Are teacher messaging apps reasonable?

[Elendel]

I am a teacher in a secondary school.

I started in a new place a few months back. In this place, parents have an app on which they, and students, can message us 24/7 and we are expected to reply as soon as possible, but latest within 24h. The app filters out swearing, but other than that it can be a free-for-all.

I do not have time to respond within a typical school day as I am either teaching, in a meeting or on duty, and with briefings as well, responding to parents either falls within the 15min lunch I get (unpaid) or outside of those hours. Time is fully directed between 8.15 and 4.30 each day and PPA is the absolute minimum school can get away with.

Messages arrive any time between midnight (some students messaging at 1am!) and midnight again, but parents most often message after work (understandably) and will expect us to have responded by mid-day. Some are messages about reasons why homework isn't done, some are asking me about what happened in other subjects, yet others are to challenge detentions given.

Is this level of communication acceptable? It just feels like I'm never off work, because I spend a considerable amount of time responding to the messages of the 1200 students and their parents on top of doing my actual day job to keep up with communication demands.

YABU - get on with it, it's your job

YANBU - that's ridiculous

That's ridiculous!

Is this a UK state school?! Very, very far beyond reasonable as a demand. Contact your union.

YANBU- how ridiculous! Can't believe the school have even signed you up for this.

UK Academy

Completely ridiculous.

Pretty standard in UK state schools I'm afraid

Fucksake no of course it's not reasonable. Did your school workload-assess it?

Even with parental emails 2 working days is a tight response time.

You need to get in touch with your union that is completely unacceptable. I believe they can ask you to download an app but you don’t have to either. Do all teachers at the school engage with this?

You need your union to get on to it. You are not at work 24-7 and nor are you paid to be, let alone should you be expected to be. What are your colleagues saying?

No chance would I have that!
I don't even have school emails on my personal phone!

This is an absolute outrage.

As a parent, I’d never ask for it. And if it existed and if the school said ‘Sorry, we’re withdrawing it because teachers need time off’ I’d applaud them.

The app isn't on our phones if we don't want to, but it's online and the same expectations apply. I am literally messaging as I am responding to yet another parent (who messages me several times daily).

Utterly ridiculous. At the least the app should not allow messages to be sent out of hours. That sounds so awful that I would be reconsidering my future there. In the meantime make your line manager aware of the times you will and will not be able to check the app.

Absolute outrage 😂😂

I only ema the school office. We have been given teacher emails but I won’t use them. They need time and space to teach!

Fuck that. We don't even respond to emails between 6pm - 8am. (Well, we do but we are not expected to)

We use Dojo for messaging but it's a primary school so I only have 32 sets of parents. In general it works well but I can set "quiet hours" where I parents do not expect a response (6pm-8am). What you are describing sounds horrendous though!

I teach in a college and we have Teams where students can message us, but we’re under no obligations to reply in any particular time frame and certainly not outside college hours unless we choose to. We all have iPads but I don’t tend to take mine home so I don’t see the messages anyway.

I’m a teacher but in FE so a bit different, but my daughter has just started primary school and they have really clear boundaries on the apps they use. They aim to reply within 48 hours during the week but this is an aim not a guarantee and they have asked us to avoid messaging outside of 8-5 wherever possible, I think this is reasonable and balanced in terms of both teachers and parents needs, and each teacher
only has 30 kids to deal with! Your situation sounds awful TBH, and I definitely wouldn’t be responding outside of the working day, and if it doesn’t get done, it doesn’t get done. I would flag with HOD/line manager and also raise with your union because it is clearly unsustainable.

Oh, I've had people getting very shirty with me when I didn't respond within 12h, let alone 24.

But I am glad that it isn't the norm everywhere.

Unfortunately, unions mean Jack shit in academies if they don't recognise them.

I work in a school and our signature specifically says that people should not expect replies out of school time.

Yours would drive me insane 😵

It really, really isn't.

Ugh, sorry to hear this.

Every single one I've worked In. Its so much additional pressure

You sound snobby.