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.

Delta, I suppose appropriate SEN funding would address much of this ‐what age group do you teach?
When I first started teaching, there wasn't the same fixation on testing and grades; we worked much more holistically and collaboratively and I am pretty certain that children were nowhere near as stressed or put under such pressure. As a result, I also did not encounter anywhere near the same levels of disruption or off-task behaviour as I do now ‐we were more child-led so could plan for inclusion, thus ensuring a higher degree of pupil engagement.

Stop the endless "new initiatives"

My school have honed in on the "expertise" of one bloke - Dylan Williams. Some of what he says makes sense, some none at all given the students we teach

Students in deprived areas / students who've struggled since Covid / students with poor mental health are so far removed from those in the studies he lectures about

We're expected to be using his strategies (we watched one video of him talking about said strategies) and get bollocked of we're not during walk throughs

I just don't answer out of school hours, ever. And in school hours, the answer can normally wait until I next see the child in a lesson and tell them the answer verbally

This exactly.

Full 5's are brutal. Three is heavenly, four is manageable.

I agree with this also.

@sharptoothlemonshark It's not so much the expectation that we're available 24h (although some do complain when they message you at 8pm Friday and haven't heard back by 8am Monday). Everyone can ignore those messages outside of working hours.

However, what has increased exponentially as a result is the number of trivial matters brought up daily:

• X doesn't understand their homework
• Y doesn't have a homework sheet and can't do their work
• Z will be absent from your lesson to go to the dentist, please send work
• Why did you give A a detention
• Why is my child marked absent during a lesson by teacher B (not me)
• Why haven't you marked the test yet
• Did you really give my child a warning for not wearing their tie

Those are just some of the messages I receive every week. The expectation is to respond within 24h on work days.

Before Covid, having to phone in or come in in person made parents think twice about how important their query was to them in the grand scheme of things. Nowadays, I receive short messages like this or long rants (usually sent on a Friday or Saturday evening, making me question the parents' sobriety at the time) daily and it eats into my time.

Massive investment in infrastructure, equipment and recruitment
Pay increases to recruit high quality staff.

Opening of special schools with specialist units so they all reach potential, not a dumping ground.
Mental health provision
Removal of disruptive pupils
Parents to be responsible for childrens education. If Alfie gets kicked out for throwing a chair and threatening to knife his teacher, his parents become responsible to find and fund alternative provision.
Ban on abusive parents
maximum 20 a class
Incorporate wrap around so that the time can be used for enrichment, extra sports, drama, art.

All total pie in the sky of course

Shadows... sounds amazing! In my dreams though
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This sounds interesting.

Are they teaching full on the other days? I think I would prefer one a day rather than a whole day.

Get rid of homework unless it's private revision
Don't expect staff to run extra curricular, get outsiders to come in and charge
Mark set pieces only: making it clear to students, parents and staff that is the norm
Replace OFSTED

But in actual terms, the NASUWT sent a whole list of things teachers should stop doing last Autumn
NASUWT | Tackling Excessive Teacher Workload (England and Wales)

It would make a huge difference.

Money. Please vote yes to strike action in the next ballot.

I’m speaking for primary here …

SEND hubs in all schools, well resourced with SEND trained staff fit for pupils where mainstream cannot meet their needs.

Knock homework on the head. Complete waste of time. Just read at home please.

Complete overhaul of OFSTED especially for things that make SLT say, we have to do this for OFSTED: marking in books, stick in geography work in topic books, planning every single lesson on paper and annotating it.

Better training for teachers and providers not offering anyone and everyone a place, we need much more robust interviewing and expectations for trainees to enter. It’s very unfair on the new students for providers to take them on when they haven’t met the standards. Makes the job way harder for schools to train people who don’t have the ability and/or capacity to teach. And then teachers/schools carrying inadequate teachers. Harsh but sadly true from my experience.

I did my PGCE in England and taught in London for a few years before moving abroad. I’ve worked in state schools in several Western European countries and private international schools in some more exotic spots before I quit.
I’d say the overwhelming majority of what I did in the UK as a regular primary school class teacher was unnecessary. In many countries there is no marking at all except for tests in older classes. Data entry is done by someone else in the school, never the teachers. Planning is almost unheard of because you use textbooks. Obviously you still have some setup for labs or practical lessons and I did way more of those because I had so much time. There is no differentiation within classes, although many countries have some kind of grammar school system, a language school focussed on EAL that new arrivals attend for a few months and much much easier access to special schools. Then you’re not trying to spin a million plates at once and spreading yourself too thin. Parents evenings for 2 minutes is useless. In Sweden we closed school for 1 afternoon and 1 whole school day and parents came in for their appointment during the day. There was no expectation that we would “lead” a subject at all.
I think another huge part of the problem in the UK is the pressure to make children learn things before they’re ready. There is nothing wrong with pushing the entire curriculum back by a year or 2. When you’re trying to make 4 and 5 year olds write in reception, it’s horribly stressful for everyone. In Germany I taught a curriculum very similar to the reception curriculum to 6 and 7 year olds and everyone survived. There’s nothing wrong with letting your 4 or 5 year old wait to learn to read and write until everyone is ready, even if they’re ready now. Education is not a race and your dc does not need a head start.

Reduce class sizes. Should be a maximum of 15 in KS1 and maximum of 20 after that.

It is not possible for one person to do a good job of looking after thirty young children at once. It is a completely impossible task. People who are given impossible tasks tend to get sad and stressed and quit.

Shrinking class sizes would also improve a lot of the child mental health problems we’re seeing.

Before people tell me we can’t possibly afford that many teachers, go see what we spend on defence and what we give in aid to eg Ukraine.

Cheesecake, that is interesting. Do you find that your professional acquaintances on similar salaries (£30-40k) regularly volunteer an extra 25% on top of their working week? Don't get me wrong, I have som teacher acquaintances who manage to maintain fairly sensible hours; they work in large 'easy' schools so are able to decide whether they want to take on the additional load of middle leadership, which is invariably foisted ‐unremunerated‐ on teachers in smaller schools, taking up an inordinate amount of time.

DP has recently worked in local authority redeployment and is saying more or less exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting: he can't believe that similarly qualified and renumerated employees working for our local council have such great T&Cs compared to teachers working in the same LA, with work life balance being protected by a number of adjustments and initiatives which teachers could only dream of.

Out of the many colleagues who have left to pursue careers in other roles, not one has ever said to me that they miss the teaching holidays as they now have their evenings and weekends back to spend as they please. They may stay late occasionally, but can usually claim time back in lieu or claim overtime, neither of which is available to teachers.

I think it depends on the school as to whether people volunteer an additional 25%. I have several family members who do very little post 5pm, I've absolutely no experience of them teaching myself though so I'm realistic that they may well be appalling! I know lots of teachers so I know well this isnt most peoples experience.

Yes sadly lots of other professionals I know work at that level, I'm civil service and have been actively monitoring hours to try and cut them back, regularly get emails from colleagues in the early hours of the morning etc. I've never worked in LA but have a couple of colleagues who have moved into the CS from LA and said our work is much less pressured! We all tend to have worked in the private sector before so the excessive hours are a reduction in expectations but the salary reduction is a shocker, I keep thinking surely someone can develop a happy medium?!

I didnt mention Ofsted before but meant to, I have no idea how to improve that though so will be reading posts with interest. I am totally on board with the idea of a QA function for schools but not one which creating so much work simply for the sake of inspection rather than with the distinct character and needs of individual schools driving the priorities and workload.

So many good suggestions here.

I still find it absolutely incredible that yearly hundreds of thousands of teachers are all planning the same things over and over again.

How have we not created a unified and central system which follows the same phase model and provides strong planning and resources for each lesson? I know classes have different needs but teachers can easily adapt from the core plans and resources.

Choose a group of extremely effective teachers, with a range of specialist subjects, get them together to plan and resource an incredible curriculum for the children, with three levels of differentiation in the resources and accompanying flips. Even if you just did this for Maths and English it would be such a load off of everyone and also amazing to know that everyone is singing from, pretty much, the same hymn sheet. This system needs to come from the government.

I know there are a lot of places where you can find such planning and resources but schools often ask you to redo them or to only use the resources once in a learning journey. Also teachers are asked to hide logos from the sites because god forbid you have used a perfectly good Twinkl lesson.

Let's normalise using the helpful resources that are already out there.

Smaller class sizes

More TA support

Better intervention and support for KS1 children with SEND. 'Wait and see' doesn't help me alone teach maths to a class with 10+ children who are waiting and seeing.

Ofsted reform and reduction in subject leader accountability and expectation

Stop pointless paperwork and meetings.

Staff provided to do photocopying, displays, data entry, first aid and resource prep.

Money for resources such as glue sticks, white board pens.

Money for computer systems and iPads that work

SLT and Ofsted who teach regularly

Bother too late to edit! Just wanted to add my teacher friends and family who have a manageable workload are "teaching" teachers, only one has a subject head role. Just to clarify the point you raise @TheMotherSide about middle leaders as I don't think I was clear on that. Particularly agree with whoever made the point earlier about increasing PPA time in line with leadership responsibilities, that makes sense to me and we get an allocated number of hours a year towards line management which I don't think teachers would get.

For me, it’s the endless lesson planning and then redoing the lesson plans the following year because of a new scheme/bandwagon that we’ve jumped on, or because ‘there’s always ways to reflect and improve’. If something worked well last year, why do I have to rewrite it?!

I think there should be a countrywide bank of plans and resources that teachers can just pick up and use for each subject and topic. I mean proper detailed, effective plans (ie not just choosing stuff from Twinkl or similar). I’m sure there would be current or ex teachers who would love to take this on as a job, so that the lessons could be planned well and ready to implement/adapt slightly if needed for your own class. Schools are all following the same national curriculum and pretty much the same topics as each other, so why are thousands of us all individually spending hours planning to meet the curriculum, when we could just all share?

I’ve worked in 1 form entry, where planning workload is horrendous for obvious reasons. Have also worked in a MAT where planning was split between 8 teachers in a year group, but I still spent ridiculous amounts of time planning because it had to be adapted for all the different classes and then checked by subject leads, then tweaked again etc etc. So I don’t think it’s only an issue in smaller schools.

I've had classes of 20 and whilst it is better, it doesn't solve things by a long way. Planning etc takes just as long and more often than not the ability gap from lowest to highest is the same. Centralised planning like White Rose or Power Maths has made a big difference to me.

More teachers.

Cheesecake, I do think the additional workload inherent in primary middle leadership, such as subject leadership, is 'the straw' for many colleagues, who were previously delighted to be 'just' class teaching. Especially given that there is no financial reward for this extra (huge) role. Having managed only one subject for many years alongside teaching my class, I now lead three subjects following the exits of experienced teachers, replaced with ECTs who cannot lead in the first years of practice. As Imuptoolate says, a one-form entry is another killer in terms of planning ‐perhaps your relaxed friends work in larger schools where workload can be shared?