Teachers should receive a 1.8% premium for not working from home

[noblegiraffe]

Interesting suggestion from the NFER who say the teacher recruitment crisis shows no sign of abating.

They suggest at minimum a 3.1% pay rise this year for teachers (govt recommendation is 1-2%) but interestingly, to make teaching competitive with other graduate jobs that allow some element of working from home, teachers should receive 1.8% extra on top of that.

I think commuting costs used to be a given for any job, but now it’s something employers are going to have to start thinking about paying for if they want people in the office.

https://www.nfer.ac.uk/press-releases/teacher-recruitment-and-retention-crisis-shows-no-signs-of-abating-new-report-reveals/

Yes i can see that but we have subjects where we have non specialist since September as we cant get specialist in . (Which is what brought me to this thread)

As a governor, am i being naive that the assistant head is actually teaching anything from the resources the department prepared. They described the curriculum well planned and resourced, which has helped them.

Is it even worse than i thought?

I'm not working in that particular school for much longer. Daily duties do take the piss.

Agreed on the data obsession, but until that's fixed we need two mocks that are spaced out reasonably. By all means, end of Y10 for one set (that's a year's worth of GCSE teaching in most cases) and then one February/ March before the exams when most subjects have finished content.

Fully agree on cover lessons; that's the culture in this particular school. Full lessons expected. My last place was the open-books-do-tasks-shut-up kind of place. I still wasn't able to work (behaviour was appalling across the board, so my primary function was to keep the kids in their seats and from hurting each other/ hurling abuse at each other during cover) but at least I wasn't expected to bullshit that I knew any of this. And I have a pretty good all-round understanding of most subjects, but leave the minutae to subject specialists.

I wistfully remember the data manager we once hired for each subject area, back in the days (20 years ago). She'd spend all the hours we now do entering question-by-question mock results, grades and the like. It was her full-time job. That alone should say it all, really.

Edited to say that I also hark back to the days of "rarely cover". Once a week now seems to be standard.

one February/ March before the exams when most subjects have finished content.

Nowhere near!! NEA deadlines (mocks disrupt those too) end of this term and then whole text to teach after Easter...

I wistfully remember the data manager we once hired for each subject area, back in the days (20 years ago). She'd spend all the hours we now do entering question-by-question mock results, grades and the like. It was her full-time job. That alone should say it all, really.

Yes, we used to have full time photocopying lady, full time attendance officers, a designated nurse, a designated EWO...

I know. I said most subjects. All non-core have finished by now in my school and mainly interrupt my teaching by taking kids out of class left, right and centre for mop-ups/ intervention/ coursework improvement. Maths have finished, Foundation stage Science have. No idea about English. HT Science are still teaching, Triple won't finish until mid-way through exams.

Suggestions for a four day week under retention and recruitment.

One MAT has a 9 day fortnight in place to address this.

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/four-day-school-week-flexible-working?fbclid=IwAR0xT4YLoHUJz8m_yq5KRsLfgsLQgorwmZCJBVzHYSyWi8aEGAqo4i2t-Is

4 day week/ 9 day fortnight - does that mean I'm teaching all day every day of those 4 or 9 with all my PPA/leadership on the other day. Because that really wouldn't work for me.

The 9 day fortnight is a teachers having a day off a fortnight, with PPA etc on the other days staying the same.

The 4 day week is slightly longer school days and schools being closed one day a week - the impact of kids being home an extra day a week when their parents are working causes obvious problems.

Then that might work - my "issue" is that my job involves lot of being in classrooms with other teachers or meeting them to discuss their lessons. Potentially it would make it harder to do that.

All other things being equal though, I'd be happy to trial either other those things.

A 4-day week or 9-day fortnight does sound promising. I presume that with primary, they would do it with a move away from classes just having one main teacher?

I also wonder how it would work with part timers/job shares?

There was a thread on this quite recently. Was reading it earlier.

The issue with that is childcare, though - not just for non-teachers, because teachers would also have to find - and pay for - someone who could take their kids all day if those days don't happen to be the same. And if those days are all the same, then we'd need a LOT more childcare places - nurseries, childminders and daycare providers for ages 4-11, which currently don't exist, because there is no need for them.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4988909-to-think-9-day-fortnights-for-teachers-is-a-good-idea

https://www.dixonsat.com/why/flexible-working

I would have thought it would reduce part time staff . I would love one day a fortnight off for life laundry and rest but don't want to be part time. Some staff working a 80 % timetable might go back to full time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crgr3rpd4p3o

https://www.langtoft.lincs.sch.uk/media/Policies/Schools_Working_Flexibly_Policy___Jan_22.pdf

My school seems to be better at emails than others. The only person who can send all-staff emails is the head, I hear in other schools you get all-staff emails saying stuff like 'does anyone want to sponsor me to skydive?' Or loads of stuff about kids you don't teach.

Same here with the scheduled emails and the fact that only the head can send all-staff emails. The latter was implemented by our new head and staff were pretty much universally livid about it. They see it as inconvenient and a form of deliberate censorship, which tbf I actually think it is in our case. We didn't have profligate use of all-staff emails before, and the rule was introduced after one particular email the head wasn't happy about...

It's not that teaching is badly paid, it just the conditions they are expected to work in are poor and unsupportive.

What's obvious from that thread you just posted @Piggywaspushed is the lack of recognition among posters who come on to say 'urgh, you already get loads of holidays, why would you need a day off?' that teaching is in crisis and these things need to happen to have any hope of rectifying that.

Yes, I noticed the usual suspects descended fairly rapidly.

According to Teacher Tapp, 64% of teachers aren’t allowed to do their PPA at home. In my own academy trust we are reluctantly allowed but we have to ask each time in case, and the resulting expression on the exec head/ head if school’s faces makes it very clear that it is disapproved of and seen as unprofessional
https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/policing-teachers-on-social-media-independent-learners-and-flexible-ppas/#PPA
.

We used to be allowed to (primary) but then I think the Head thought some people were taking the piss so it was stopped. Also, there's so much staff absence most weeks that frequently we have to miss it (paid back at a later, usually inconvenient, date) and they want us on site just in case.

Also, there's so much staff absence most weeks that frequently we have to miss it (paid back at a later, usually inconvenient, date) and they want us on site just in case.

This is a huge problem. Because we are so poorly staffed-there is no ‘give’ in the system so it seems to be fire fighting on a daily basis just getting a warm body in front of every class.

Question, are lesson plans not recycled every year?

Surely once you have for example, spring term, week 1, yr 7 history - 'Treaty of Versailles' presentation/lesson plan. This can be used every year with just a bit of tweaking perhaps?

Question, are lesson plans not recycled every year?

Surely once you have for example, spring term, week 1, yr 7 history - 'Treaty of Versailles' presentation/lesson plan. This can be used every year with just a bit of tweaking perhaps?

No, not really. I suppose at KS3 you perhaps can do, but it's not a great way to teach (I teach history). We change some of our topics every 2/3 years - partly as a way of keeping ourselves interested, but also as other things change. For example - we used to teach Industrial Revolution in Y8, but a) my colleague hated it and b) we discovered that as we were teaching American West at GCSE to Y10s who knew absolutely nothing about America it made sense to drop Britain's Industrial Revolution and we decided we would teach a unit on Slavery instead. This introduced Y8s to some American history - and meant that they then had some basic knowledge of the Civil War/Reconstruction for when it cropped up in GCSE.

We also then switched one of GCSE Units from Russia to teaching Black Civil Rights and Vietnam, meaning it also fitted in with Y8 and also, the weaker students found it easier to grasp Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, say than they did to grasp the politik of Weimar Germany. And were more interested in it.

As the HoD I re-wrote 30 GCSE lessons, fully resourced them, produced PPTs etc. I would say that probably took me about 60 hours work in total, which I did in my summer holidays. The change at KS3 took me a week of my Easter holidays.

I know the English dept have just switched one of the GCSE texts they do - I think they've dropped Jane Eyre and gone for A Christmas Carol instead. You are often aware that you have a weak cohort coming up - or that some things just take a lot longer to explain and for kids to grasp. You also realise that some things just aren't working, or kids aren't engaged with the topic.

The exam boards also frequently change stuff. Yes, this is very very annoying.

Yes thinking it's once and done suggests a static series of lectures (reminds me of some of my Oxford lecturers who I am sure had the same notes from 100years ago)

Teaching is interactive and dynamic and each lesson will be in response to the actual students you have in front of you.