To think 9 day fortnights for teachers is a good idea...

[LadyCrazyCatLady]

...if implemented correctly.

One of the large school trusts local to us have announced that, from September they're aiming for flexible working for teachers within their schools:

The trust said: "We have been focusing on prioritising flexibility for our teachers to support greater work-life harmony.

As a result, we are excited to launch our new flexible working plan which will come into effect in the next academic year (24/25) and includes working towards a nine-day fortnight for teachers.

We want to be bold in our approach. Our ambition is for teachers to be afforded the same flexibility that’s available in many other sectors and now even expected in the post-pandemic world.

Given the nature of teaching, we know that the scale of this flexibility will not always match what others offer outside the sector, but making these changes will go a long way in making a difference.

In line with our deep commitment to self-determination, we want to give our teachers more agency over their roles by offering a flexible working plan that will give them time back.

Nine-day fortnight: We are working towards a nine-day fortnight for teachers without impacting students’ contact time. As far as possible, we want this to be a genuine reduction in working hours and not just trying to fit 10 days of teaching into nine. The analysis we have been conducting shows this is possible in many of our schools.

Remote working: We are pushing forward with a plan that allows remote working during non-contact time, which includes giving more PPA (planning, preparation and assessment) and making it manageable from home or another remote location, and where our teachers want to do this, compressing the free hours or non-contact hours so that they can be away from school for longer periods of time.

Personal days: We want to offer personal days during term time so our teachers are not restricted to only taking time off in the school holidays.

Artificial intelligence: We will look to use technology, where possible, to reduce teachers’ contact time and provide greater flexibility. We want to harness technology more widely to free up more time and allow our best teachers to influence more students than just those physically present in their classrooms."

AIBU to think that, although it would take some major organising, something like this could help with the teacher retention crisis that we currently have in the UK?

Wow I'm quite impressed. I'd have found planning so much easier with a day a fortnight to crack on and do it. I'd still be working tons but just a bit of breathing space.

I worry there is no comment on the impact on all of this on pupils. Is this primary or secondary school?

The trust in question has both primary and secondary schools @Sirzy

So teachers already get 13 weeks off a year when the rest of us get just 5 and they are STILL not happy and they want even MORE time off? They really do exist in their own little parallel universe, don’t they?

I’m not against 9 day fortnights but let’s not pretend most of us who aren’t teachers have the possibility of this. There are so many working conditions worse than teachers but the who’ve never experienced other work places seem to think the grass is greener.

if they can make it work, make teaching a more inviting profession and not impact on the outcomes then great.

my views on AI however are fairly critical - it can’t tell my twins apart which feels like a fairly basic thing to get wrong. I also receive cvs from applicants clearly written by AI. And there’s evidence AI is learning misogyny and racism.

That's not what 9-day fortnights are. They involve working longer hours for nine working days so that you get every tenth off. They work the same amount of time... over fewer days.

I don't know how to make that more simple.

I think it’s a really good idea. Staff well-being, recruitment and retention are major issues. Paying more is not an option due to nationally agreed contracts and funding. So other ways to make it a manageable career option in the modern world need to be found.

There are trusts that already offer this, and their retainment and staff morale does seem to be better, from my very small sample size of knowing three teachers who work for them

The 10th day won't be "off". It will be doing the work to prep for the other 9 days. It will be working from home in thr true sense of the word of actually working. (I get some people abuse wfh but if teachers don't do the marking/prep it just gets moved to another evening/weekend. It can't be done between 8-4 as they're literally teaching)

The way I see it @BarelyLiterate (I'm not a teacher but have 2 DCs in school) is supply and demand. We need good quality teachers and there's a recruitment problem, leaving many posts empty. Therefore, in order to ensure our DCs get a good education the system needs to adapt to make teaching more desirable as a career.

It doesn't really matter what anyone outside thinks about teaching as a career, if the posts aren't filled and the demand is there something needs to be done.

I think this is a good way of 'thinking outside the box' to improve work-life balance and if it works, I imagine the schools in the trust will have their pick of the best teachers.

I don't understand how this will work? PPA time possibly from home, but how exactly are hours being reduced?

And yes many teachers return back to the jobs they came to before or look at jobs with flexible working. There's a couple of threads now about teachers looking for alternate work!

The whole of society needs to be bold and implement flexible working regarding hours, working patterns and locations. Good on them. If people want things to change, no point clinging onto old ways.

They don't get 13 weeks of leave. They are contracted and paid for 195 days of the year (190 school days plus five training days), they are also paid for their legal statutory holiday entitlement that everyone is entitled to and these weeks are taken in the holidays. In total that equates to around 46 weeks of paid employment time. The remaining c.6 weeks are unpaid/uncontracted but are still usually spent planning, marking, creating/researching resources, in school organising things, you may be on call if you're a DSL or keyholder or an emergency contact, etc.

If you think teaching is such a lark with thirteen weeks of jollies and "a parallel little universe" then please come join us in the field of education. We'd love to have you and you'd very swiftly find that it's not the land of milk and honey you seem to think it is.

Hmm, makes a good soundbite but doesn't that just mean working 5 full days with no PPA one week and making up for that by having a morning PPA session (longer, to be fair) and afternoon session on the same day the following week? Not that much of a gain really. Yes, you get a good run at planning and curriculum on that day, but then no time to rejig planning the following week.

Personal days sound good though - our MAT has 3 paid compassionate days per year but only for specific situations involving caring. Being able to widen the criteria would be beneficial to a lot of us.

It's a brilliant idea.
If they can get enough staff to cover all of the lessons for the children in the school.
If teachers teach 5 full lessons per day and then have to plan for the next day and mark work from today they absolutely need this time to do it.

Evenings and weekends are used up doing this at the moment.

60 hour weeks are unsustainable and staff limp to the holidays.

@Iam4eels 👍

I imagine you'll have many notifications with 'thanks' from lots of burnt out teachers who are sick of explaining this! Thanks!

In principle why not? Lots of other places offer it now. However, I’d be interested to see how they manage it not affecting teaching time though as if you have people working an extra hour each day but later once students have gone, that isn’t the time that needs the cover. I suspect a lot of schools are relying on good will to do extra so if a school trust can make it work, I’m sure it would be popular as you’d be rewarding teachers for that work with toil effectively. But… compressing is harder if you want to see your own children of an evening. The people I know who do a 9 day fortnight or compressed hours tend to be younger.

How are they proposing to cover the classes whilst the teacher has that day WFH? Using the usual PPA/Cover staff?

I may be naïve as I know little about the inner running of schools, but my interpretation of trust's statement was that they were trying to reduce total workload, not compress 10 days into 9:

"...we want this to be a genuine reduction in working hours and not just trying to fit 10 days of teaching into nine."

I sort think everyone should have this, not just teachers, or even just a four day week. If they did it so that teachers (and indeed everyone) had different working/ non working days to each other - perhaps by investing more in schools - they could do it with children still at school five days a week which would be ideal.

I would think this is just rearranging PPA, so one day a fortnight instead of half a day a week. Would be nice to be proved wrong!

I think it's a really interesting idea. I'm a secondary teacher. I could see how it could work with some timetable jiggling so if you had eg an afternoon free you could go home rather than having to stay in school once a week or a whole day if feasible once a fortnight.