Schools should close early on a Friday

[Goolagoo]

I know this will be very mixed opinion - especially for working parents .

But , I’m a teacher . Over the years I have seen so much in schools regarding PPA time and really unfair practices . I have seen , and experienced , teachers having PPA taken away due to staffing issues . I once saw a teacher have a day of PPA ( a whole day because she wasn’t having it the week after due to staffing issues so would need to plan 2 weeks work in this PPA session ) taken away - it was a Friday too so she was supposed to be having that day to plan for lessons beginning on the Monday . It was taken away due to staffing issues and she was in tears - she had plans that weekend that she had to cancel so she could plan for the week ahead ( I didn’t work in that school , she’s a teacher friend ). I have also had PPA time taken away from me before and I also have never had a class that didn’t get upset at me not being in class and having a supply or a Ta cover . Usuall work that’s done during the cover whilst class teacher is out on PPA isn’t ‘important’ work - it’s a lot of filler work , or work that doesn’t go in books . A lot of children also get anxiety over their class teacher being out and children with SEN especially suffer with this .

I read about a school that decided to close at 1pm every Friday to allow teachers to all have their PPA time . They said that they made the time back with a slightly later finish time / slightly earlier start time and they found that behaviour improved massively. Fridays are usually the end of a long week and filled with behaviour issues and this reduced along with attendance improving . I know some schools around the area do Finish at 1/2 on a Friday and I wonder if this is the reason why .

It seems like it would really make sense !

Maybe even , as TAs don’t get PPA time as they don’t plan , they could offer a kind of after school club ( until normal pick up time ) where the TAs watched the children who’s parents couldn’t do an earlier pick up time .

They really don't.

they could offer a kind of after school club ( until normal pick up time ) where the TAs watched the children who’s parents couldn’t do an earlier pick up time .

This isn't very different to what currently happens in many schools with ppa covered with a HLTA. All you'd be doing is making it consistent that its on a friday afternoon.

It would be a nightmare for parents if schools officially closed even earlier.

The issues in your post are poor management and can be resolved easily in other ways.

Lol at the average teacher earning £50.000.

They really don’t what? Teachers don’t get paid for their holidays. So, if you take the average teaching wage for 39 weeks and extrapolate that to 52 weeks that’s what it works out as.

Oh, so teachers do get paid for holidays then? The salary they receive is for 52 weeks after all?

A better approach:

Local music service or county run sports service is established who serve all schools, rotating around. Each school is allocated a set afternoon as PPA team, during which time the children are provided with well organised sport & music provision (1hr sport and 1hr music). This time could also be when peripatetic teachers offer lessons to minimise disruption to normal lessons. You could also have this as a forest school option, especially for younger children.
.

if schools had a TA in every class then it wouldn’t be so bad, would probably be just a few in each class

In many schools it would be the whole class. SAHMs are vanishingly rare in the south east.

@Tippexy

You saw the graphic above. Average teachers don't earn £50.000. I do. But I'm not an average teacher.

How many schools have a TA in each class? Mine certainly doesn't. And as a teacher with kids of my own, how would that work?

This chart doesn’t include holidays though, remember? Teachers don’t get paid for holidays, they tell us on every thread.

So these salaries are actually only for 39 weeks of the year. As they don’t get paid for holidays. The other 13 weeks are unpaid.

So if we want to compare professions, we have to work out what the average teachers’ pay is for 52 weeks.

It’s approximately £50,000 per 52 weeks.

That’s the comparison when we are comparing teachers with other professions who work 52 weeks of the year.

I can’t believe on a thread of very clever teachers I have had to explain this four times now…!

Wow! So if you earn £50,000 for 39 weeks then that’s nearly £67,000 for 52 week FTE!

That’s much more than I earn and I do unpaid overtime until the job is done, along with many other professions…

I work four days a week, have been tracking my hours as feeling really fed up and it averages at 45. For 4 days. I’m not turning this into a competition because I am well aware other people work hard but something does need to change as expectations in teachers are crazy. I’ve been teaching 20 years but am really close to burn out. There are so many things I am not doing as well as I should.

I think the OP is probably slightly missing the mark with Fridays but I understand where their thinking comes from. I do believe with better funding there is a place to reduce teacher contact and replace with high quality sports coach / music / drama / forest school etc , giving children quality education and ensuring teachers have time to actually do their job properly.

Seriously @Tippexy. Take that chip off your shoulder. Be a teacher if it's so good.

As it happens I love my holidays and think I earn well.

I work four days a week, have been tracking my hours as feeling really fed up and it averages at 45. For 4 days. I’m not turning this into a competition because I am well aware other people work hard but something does need to change as expectations in teachers are crazy.

I work 4 days too in another industry and 45 hours would be perfectly normal for me. I'm not saying that's right or you have no cause to protest, but this idea that teachers are outliers with regards to hours is not grounded in reality.

@TheKeatingFive out of interest what are you paid to work 45 hours in a 0.8 contract?

Nonsense. There are expectations for many of those weeks, much of the planning is done then. Or of course many teachers use their weekends for planning. Also, they would clearly have the normal holiday allowance of 4-5 weeks.

You can only really do minimal planning before you've met the children in term 1. You get handover information from the previous teacher but you really need to do what's called "responsive" teaching. Every year children leave or are added to the class and this can come with additional needs such as EAL, ASN, social work involvement, and other issues which will mean adapting how you teach your subject matter.

Overview plans are completed and submitted to the headteacher termly which cover which areas of the curriculum you are focusing on, what the targets are for each group/child/curricular area. You then complete weekly and daily plans for how you are going to teach these concepts and (in Scotland anyway) this part varies widely across local authorities. The Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland was 'designed' so that teachers have more autonomy and creativity but in reality it has drastically increased workload as there are no schemes of work, ready made teaching manuals or even textbooks in many schools - everything is left up to the individual to create. This, coupled with slashed budgets, means that teachers are spending hours creating lesson materials every week. If you are teaching the same stage year after year then a lot of this can be repurposed but many headteachers don't give staff a choice as to which class they teach each year so if you've gone from say P1 one year to P7 the next year then you have a lot of preparation to do. Kind teachers will share a lot of their plans and materials but as a lot of resources are bought with their own money some will prefer not to share. There's also such a high turnover of staff that sharing resources and expertise isn't always possible.
Planning takes time but there is so much additional paperwork due to the high number of children with needs now in mainstream and having to complete separate targets and prepare individualised materials. Again, I'm in Scotland so I can't speak for everyone but we don't have support assistants in our classes every day. There are a handful shared among the whole school. They are very much needed in class to work with children so can't be used to help prepare photocopying, displays etc. That all needs to be done before or after the children are in class.

None of this is intended as a moan. I am very appreciative of the extra time I get to spend with my family. Also, just to add, we get 8 weeks of paid leave. The rest are considered "school closure days" and are unpaid. Still considerably better than most jobs.

In Scotland you get 8 weeks of paid holidays. The rest are school closure days and are unpaid. However, I have taught for 20 years and I am top of the pay scale and don't earn £50,000 so I'm not sure where that is the average teacher salary.

For those who think that teachers have it easy….Imagine writing 5-6 PowerPoints ready for your ‘meetings’ tomorrow. Tomorrow you teach those PowerPoints for 5-6 hours and at the end of the day you need to prepare the next 5-6 PowerPoints for the next day. And so it goes on. I’m not saying that teaching means PowerPoints as that would be dull and ineffective (in fact, in addition to slides you also have to plan the activities, which are differentiated to accommodate all the different needs).

Yes, you can use last year’s content, but now the spec has changed and you have new students with new needs. Plus, you’re professional so are always trying to improve on last year.

For many, the above is just survival. On top of that are meetings, reports, referrals etc etc.

What do you call an early finish as I'm in school around 8 and leave around 6pm most days to carry on at home and usually work a Saturday too?

@Tippexy by that logic the average teacher works 52.4 hours a week according to the latest workload survey ( that’s teacher not leader they are higher) times by 39 and then divide by 47 ( think most people are entitled to holiday) that means an average of 43.4 hours a week if you don’t count the holidays. So £50,000 is nonsense.

Again for a couple that don’t pay attention, I am making no comparison to other professions, I’m sure people work hard too, maybe harder , I can just explain my own experience and point out that teachers are exhausted and children are not getting a optimum deal.

This is statistically unusual because surveys consistently show primary teachers work more than 50 hours a week and it's simply not possible to do lots of the jobs from home.

No chip whatsoever - I'm just doing the maths because there was a discussion upthread about comparison professions and salaries. So it makes it fairer to compare