Can my son's school shorten the lenght of school day with only 8 weeks notice?

[notagrannyyet]

We have just found out that our son's secondary school will be closing early at 2pm. every Friday afternoon as of the start of the autumn term. Can a school do this at such short notice? The school is in a neighboring village and children travel there in fleets of buses. Mon to Thurs buses will drop the children off at 3.40 as is the case now, but on Friday they will arrive home at 2.30. Many children will come home to an empty house because so many parents work and not all can change their working hours. Next term I will have 2 children at this school 1ds age13 and another who will have just had his 11th birthday. Even though they get on well (most of the time!) I am still worried and more than a little annoyed that the school can just change the school finishing time with so little consideration/consultation with parents.

nothercules

unless teachers are 'supply' ie paid by the hour,they are paid during the holidays!

Why does teachers' pay periods come into this?

not sure really !....Probably because nothercules messaged ..... Please remeber we dont get paid for those 6 weeks holiday.....

I hope I'm not upsetting you scienceteacher! Don't be so sensitive. I'm not anti teacher and some of the best teachers I've ever met are science teachers! It's P.E Teachers I've always had problems with,....

Seriously, I have every respect for the work all teachers do.I just think that in this particular case my son's school has not handled the situation at all well. In fact I think the head & senior staff have not been up front with parents and that is in my opinion very unprofessional. Therefore they are letting all teachers down.

That's my opinion you don't have to agree.

I'm not being sensitive - I am just bemused that you can be so petulant about getting 4 months' notice for a change. Especially one that amounts to an extra hour of parental responsibility for a secondary aged child.

It's up to the governors to decide on how the school day works, and there are parent governors on every governing body. It's not a case of asking parents for their permission, so it's a bonus that they had an open meeting for you.

I think having this non-contact afternoon is very good for the school, as it should make it run more effectively. At my school, the pupils finish their academic lessons at lunchtime on Wednesdays, and we use the time for meetings, training, and generally catching up on paperwork.

.I'm probably more sad than angry. I think it's a shame that at 2pm on a Friday afternoon in term time school children are not in school learning, and teachers are not there teaching them.

It's not even the extra hour or so the lads will be on there own.They are both more than able to cope on their own.

I have already spoken to a parent governor.She also shares my concerns.

As for non-contact time. Don't teachers still get free periods? There are also what used to be called 'baker days', I know this term is no longer used. I can't think what they are called now. Teachers do have days in school when pupils are not there for planning etc.

Some schools in this area have no lessons on Wednesday afternoon .Most teachers as you say use this time for marking etc.The children are not packed off home though.They do games & PE.

Teachers do get free periods, but these are often used for cover - there are no guarantees that you will get your free, even if it is PPE time.

The good thing about having an afternoon completely free of lessons is that you can get together as a department or year team. In my school, none of us have our own classrooms, so if we want to work in a room (say to do display work or practice an experiment), our Wednesday afternoons are the only time we can realistically plan to do this. A couple of 'Baker Days' at the beginning of the school year is not really suitable for this kind of work, and tends to be used for whole school issues.

When my school switched to the current arrangement, they clawed back the time on the other four days, so that the children did not lose any teaching time.

I bet the kids are thrilled though at the thought of getting home at 2pm on a Friday!!!! I know I would have been when I was at school :)

It must be great for the staff to not have to teach that last lesson on a Friday - never a good one, especially if you are landed with a difficult class.

If I had flexible working arrangements, I would love to have my kids home early on one day - it would give us a chance to do things that would otherwise have to be crammed into a Saturday. One of my kids finishes at 4pm on Wednesdays instead of 5.30pm on the other days, so that is when I fit in shopping trips with him.

I think the issue here is possibly a lack of suitable childcare provided by the government, rather than teachers having an extra hour a week for planning. Afterall, school is a provision of education (not free childcare), and childcare really is a separate issue. So, maybe you, and other parents in the same situation, could contact your local government regarding the provsion of better after school childcare

There is money around, Scnapps. Our school gets money from a group called Leading Edge, and that funds the programme for Wednesday afternoons. In our school, it's for KS3 only, with KS4 going home.

Boys are thrilled about early finish on Fridays!
Mum is hoping homework will be completed early for a change so that we can have stress free Sundays.....

At school in question teachers no longer have to cover for absent colleagues.Also they rarely use supply teachers now.Thats probably a good thing.Is this the norm in schools now.If it is surely they don't have spare teachers sitting around they must use TAs.

I made the point about not being paid during holidays because of your comment about having allthose weeks off. Teachers are not paid for the holidays. Term time pay is simply divided between 12 months. Baker days were also taken off teachers holidays too.

I do lots of cover still for other staff being off. Time spent on preparing, marking, report writing, planning etc is done in my evenings, weekends and holidays.

I don't really think of not being paid, Nothercules. But it makes no difference to pay whether you work in the holidays or not. I don't, although I have brought home some coursework, just in case - haven't touched it yet. I will do my preparation for September towards the end of this term.

Teaching is so intense, unlike other jobs, and it is important to unwind during the holidays.

No, I dont either. It just grates a bit when someone makes comments about us having all that paid holiday when actually we don't.

A lot of schools are using 'cover supervisors' as a money saving way of doing cover work. What I've seen of this set-up has not been good. I think the concept of having a cover department is good, but imo it only works well when staffed with qualified teachers (who don't tell the kids how much they hate science).

I used to be a regular substitute for a school that had a substitute dept - two qualified teachers who covered individual lessons, who called in supply teachers for cover full day absences. Regular teachers did have a sub slot on their timetable, but these would only be taken occasionally for non-full day absences.

I don't let it get to me, Nothercules.

Do teachers get a P45 at the end of each term ?
If not employment is continuous ie. you have paid holidays.....Just many more than other mere mortals.

bye folks

No, we dont. We get paid for a set number of hours a year. This is during term time.

So are teachers paid pro-rata? I know my mil (lollypop lady for a while) was paid every week of the year but it was really payment for the year minus school hols divided by 52 (or something like that).

Teachers are paid every month of the year - the annual salary divided by 12.

If the teacher is on a one year contract, they still get the same amount of money, even if they are out of a job in July.

A supply teacher should get a daily rate of the annual salary divided by 190. Supply rates seem high, but it is because the holiday element is already built in.

Teachers may get 13 weeks plus one public holiday off; other professions get 5-6 weeks plus 8 public holidays. My DH gets 36 days off per year, so 6 weeks less than me. It is not unusual for a teacher to work for a substantial part of each holiday, especially primary teachers, so the gap closes. And considering the salary that teachers get compared to what they could get with their qualifications, I don't think holidays should be begrudged.

I should parp, but ...

I've just spent a year doing a job with "normal" holidays after having been a teacher the rest of my career, and I discovered this incredible thing - with only 39 days holiday a year (that's the 30 year allocation I had plus the bank holidays) you would never even think of taking leave and then doing work during that time. Any day leave you had you would completely forget the office. As someone who has spent their entire career to this point as a teacher I found this incredibly liberating - never before had I had any period of leave in which I didn't have a massive pile of work to get through.

I also worked out once (when someone was winding me up about the amount of holiday) that because as a teacher I never took a lunch break of more than 10 minutes, and certainly never went off site that if I added up all the lunch hours I was owed and took them all together that would more than cover the entire holidays!