What would it take to fix the problem of teacher workload?

[TheMotherSide]

What would it take to fix teacher workload and thus stem the haemorrhaging of colleagues from schools?

Please share your out-of-the-box, blue sky thinking solutions to this perennial problem, that would put an end to the 55+ hour week (I know many do more) of endless evening and weekend working.

I appreciate that workload looks different in EYFS, primary, secondary and FE, and whether you are a one or 2-3-4 form entry school, and where on the index of deprivation your setting sits, so if your ideas pertain to a specific area of workload, please specify.

Let's assume full-time equivalent ‐so many colleagues are having to go part-time to reduce active workload in school, and are spending their days off catching up, essentially volunteering their time.

I'll start:

I would like to see the exploitative clause in teachers' contracts which compels teachers to work however many hours it takes to complete their tasks, without specifying a limit on said tasks, radically revised. It is this clause which allows government and callous management to pile on expectations of the workforce which cannot be reasonably met, leaving teachers open to coercion, bullying and surrendering any semblance of work life balance.

I would like to see a reform of Ofsted; encouraging the inspectorate to fulfil a much more supportive function instead of being a bogeyman many colleagues live in perpetual dread of and won't even mention by name. This would put a stop to so much fear-driven data collection and box-ticking.

I'd like to knock primary subject leadership on the head and revert to the subject coordinatorships of yesteryear, where a single colleague would not be held accountable for their peers' delivery and progress in their subject area. Colleagues were relied upon and trusted to teach subjects and fulfil the statutory objectives of the National Curriculum and tended to manage just fine.

For me- the difference in a day with a PPA and one without is huge.
The days where I get an hour for jobs feels manageable and I feel organised/ prepared.
Those without are just crazy- I don't feel on top of things at all.
Not really a big idea- but just that hour makes such a difference.

A robust and well funded Youth mental health system and SEN referral, identification and support system.

A vocational pathway available from age 14 - including straight to functional skills English and maths routes.

Reduction in contact time to half a working week - say 38 hour office week, so max 19 teaching hours a week.

Appropriately funded schools to allow for sufficient support staff for pastoral, behavior and learning needs.

Teachers should be teaching and marking. Not doing all the social work that takes up so much time.

Reduce class sizes
Absolute maximum should be 20. It would cost a lot of money but the long term effects in schools, and the wider society, would be huge.

End 24h access to teachers by parents and students - all those messaging apps make life so much harder because we now spend so much more time answering to trivial matters.

Extend lunch breaks - many places only have half an hour; between getting ready between classes and answering a few emails that barely leaves time to shove down food and go to the loo.

Give a proportionate amount of PPA with increasing responsibility. Why does a deputy faculty lead only get one extra hour a fortnight and a head of faculty only three when both jobs take so much longer to fulfill on top of normal teaching load?

Stop making form time into yet another lesson, especially with the expectation to plan and differentiate often completely inappropriate material. Give us time to do the job of a form tutor to get to know our kids and sort out issues like equipment so the kids are prepared for the day.

Give appropriate PPA to teachers. Each lesson takes me 30min to plan and tailor to my classes. That's 2.5h on a normal teaching day, 3h on a day where I'm expected to teach or intervene lesson 6 as well.

If you want anything extra done, give teachers time to do it. Rather than having yet another pointless briefing/ meeting after school, allocate the time to write schemes or reports or meet with the SEND team.

For me funding into the social care system would help – I spend so much of my time being a social worker not a teacher. Yet when I try to refer to social care, nobody ever meets their increasingly high threshold threshold... all they do is ask what school early help can provide. Apparently I am supposed to not only organise food bank referrals, but also help families apply for benefits and sort housing

Stop expecting me to spend several hours every term putting up displays. Why is anyone paying someone £45k a year to do that? It's a colossal waste of resource. (The reason a TA doesn't do it is because there are no TAs).

A daily PPA period.
Less data entry.
Photocopiers that are reliable.
Less room swapping. An extra 10 minutes at break and lunch.

To see any big change, I think you’d first need teachers to go whole hog on emphasising how much extra they end up doing. My parents are retired teachers.

My dad taught in secondary and would arrive at 0850, in time to get to his room for form class, and leave at 1540 when the last bell rang. I know this, I went to that school and travelled with him. He kept he same times as I did. He did not work at home, other than marking exams once a year. He did not give homework. He did not plan lessons or spend hours tailoring them. But he had exemplary results every year and was a great teacher. He was firm in his mind that if it couldn’t be done in the working day, it wasn’t done.

My mum taught in primary and went in to school around 0800 and came home at 1700. So she did more, cause there was a degree of marking that can’t be avoided in primary. She did not do work at home apart from writing reports and very occasional marking.

No work as done at weekends or in the holidays. Mum would go in to set up her classroom one day in the last week of the summer holidays. Dad didn’t have to change rooms so didn’t have this task.

It was still a stressful job. But now it’s a stressful job where people feel obliged to work extra. And it’s taken for granted that they do.

Properly funded social care and outside providers like CAHMS and other agencies need to be stepped up. Teachers are expected to do the work of child psychologists, attendance officers, parents and welfare staff whilst overburdened with actual teaching and planning. 'Differentiation' has become a joke. You can't differentiate properly for all the needs in the classroom, it's basically 30 different lesson plans in a big class! 'Special' schools need to be brought back with differing levels of support and classes for different needs, not just the most extreme, and not just going what the hey, just let the rest of the SEND kids muddle through mainstream, it'll be fine with 'inclusion'. It's totally unfair on every child as well as staff. Bigger budgets. 1 PPA per staff member per day. A proper break, not shoved into endless duties. Staff meetings only for essential reasons, everything else in an email. Stop hiring SLT who haven't been in a classroom for years and who just constantly reinvent policies with extra paperwork to tick a box. Endless bloody assessment cycles need to be scrapped. Hire qualified staff, not just shove poor TAs in as cover supervisors. Better pay and retention schemes for teachers. Reduce class sizes. Reduce mark load. Reduce inspections, learning walks and book crawls or whatever they call them now. Professionals do not need to be constantly scrutinised.

This is from me as a teacher of 11/12 years, current TA, and mother of 2 SEND children.

I've been out of teaching almost 8 years, these were problems pretty much since my career began in 2005 and are far, far worse now.

Like all these systems, it needs more investment into it. The education system has been doing more with less for decades. We need to pay for more teachers and TAs.

If a child's behaviour is disruptive and they don't do their work, the parents are called in, put in a room with the child, door is locked, they are not allowed out until they have taught the child the content, the child has completed the work and passed an online automatically marked exam in the topic....

I know! I can dream though, can't I?

Everything already said re. SEN pupils.

Better pay to attract higher quality / more efficient people to teaching.

at the moment there is a dearth of computer science and maths teachers, because teacher pay does not in any way equate to what they can earn in any other job.
So many of the excellent ideas on this thread would require MORE teachers, to cover the resulting gaps.
That won't happen while teachers pay is so low compared to their equivalents in the private sector.

But ultimately I think it is the exhaustion that wears teachers down, too much to do in the time available.

Give them full autonomy.

I don't mark books. Just assessments. Whole class feedback too. Coursework at KS4 is slightly different as I check their work after each lesson and give feedback.

Ai Marking systems

"If you want anything extra done, give teachers time to do it." That rather sums it up, Thrall.

It is often assumed that teachers are able to reuse plans and resources year on year, but like you, Thrall, I'm rarely able to do this as I either have to change year group or the needs of a new cohort are different and old plans become redundant.

Snow, I could weep, it's so obvious. Your first two paragraphs would make education not only manageable for teachers but also tolerable for the tens of thousands of young people who feel unable to attend school due to unmet SEN. This would be right up there in my top 5; SEN / MH funding and a more nuanced set of options for KS4.

Give schools more power to ban abusive or harassing parents. Weeks and weeks has been lost to parents who either threaten or actually do phone ofsted at the drop of a hat, or the police, or the press, or the LA or the TRA... or phone hourly demanding to speak to one particular person and that person only. Who take up hours of time, demonstrating their own poor mental health, refusing to accept support or any answer other than the one they want. It's farcical that schools cannot refuse service yet every other public body can. We are losing good staff to the mental health crisis through no fault of our own.

I’m a teacher.

More SEND places for children. So many of my class are awaiting specialist places (some for more than a year). They are distressed and unhappy in mainstream which is the wrong environment for them.

Give teachers more autonomy. We have an ECT at school and I overheard her saying how much she feels like she’s treated like a child and was that normal. So many teachers agreed that’s what teaching is like.

Parents being on board. A lot of our parents seem to be against the school and children know it. The children will say that they don’t mind their parents being told as they won’t care and sadly they are often correct.

I’d love to be valued by SLT and parents. Pie in the sky I know!

Pinky, how would you feel about more primary and secondary schools having small specialist resource bases / SEN hubs 'in house' ‐obviously some traditional special schools for certain types of specialist provision where necessary. I'm a SEN parent too, and feel really strongly that for SEN pupils whose needs can be met in mainstream through facilities such as resource bases, this should be a possibility if the setting as a whole is deemed by the parents and child to meet need. Funding should be available for schools to meet needs of SEN pupils in house, should parents and CYP want this.

Totally agree with points made re SEND.

Also with reducing classroom contact/being able to leave site when not teaching. Last year I had 7 lessons one day on my timetable where every lesson was a different year group class. So tiring.

also could isolation blocks be possible so classes can continue without those that dont want to learn or study in the lessons and the teacher can focus on teaching

End 24h access to teachers by parents and students - all those messaging apps make life so much harder because we now spend so much more time answering to trivial matters.
I retired nearly 10 years ago and this wasn't really a thing then, at least not in my school, so it seems to have crept up fairly recently. This practice should certainly be stopped and allow teachers time to relax and unwind in their own time. I can't imagine being on duty 24hrs a day like this. Absolutely awful.

I see an Academy chain near me has said it's committing to reducing teaching hours so that teachers get one day a fortnight off and another day for planning and marking. So a 20% reduction in teaching/contact time with the same pay. Would that help? (Am not a teacher)

I agree with this. I also would like funding of more HLTAs as an additional resource to enable more in class support and effective PPA time. Our staff dont do a lot of the extra curricular things they used to do and are under on directed time but this seems to be because the day is so much more intense without support staff, increased needs and fewer breaks, lunch time has been reduced. I would also like to see a significant increase in specialist provision to try and support the greater needs of children. Increased funding for social care to actually meet need would help too. This is in primary context.

I would like to see the exploitative clause in teachers' contracts which compels teachers to work however many hours it takes to complete their tasks, without specifying a limit on said tasks, radically revised.

I don't agree with the above, this is true of all salaried professionals that I know and teachers I know certainly aren't working more hours than I do every week for similar salaries.