Teaching year 1, no partner teacher and no previous planning, planning everything from scratch. Furious, tired and stressed. It’s only the first week back.

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Started a year 1 teacher role at a new school. The school has no previous planning from the year before. They follow white rose but English is a new scheme so PowerPoints are made from scratch.
History, geography and science from scratch. Re and PHSE is jigsaw but needs reading through long plans. Their phonics scheme is new to me let alone the sounds they learn in year 1. I come from EYFS. I found myself working every night planning and all weekend. To create 6 week plans from scratch looking at medium term plans, to then make PowerPoint lessons, learning objective files, worksheets. I feel stressed. The previous year- they had too many teachers and they said the supply didn’t plan well and didn’t put planning up. They are waiting for ofsted and are requies improvement. I cannot go further back as all their schemes changed. Anyone ever did this? One form school.

The thing is, kids hate PowerPoints and much prefer chalk and talk, spontaneity and flexibility.

All us oldies talk about the teachers we remember at school, the fun, creative lessons and the teachers who loved their subjects and could hold a class rapt because of this.

Never heard anyone say, “I remember this really great PowerPoint…”

OP, this is what teaching is. You’ll get the schemes finished and then someone from Up High will decide we’re not doing things Like That any more, we’re doing them Like This, and they’ll all have to be done again.

Which is why I’m a tutor in AP now.

I’ve just seen you’re doing CLPE for English. You really don’t need PowerPoints for this - especially for Year 1. If the school have told you to do this then they’ve completely misinterpreted the scheme.

I’ve done the Power of Reading training and a lot of the teachers just taught the lessons with the plan and the book - no PowerPoint at all. Yes, the plans take a bit of time to read through but really don’t faff around making a PowerPoint.

To speed things up, copy and paste one of the lesson plans into ChatGtp with the prompt ‘please give me an outline of this in bullet points, chunked into activities with timings for a Year 1 UK literacy lessons’. Use that as a simplified plan. Good luck!

I joined a school as an NQT in January. The previous teacher took ALL the planning with her, short term, medium term, the lot! All I had were a few titles from scraps of paper hanging around! And I had a R/1/2 class. I had no idea what had been taught and what hadn’t. I had to ask the lovely class TAs which phonics sounds had been covered. I nearly walked out on my first day!
Take a breath, find what you can, look online for as much as possible, don’t use PowerPoints unless you absolutely have to or adapt existing commercial ones to suit your class. It will be a nightmare for your first half term, no doubt about it, but you will survive!

Oak National Academy resources are fantastic. Curriculum based, designed by teachers, funded by the government. And free!

I couldn't understand why there weren't proper textbooks when Covid happened and we (as parents) were emailed a million crappy White Rose worksheets.

Apparently it's the cost.

Amazing that scrabbling around among Twinkl, Teach Mate AI etc and writing your own bespoke textbook every year is better. I guess it is, but this is Year 1 - they're still little and having masses of PowerPoints every day because of Ofsted sounds completely OTT.

I should have used the word thread! I am so shocked that a single teacher has to do so much planning and that has to be repeated countrywide.

Exactly why I'm not longer a teacher!

Get Claude or GPT to help you, it’s excellent in these use cases, no need to suffer

This is what individual teachers are having to do on their own for hours and hours a week up and down the country. Then they leave because the job is so awful (not just the planning!).

Yet nobody looks at the reason for retention and just tries to throw more money at different routes into teaching and on making 'get into teaching : excellent teachers can earn £60k' adverts...

For those responding who aren't teachers.

The National Curriculum sets out the objectives children should meet by the end of each KS.

Individual schools have autonomy on how they choose to teach these, pedagogical approaches and planning expectations.

Even 'centralised' planning is inadequate because you are supposed to teach responsively and plan for the needs of your class which might be very different to the needs of the class you taught last year so all plans have to be adapted anyway, even Twinkl resources, and doing this properly takes as long as planning lessons from scratch. And, counter intuitively, can take longer.

It might be a parental view that they are only little and schools should focus on the basics but that is not the view of the government, SLT or the governing body

And PowerPoints are often used as a monitoring tool.

Are you a teacher? Because the opinion of most teachers/schools is that it was inadequate.

This is teaching! I’ve done it for 30 years.

Right???

With the right prompts AI can help you do so much of the PowerPoints and also quickly summarise topics or phonics approaches for you.

Sure but surely a central template would help and then it can be adapted to the individual class? This teacher is having to do all of the work before she even knows the class. Which if there was a template, she would save time and then adapt as she goes and knows them.

It sounds like madness that this stuff isn't central and provided to all schools who can then put their own spin on things.
Being at a new school and expecting you to reinvent the wheel is so stressful I can see why any teacher who leaves take all the nights and weekend planning with them and not hand it over, they're unappreciated by the higher ups, why should they do all the work for no reward.
They wonder why they are losing teachers.

You’d think, wouldn’t you?

As a newly appointed HoD with two part time staff (one unqualified in the subject) I wrote every lesson plan for a whole year covering all five years across the school. At least the department ran smoothly and I knew what was being taught. Not saying it was right, just had to be done.

Not a teacher but can you feed in some documents and let AI do some planning for you?

Not necessarily. Because plans have to be adapted so you can spend as much time taking stuff out and adding it in (to account for prior learning and the needs of your class) that stuff you could use is irrelevant because it relies on you using the planning in its entiriry with no changes. It can take as long going through and rewording/adapting it as it would to just have the idea in your head and go from that.

Not only that but our school has decided that no prior planning can be used now because too many teacher were doing exactly that - adapting existing planning and it wasn't considered 'responsive' enough.

We can no longer plan a sequence of lessons for a topic to cover a half term. Now all lessons for all subjects must be planned weekly from scratch. It makes it difficult to plan a sequence of lessons when you're planning them one at a time a week apart. Makes it difficult for your partner teacher to adapt for their class because they can't see where the learning is going.

We've been told that our SLT will be monitoring our shared folders.

That's teaching for you. I never had it that bad but have often had to plan whole schemes of work etc. People don't realise what teachers are expected to cover or how detailed lesson plans are. Then there's all the admin and getting the resources and keeping on top of the technology stuff and the marking and the meetings... I'm so glad I got out over 10 years ago. I can only say just do what you can and try not to stress. Also, carve out some time for yourself even if it seems impossible. It really does help.

Yes - it's shocking and ridiculous.

I would leave and take my chances with day to day supply in your shoes. I worked in an RI school for 2 terms and it was hell on earth. Waiting for OFSTED to return, thinking about OFSTED constantly, SLT talking about OFSTED constantly. I was on a maternity leave contract but if I’d been supply I would have walked…

Chat GPT for planning?

Chatgpt can give a starting point for ideas. But I've not used it yet and have it give me a lesson I could use.

It's literally the basic ideas part of the lesson or the structure and that's generally the quickest and easiest part of the planning process because lesson structure is something that the school will already have agreed upon.