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

You seem defeated and ready to leave and that is ok but you have not even given it until the first half term to either 'train' your students/parents or school/department!

@cansu our primary doesn't have an office open during all of school hours, it's only open two mornings a week. I still think important messages should be dealt with within 24 hours though. As I said, I classify e.g. threats of violence towards DC as important (and am actually struggling to think of other examples) and

Nobody is saying 24 hour access though. Mute the app outside of reasonable hours.

Our FS is at an academy secondary school. Sometimes I do need to contact staff but if it was urgent I would phone the school and leave a message with the reception asking if they could phone back when convenient.
We don't have an app for contact but we do have email addresses however I wouldn't expect an immediate/same day reply

Definitely not common for the schools where friends teach ir at primary schools.

PPA is during working hours. It's ten percent of the hours actually taught and excluding duties, tutor time, meetings, training and everything else (so say with 5 lessons per day, roughly equivalent to 30 mins a day) and it's for planning, preparation and assessment - not pastoral queries, admin or parental contact. It's already a meagre amount to organise 22/23 lessons a week and mark the work produced for hundreds of different students .

At the risk of outing myself and my workplace, we do not have allocated PPA as such (not timetabled/ protected).

No PPA! Unbelievable. I don't know how they recruit.

They don't tell you that bit at interview.

This is batshit, my daughter is in year 9 and has had the same form tutor since year 7, I've spoken to her twice ever. I cannot imagine bombarding her like this on a daily basis!

You should look for another job ASAP. This isn't going to get better

I was going to say that I bet this is the tip of the iceberg and not just one issue that you can 'train' the school out of, then OP returned to say they don't get paid either.

OP you know yanbu and I expect you're jobhunting.

Dont get PPA, not don't get paid! I hope...

This is outrageous OP; you absolutely can't be expected to do this - it must take a terrible toll on your general wellbeing, apart from being so time consuming.

If my DC's secondary school tried to bring this in I'd question the HT about it, asking why staff well-being isn't being considered.

It's reasonable for parents to ask those questions.
I don't think you need an app, nor do you need to reply outside working hours.

Schools need to look at the reasons for these contacts and ways they can reduce them by pushing info out or making it readily accessible so parents don't have to seek it.

I think my parents spoke to my teachers maybe once or twice a year, at parents’ evening when I was in secondary school. This nonsense sounds very influenced by the USA where parents expect to have their child’s teacher’s phone numbers!

This is ridiculous and reinforces the fact that the app (and its workload and working time issues) isn't just an oversight or has got out of hand.

If there's noone to ask what can be dropped to accommodate the time needed to communicate with parents, I think it will have to be the 'automated response' approach where you send stock phrases.

That's utterly mental. I work in a large independent secondary school. We are strongly discouraged from sending work-related emails between 7pm and 7am, and we aren't expected or supposed to reply to parents or pupils between those hours.

We also get a reasonable amount of PPA (not called that, but non-teaching slots) within the school week.

Get a different job @Elendel. I used to have 5 hours of timetabled PPA a week.

Thats absolute madness. I really feel for you. We have a news app from school (jigsaw) but anything else is dealt with in school hours. I sometimes send an email last thing at night or first thing the morning but its only cos I suddenly remember stuff!!!! I would be complaining to the head teacher or your union. Good luck and thank you for all your efforts x

This is stupid.

At my kids’ secondary we were told to email the class tutor and they would decide whether to pass it on to individual subject teachers.

I might have sent a couple of emails a year max.

It was lovely this summer, after my daughter got her stellar A Level results, two teachers emailed me spontaneously to say how proud they were of her (she had all sorts of struggles!) That was so nice of them but completely unexpected.

I would not expect routine contact like this of any kind. This school is not looking after its staff at all.

Maybe they could give the parents a quota of one message a term and that’s it..

Can’t teachers pick and choose their jobs these days? Tell them the app needs removing or you will have to reconsider.

I like the messaging app but I don’t expect teachers to respond outside of office hours or within a set time frame unless the message is actually urgent.

Most of my messages on such app has been in response to a teacher though. A child has left Pe kit can you pop it in or such. They use this in primary school a lot.

Expected a 24 hour turn around response to mundane rubbish is rubbish.

There is no bending on the time frame and my colleagues are mostly young and childfree, without the backbone or experience to say no, so I'd stick out like a sore thumb and we all know how that ends.

I've been there, so I know how it ends. £30k pay out because they wanted me to fuck off then I walked into a job at a much nicer school.

I also know how giving in to dickheads ends because I did that for far, far too long before just saying no.

@Maddy70 You're talking through your A* hole.

It's ridiculous.

Not that parents can email as such. But the turn around time and that they are encouraged to email over every little thing.

I often think if parents couldn't speak to a teacher 24/7 excusing why their children haven done homework, questioning your every decision about consequences and asking questions about things they've had information about they'd actually spend time making their child do homework, giving a shrug and a "behave then" and reading the information provided!

No PPA either??
It's not a school OP, it's an asylum - and the lunatics are running it.
Get out asap.
Good Luck.

It sounds really tough. Not all schools are like this.

I work in a stand-alone academy and the email signature has a message that replies should not be expected after 4:30 and staff are not expected to check emails at weekends.