apply a range of skills in familiar, unfamiliar and changing situations, exploring space creatively in response to a variety of stimuli. I can motivate myself to engage confidently in regular physical activity and sport, and am aware of my own progress."

The whole rational behind the curriculum is that every school will,, using the documents, create their own bespoke curriculum. So every school in Wales has spent the last few years working at unpicking and making sense of the documentation. And creating and writing their own assessment methods (levels have gone and there aren't year-specific statements.

There is less content in some respects, but then you can't use any schemes written for England as only your top ability pupils can complete them (I'm looking at you Power maths!)

And you are supposed to fit as much as possible to your Cynefin (your locality) so that's every school creating content that's bespoke to their area, further limiting the scope for using pre-prepared resources.

Of course, once you've taken out collective worship, 15 mins daily Welsh, Wellbeing time (replaced golden time), time spent for pupils to 'follow their pupil voice' in activities related to the topic being covered, daily mile etc, there's not THAT much time left! Oh and we are supposed to teach a third language too!

Oh but we HAVE had one extra training day a year to do this....so that's alright then.

I just found out on another thread that Wales is overhauling its secondary curriculum and GCSEs again, for first teaching in 2025. Utter madness. The current ones are less than 10 years old.

Wasn't there some discussion about changing the curriculum in England as well?
I think that I read about it but I might just have imagined it.
Its hard to say with Keegan being 'in charge'

Call me a dreamer but as well as the myriad practical problems, I really would like to see some acknowledgement that teachers need to go on learning themselves if they're to stick with it long term and maybe even flourish.

I could do absolutely zero further learning if I wanted. It's not like anyone actually cares if you do it. But I'd be bored and my lessons would be dull. So I read, find free courses, try to learn from other teachers of my subject - why does this all have to be nearly always in my own time and at my own expense?

Oh and the SEN. I'm trying to get an EHCP for my daughter at the moment and it's a thoroughly depressing process, apparently designed to bury you in paper till you give up. Of course I know, being a teacher, that it may not make much difference anyway but it feels irresponsible not to at least try.

Properly resourcing SEN would make a huge difference. I suspect it would also make a strong contribution to the labour market issues the government keep whinging about, because parents (mostly mums) wouldn't get forced out of work by lack of suitable education for DC. The difficulties with year 6 to year 7 transition need looking at particularly.

Yes I agree with training. It's nuts that we have to lead on subjects and be judged by Ofsted teaching them after receiving perhaps one day of training on them in our PGCE 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. It's one of the things I hate about teaching the most: no one tells you what to actually do, but they are very quick to tell you what you're doing wrong when it's inspection time. Tell me what to do (and what bits of pointless paper to make available) and I'll do it!

I was at a school during an Ofsted. I'd diligently filled in all the paperwork the school asked for. The Ofsted inspector was a specialist in the same subject as me. Did she want to see paperwork? Did she heckers. She wanted to talk about Economics. She came back the next day to talk about it some more. It was an unexpectedly cheerful experience!

Properly resourcing SEN would make a huge difference. I suspect it would also make a strong contribution to the labour market issues the government keep whinging about, because parents (mostly mums) wouldn't get forced out of work by lack of suitable education for DC. The difficulties with year 6 to year 7 transition need looking at particularly.

Very much agree with this- we need to be able to pay TAs/LSAs a proper wage which actually reflects the work they are being asked to do- including funding time for them to have proper training etc, and ensuring they get proper breaks in their day as well.

The current system with ECHPs funding, say 15 hours support for one child, and then, say, 7 for another etc, is really difficult too, because you really need to be able to offer people a sensible number of hours to make the jobs viable- especially in more remote, rural schools.

I think it needs a lot of money to fix it though, and right now "inclusion" is used as a cheap option, rather than because it's necessarily best for the child.

I also think as things get "worse" in mainstream e.g. larger classes, inconsistent teachers, sudden changes to the timetable etc etc, that must make it harder for students with SEN to cope.

we need to be able to pay TAs/LSAs a proper wage which actually reflects the work they are being asked to do

Completely agree with this but can’t ever see it happening. The funding attached to EHCPs is woeful inadequate and makes it impossible to hire people. Our LEA sometimes award a ‘higher’ banding rate for pupils on a temporary basis which means you are trying to advertise for hours that may not even exist in 6 months.

We have had parents complain that the school should have hired a specialist teacher in ASD the day the funding was agreed when in reality we end up with a mum of a child in another class working with the child as she was the only person who applied to work the crappy hours the funding would cover. She had never worked in a school before, let alone knew anything about SEN.

In Dublin they’re offering €800 pw to drive buses!!!! I’m tempted.

@ThrallsWife@ThrallsWife good list.

I would add resources to diagnose sen earlier, or properly trained Senco

And

@Appuskidu really? From what I have seen its a lot of money

@Kokeshi123 in my experience disruptive pupils are so because they have undiagnosed /diagnosed or not supported or diagnosed too late sen.

Or they have troubling home life.
We need to chuck resources at these dc early on.

Most children actually want to do well and please but they can't of they are being held back by the above factor's. The adults /teachers call them disruptor and that's it you have lost them.

How would school be rated without ofsted?

Agree its a beast but there has to be some rating procedure

Sorry, I'm not with you. What are you saying is a lot of money?

How would school be rated without ofsted?
Agree its a beast but there has to be some rating procedure

Why?

And the fact that schools are rated on certain areas mean that those are the areas that get all the attention. If schools were rated on the quality of their library, we'd see them stop being closed down and librarians being made redundant, which is surely something everyone can get behind. But they are not rated on that. If they were rated on safety of school building then those school buildings that the DfE has designated as being in 'imminent danger' of collapse would be made public and sorted pretty sharpish. But they are not rated on that.

Instead they are rated on things like 'quality of curriculum' which means that endless time is being spent writing curriculum documents in order to prove to Ofsted that the school isn't just making it up as it goes along. Which is obviously a good thing, but the documentation and effort is entirely disproportionate to the impact and ignoring things like rats, leaky ceilings, lack of qualified teachers, lack of teaching assistants.

Schools need rating and need to be held accountable in some way.

Schools also should be safe, driving safe school building policy has nothing to do with making sure schools are doing well by their "clients" learning needs.

@Appuskidu I've seen some budgets for various level of ehcp needs and it's a lot of money.

Schools need rating and need to be held accountable in some way.

They can be held accountable without being rated. Why are you desperate to rate?

Oh, and pupils aren't clients.