I'm beginning to think that job sharing for teachers doesn't work very well in primary school

[flashharriet]

I have 3 children and each of them have had years with job sharing teachers and years with just one class teacher. Having read many education threads on MN over the years, I know how hard it is for teachers with young children to juggle the needs of their own children with the needs of the children they teach and so a lot will opt for part time. But having just looked back at my children's time in primary school to date, I've realised that without exception, their "duffest" years have been those years when they've been taught by job sharers.

I'm now wondering whether part-timers would be better suited to secondary schools where pupils are used to moving around and having a number of different teachers anyway; certainly I had two different teachers each year for English, for example, and it didn't present any problems AFAI can remember. Communication is much harder with job-sharing teachers and IME consistency between job sharers seems to be an issue too.

I'd love it if we could have a good discussion about this and have therefore deliberately not posted in AIBU! But I'd be interested whether others have found this too (posting this thread was prompted by reading Greeny's current thread about trying to deal with two job-sharing teachers) or whether we've just been very unlucky.

i don't think you can move from primary to secondary teaching - secondary teachers need a degree in their subject. a primary teaching degree would not get you a job teaching a subject in secondary...

however, you could say no job-sharers teaching reception...

i wonder how hand-overs are managed? when i worked in a team with more part-timers than full-time we had a rule that everybody had to work wednesday mornings for a team meeting....

I think there is a bit of confusion about teaching here - you can't just switch key stages! I'm one of those awful primary school teachers who has had children - bad me - and I can't go and work in a secondary school just cos it's easier to work p/t there. I am a trained primary teacher - wouldn't have a clue about secondary education, don't want to work with teenagers, and wouldn't be offered a job anyway.

I agree it can be a problem, but forget about secondary as an option cos it isn't.

lol, x-posted with fluffles!

OK scrub that idea then

Ye i always equate it to being a doctor and dentist

am not a teacher so this could be a daft idea but i wonder if kids could always have the same teacher for literacy and same teacher for maths... though i don't think that would work in english schools where they have to do a bit of literacy and numeracy every day...

oh shite - dd has a job share scenario. we already have a favourite!

Six teachers does seem alot for a small child, they can't possibly, no matter how good they are get to know all these children very well.

dd1 (year 2) has a class teacher, one for science (her Friday teacher from reception) and one for music (who she has had since nursery).

The job share year (year 1) their 2 teachers, one for French and one for music. The TA is the same all week. They already know the French and music teachers from reception.

fluffles, no it wouldn't work as literacy and numeracy is taught daily.

ballad, not all job shares are disastrous - they just need a little more work than having one teacher.

It's very hard to know how to manage it as a Head - lots of years in primary are 'crucial': YR cos it's the first one, Y2 cos of SATS and transition to KS2, Y3, first year of KS2, Y6 for obvious reasons. So job shares could only be in Y1, 4, and 5. It just wouldn't work!

The more I think about this, the more I realise that good communication is vital and it's the lack of it in our school that causes a lot of the problems. I also find it really dispiriting to be constantly told that I'm speaking to the wrong person and I need to go and see someone else. If I want a 2 minute chat just to find out how each of my children are settling in, I've got to speak to 3 teachers for dd2, 4 for dd1 and 6 for ds!

Those numbers are for lit, num and class btw.

God, I can't even think about the TAs, they each have LOADS!

Thanks for everyone's thoughts btw - would be interesting to get some more teachers' perspectives on this as well.

I don't think it works very well at all.

Dd had 2 excellent teachers in infant school, I was very happy with her there. However it all went wrong in Junior school:

Yr 3 - teachers were doing a job exchange - 1 UK teacher swapped for an Australian one. The Aus teacher was there for the 1st term, then she went back to Aus and the UK teacher came back for the spring and summers terms. It was very disjointed and unsettling for the first year in a (large) junior school. Why the teachers couldn't have done a straight academic year swap is beyond me.

Yr 4 - a different teacher each term. The orginal class teacher was on maternity (she came back in summer term), the inital temp teacher left to go travelling at Christmas.

Yr 5 - Teacher was deputy head, she had to have 2 non-teaching days per week, so had a rag bag of temps for those days.

Plus literacy and numeracy were streamed, so more often then not they would have 2 different teachers for these lessons as well!

It was so unsettling for the kids, and it really annoyed me. Thankfully moved away so changed schools. Didn't encounter any problems with the new school, and theystayed with the class teacher for literacy and numeracy as well, which I think is better.

cat64, that's a really interesting post. I have to say, when my first child had a jobshare, I thought it was probably a good thing for all the reasons you mention (and the same when they introduced streaming for lit and num). I'm thinking more and more that this is all down to poor management - there seems to be too much emphasis on what suits the staff and not enough on what the children need. Couple this with poor communication and you have a recipe for disaster.

sorry, meant to say down to poor management in our school.

I'm also thinking that this is an issue that isn't going to disappear, so it's really good to hear of experiences where it's been positive and very useful to hear the details of why people think that it's worked/not worked.

Try having a jobshare and a split class together! DS is in a mixed Yr3/4 class with a job share on a 3 days/2 days basis and I'm not hugely happy with it. I think I can cope with one or the other scenario but not both together especially as DS came home a few days ago to tell me happily that they are set for numeracy and all of Yr 4 go out together. Hurrah, I thought, until he told me that they were doing numeracy with the TA! As DS's grasp of maths concepts could best be described as "tenuous" I shall be keeping a close eye!

Well exactly annh, we have that scenario and it's not great.

Interesting. DD1 is in her third year with job-sharing teachers and it's all been great so far. In each case, it has been a good partnership and each teacher has brought slightly different attributes, but in a way that complements, rather than confuses.

Maybe the school is good at giving them time for handover. Or maybe they have all just been very experienced teachers. In one case, I know they've been working in partnerhip for years, which probably helps. But in the others, they've been new partnerships and it's still worked.

The children seemed entirely unfazed, even when each teacher had a slightly different way of working.

My DS was taught by 2 teachers job sharing in year 6. It was a joint year 5 and 6 class. It was fine. One (returning from maternity) taught Maths and English in the morning. The other taught Science in the afternoon.

I would rather have the excellent teacher return to the school after maternity leave (she had taught my son before and was great), than not return because full time was made the only option. We would lose a lot of great teachers from the profession if we had no job shares.

I think it sets a good example to children to see that having a family and a career can be combined.

I can see there are problems if it is an early years class though.

I think YABU.

Should primary school teachers not be allowed to work part time?

Where schools allow a good amount of handover time and where you have good communication in place, then job share can work extremely well.

By junior age especially most children must be able to cope with having different teachers surely?

My DD has just gone into Y3 and has different teachers for different subjects and it works perfectly well. Job share wuld definitely work there. Whilst in infants she had specialist teachers for PE, music, French, ballet, drama and sometimes Art too. I can't think of any child in her class who struggled with moving classes and teachers even at 5.6yo.

I've changed my thoughts as this thread has progressed tbh - I think the issues I have are with the woeful communication in our school and the fact that everything seems to be geared around what suits the teachers rather than the other way round.

Hulababy having different specialist teahers for specific subjects is rather different IMO - most schools have those and the children cope fine, of course

however in a school where the system is built around each class having a "class teacher" who deals with the central issues around each child and is the main point of contact for parents etc - job-sharing can be and often is not a success

I think the problems we are having with ds1's class at the moment would be much easier to sort out if there were one teacher who actually knew him and knew what his SN were etc, rather than two teachers who appear to be completely confused and know nothing at all.