Annual leave

[Mumteedum]

I'm just curious.

How much annual leave are you entitled to and how much do you actually take?

I take most of mine but I'm not on a research contract. I know some colleagues do research in the summer but then I'm wondering if they actually take their annual leave too?

@Mellownellow I really feel sorry that you feel you can't take leave. I learned the hard way to say no when I am asked to do more and I am still learning to be strategic. My research time suffers too but I don't care (enough)! All going well, I am in my mid 50s by the time I make professor :-).

It really is. Not going to do it now but I'll go through my department workload model and see how many teaching hours I am down for.

I went through a period like this for a few years. It has paid off (massively) in my career - as long as you are careful to measure any impact of what you are doing, and, if possible, include a wider element in any initiatives you lead (i.e. make it bigger than just your department), then you are setting yourself up very well.

After a few years, though, I realised I had not prioritised research. At one point, I didn't publish for nearly three years. I turned that around by making it my priority - treating it like one of my service role initiatives. I formed a team to work together on some papers, and we make plans for data collection, analysis and writing. I started pumping out the papers, and saying yes to other disciplines' workshops, where I met more people. Now, I am collaborating on ten Q1/Q2 papers a year.

I take all of mine but I’m on an unusual contract. It’s the norm in my group. I work additional hours in ‘sprints’ up to deadlines, but not every week. I can appreciate this isn’t possible for others, though. Some workloads in an adjacent department are horrendous.

I don't at all mean to come across as rude, but in a subject area like that, you will have very few students, and so you will have far fewer assignments to mark. You should work out how long it takes (40 mins max would be my suggestion - get ruthless with this). So even with 20 students per module, doing all the marking for 10 modules would take 130 hours.

I come from a discipling with 350 students per module, so we have many, many more scripts to mark (usually 150-200 each across the academic year), but we also have 12-20 UG and/or MSc dissertations each to mark, which will be way, way more than the numbers you will have in a creative discipline.

So even with the increased teaching that you have, your teaching, admin and marking hours will not be very different from mine (do correct me if I'm wrong, and you are leading 10 modules with 300 students on each of them).

Again, I am not trying to be difficult, but I come across a (huge) number of colleagues from all disciplines who start out with, "but I couldn't possibly, I have uniquely so much more workload than anyone else, there are no solutions". In - genuinely - every case, it is organisation and management. Try breaking your tasks down and planning them out. I can do it, so can you.

I think this sort of thing can be very, very variable. I have a lot of portfolio, video, visual assessments etc, plus formatives for all of these, and 60-70 students per module. So with the best will in the world, I can't get my marking done in 50 hours, and do far more teaching, personal tutoring etc.

I do agree with @Marasme that, in my experience of line managing, there are a lot of people investing a lot of time in things that are enjoyable but not actually the core part of the job, so it's hard to argue that they really need to do such excess hours.

Actually line managing has been a huge huge time suck in my experience, and I am hugely relieved to no longer be HoD.

Oh, and another big time suck is marketing. Given the state of the sector, there's a real threat of courses closing if student numbers drop. We have a decent marketing department but apparently they can't do course specific stuff, so we should all be raising our profiles through social media, blogs and news articles and need to spend regular time doing this.

It's all that stuff I resent. Teaching and course admin takes a lot of time but I mostly enjoy it or at least can see the purpose of it within my role. But academia seems to have changed into something quite different from the traditional teaching/research/admin with just more and more stuff poured on top without anything being removed.

I didn't suggest you could get your marking done in 50 hours. In my example above, I was giving a model of marking 40 scripts (which I might have for one assessment), but we mark several assessments throughout the year. Typically, we mark 150-200 assignments each (and of course lots of these are portfolio, posters, presentations, as well as essays).

It is of course possible for all of us to organise out time better. In your case, I would suggest starting by noting down for yourself what you actually have to do during the year (teaching prep, marking), breaking it down into smaller time chunks and putting it in your calendar in advance.

in our faculty away day this year the HoD said he was urging module leaders to reduce assessment and marking but they were weirdly resistant to it.

i divide my job into things I pour huge effort into (research, helping junior colleagues write grants, my personal tutees) and things I do at a ‘good enough’ level (basically everything else). I wouldn’t spend hours tweaking a lecture or devising extra assessments. I don’t go to many meetings and only join one committee if I can resign another. I do lots in the community but again on a one-in-one-out basis. I’ve just finished a stint on a grant panel so might host a conference now. I won’t join an editorial board until that is over, etc etc

I'm not sure why you're questioning what I've said based on some imaginary figures you've added (10-12 modules each year). My point was that you've said that you're baffled by people who aren't as efficient as you, but there are plenty of us who are far exceeding your teaching hours of 150-200 hours and 74 hours of marking, so it's not that baffling that we are saying it can be a struggle to get everything done.

For instance, many of us have marking loads that are a lot more than yours, not because we're ditherers and are taking several days per script, but because that's just how long it takes.

Great that you've got it all worked out, but I think your tone has been unnecessarily disparaging considering the huge variability of academic jobs.

For instance, many of us (including me) are dealing with more than one intake per year etc.

I also don’t know. Best guess is 35 days and maybe 15 days leave. I do get ill though so that probably counts (and yes, there probably is a causal association there).

Ah, I see your confusion. We mark 150-200 scripts per year, not 40 (40 was the example I used for one assessment). We have three intakes a year. Being organised with time management makes a big difference. Instead of saying that you couldn't possibly, or that you have a uniquely high workload, you could try to listen and implement some strategies others have found to be successful - I'm not sure why you would be resistant to trying.

As an aside, I promise you, you don't have a uniquely high workload - we can hash it out further here if you like, but we each typically have around 200 hours of teaching and around 200 scripts to mark and around 20 dissertation students and 50 personal tutees. You might have more teaching where I have more dissertation students, for example, but it boils down to the same workload.

30 days but that assumes the 2 May Bank Hols will be worked as they fall in exam term and are teaching day in the uni. I don't teach, but the department must have enough people in the building. If you are in the building and given a specific task/asked to cover an essential role you get an extra day. If you are in the building and not doing a cover or wfh they don't take a day off your annual leave. It's quite handy to be able to cover essential services like evening invigilator during late opening as you can get TOIL.

We are allowed to carry over 5 days. I usually carry over the max. Our leave year used to be calendar year and changed to academic year 3 years ago. The leave carried over has to be used before Jan. DH (diff dept, same uni) is on sabbatical this year and doing several overseas invitation contracts, so my pattern of using leave is different. I may not have as much as a week left to carry over. I'm working both bank hols in May.

I'm really not confused, I think you might need to read what I've written again as you're not responding to what I've actually written.

I can manage my time fine, thanks, and am good at organisation, but my experiences of different institutions over the years has definitely shown me what workloads can vary hugely. I'm not sure why you're so resistant to that as a fact. I'm glad you've managed to find a system that works for yours though!

I've worked across several different types of institution. Workload varies a lot. In one people thought 2 modules was a 'heavy load' and complained bitterly if the modules were spread across both terms. In another 6 modules was the average load and the workload was so high that once people reached triple the points (with no extra pay) they just stopped publishing the workload data to stop complaints. You'd also be expected to mark scripts on modules you had no idea about so you could end up with 500 scripts from your own modules and another 300 from other modules you didn't understand so would then also have to learn the content before starting to mark.

I’d agree that workload varies across institutions and within institutions. For example I’m in a school that offers vocational undergraduate programmes that are all professionally accredited and many of them apprenticeships. Both of these mean multiple layers of Byzantine administrative systems on top of the usual teaching/marking process. There used to be an expectation and opportunity to build a research profile but those days are long behind us. Even without redundancies we consistently lose staff back into the NHS as the pay is better and employment not quite so precarious.

I don't think I ever took my whole allocation, except on years I was on mat leave, where it was used to bolster my leave (perfectly acceptable, to the PP who was in a moral quandary about that). There were a couple of years where I tried to take more of it, but I got fuck all research done those years (humanities) and I worked out that if I did take all of it at times I could actually take it (i.e. Easter and Summer hols - Xmas was already pretty much covered by Uni closure dates) then that would leave me about 2 weeks of uninterrupted time to do research. If your research involves travelling to and spending time in archives, 2 weeks a year ain't enough...

I read an excellent blog post about the 'lie' we all tell ourselves as academics - that the job is really flexible. I mean, I guess it is in some ways, but that flexibility comes at the expense of being able to take proper time off.