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.

A late twopenneth here: the job sharing teachers I have encountered have been brilliant but, as others have said, it works when the teachers work well together and are older. Dd's teachers last year were actually best friends. One or t'other was always there, and often both were, as they loved their job.

There will always be slackers in any profession, and unfortunately in teaching it's very visible and angst inducing because they're dealing with our precious children! It's not just serial maternity offenders, either, it's those with the old bad back problem with handy flare-ups.

I often wonder where are all the older teachers? You see so many young teachers in primary schools. I know it's more expensive to hire old qualified ones, but a woman whose family have grown up a bit has a good 15 years left in her. (Sounds like farm animal.) Can old teachers not get jobs, or do many never return to teaching after having families?

Good grief. I see this discussion has expanded since the OP. I am horrified at the suggestions that maybe teaching is not the place for women to return to work part-time.

Surely (as I said before) it all comes down to the teachers themselves, and the way the school manages it? In fact the OP has already said she believes the problems she has experienced are largely due to bad communication.

I also agree with blueshoes that some parents are very precious about their kids and think their kids can't cope with change. I am not attacking parents of SN children where they know their children respond badly to change. I mean parents of NT children who grumble about the school mixing up the classes or having a cover teacher or someone coming back from maternity leave. In most cases the children take all these changes in their stride.

There are loads of brilliant teachers around, primary and secondary, who also have children, and it would be terrible if they were prevented from managing, caring for, enthusing and inspiring their pupils just because of a misconception that job-sharing does not work.

I also believe (although this is a wider issue still) that making employers acknowledge the need for flexible working does not just benefit women with kids or women planning to have kids. It benefits anyone who would appreciate flexible working.

My dp has recently been able to have far more options at work than he had previously. This is solely because two women returning from maternity leave persuaded his employer that they could do the job part-time. Previously even dp would have argued that it couldn't be done (mostly because of communication between staff and expectations of the clients that whenever they called they should only have to speak to one key person).

fircone my dad and his partner are both ex-teachers with a few years in them yet. But they left teaching a while ago, because they were fed up with the English education system. (It was nothing to do with looking after their own children as we were adults ourselves by the time they left.)

Fircone, the 4 teachers in dd's school range from very young (first job) through to older (wouldn't dare to speculate on age, but grey hair and grandmotherly!). Maybe you find more older teachers in the countryside?

All classes now are bound to have more than 1 teacher, as all teachers have to have 10% of their time not in the classroom. More often that not IME this time is covered by TAs.
I would rather my children had 2 qualified job-sharing teachers than have TAs teaching them.
(nothing against TAs, just think that qualified teachers should be teaching)

agree with policywonk.

I have benefited personally from job-sharing in the past and really appreciated the flexibility it gave me. BUT I think you can't deny that in many cases it can have undesirable consequences. In the OP's case, for children. In my own case, I could tell that some of my managers weren't exactly enamoured with the idea of having part-timers on staff in jobs that traditionally were full-time positions.

The uncomfortable truth is that, even with fantastic, motivated and well-motivated teachers, jobshares are often not ideal.

DS1 had job sharing teachers in his reception year at previous school. They each worked three days so on Weds they were in together what made it harder in our case was one of them coming back from maternity leave half way through so he had 3 teachers in 6mths. The classes all had diaries which were supposed to be checked daily, so any issues would be picked up by whomever was in charge for the day. I really support the idea of flexible working and thought it a great idea but for us it worked out really badly eg. things were left for the other teacher to deal with but then forgotten, ds1 was nervous of the teacher who returned from mat leave so wouldn't read to her, he was being badly bullied but it kept being overlooked etc.

I think it would have been much easier on slightly older children, in Year 2 I don't think it would have bothered ds1 at all.

Fircone, your thought about older teachers - it is much more expense to hire an experienced qualified teacher than an NQT. School budgets are being pushed so hard that Heads don't often have a "choice" but to hire the cheaper staff. And this is also why many women return to teaching time - to keep a job. If you fully leave the profession to have a "baby break" then it can be very hard to return, as not only are you more expensive but you'll need some level of re-training. Hence lots of job shares as teachers keep their fingers in the pie, so to speak.

There are lots of older teachers who want to do job shares -it isn't just young ones with small children. After you have been teaching some years you quite fancy having a life! It seems to be getting more common for those who have taught a long time in a school to go part time. I think it will come more and more. The job has changed such a lot that I think it is too much for one person. There have already been threads on here about DC not being on the right reading book or it being 3 weeks into term and the DC who should have an IEP hasn't got one. This is because there are only so many hours in the day and it isn't physically possible! When you are in the classroom you are 100% teaching. You have 30 new DCs and it takes time. If you have 2 teachers doing a job share they have more time between them to get those things done. The second teacher comes in fresh and enthusiastic half way through the week when most of the staff are getting tired. I think they can be very positive-as long as they gel as a team, have the same style and very good communications.

Piscesmoon makes a good point.

There are a couple of excellent part time older teachers in my childrens school. If they were only given the option of full time they would just retire. I'm glad they are still there imparting their wisdom to my DCS.

The other jobshares involve the most senior teachers in the school who are allocated a day or more to fulfill their management role. Other teachers come in to do job shares with them working 1 or 2 days a week. I trust that these senior teachers will pick a good person for their job share as it would make their life harder if they didn't.

I just thought I'd add that my DS's job share teachers split the day, not the week. One did every morning and the other did every afternoon. I think that was very positive as they had a lot more energy.

Had part time teaching been more common when I was younger, I might have felt differently and considered it as a career.

I am about to go on maternity leave (for the second time), but have job shared for the past two years. I have always worked hard in my job, but I definitely have to work harder as a part timer and job sharer. I do think that it's true that you need to get on very well with your j-s partner and have similar teaching styles. Between us, we have 24 years of teaching experience and to my mind that's not to be sniffed at.
I understand that some parents may well be concerned when faced with lack of consistency and poor communication, I am after all a parent myself, but I'm afraid that this is where my feelings will begin to divide from those of the OP and other posters on this thread.
I have read with frank disbelief the views of some posters who think that just because I choose to have children of my own, I should give up a job that I love, retrain and follow another career path. It is offensive to me to assume that I am somehow 'playing the system' because I choose to take my entitlement of maternity leave and then return to work when I choose. What other profession would this occur in? Perhaps these posters would prefer only men to be employed to educate their offspring, although presumably they would also insist that these were men in the absolute prime of life and in the peak of physical fitness in order to ensure that they did not go off sick at any point and that their child may suffer the indignity of a supply teacher.
This thread, to me, smacks of sexism pure and simple. I used to have a postcard pinned to my door at university saying 'I'll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy'. I haven't thought about that postcard in years, but would seriously consider going up to my loft to dig it out again in the light of this thread if only I wasn't 37 weeks pregnant!
P.S. I'm still job sharing too-how selfish can you get????

I agree 100% daisy.

Children are often taught by someone else when a teacher has his/her PPA. Also NQTs only have 80% time table. Your child is never going to be taught by the same teacher full timetable whatever the child's age is.

Sometimes people forget teachers are human. For example I know a parent who was grumbling because the teacher had the audasticity to get pregnant and then take sick leave for the pregnancy from hell. The poor lady was expecting twins and had about every complication going.

Maybe you should send your children to a convent school where all the teachers are nuns and wont get pregnant.

Quite, I vividly remember having a parent's eve and a parent noticed my increasing tum (about 16 weeks preg). She asked if I was preg and when I said yes she actually said "Oh no, what bad timing!"
As I stood open mouthed at her sheer bloody cheek, she tried to recover herself by going on about disruption to her darling child. She, by the way, was a social worker who had taken 3 sets of maternity leave from her job and presumably had returned to her clients whenever it suited her. I had taught her son's class for the previous two years because they were such little buggers no-one else would have them. And I taught up until the last minute to cause the minimum disruption. Given the feelings expressed on this forum, I am now wondering why I bloody bothered.
It beggars belief.

Thanks Team Edward, but be careful I might go into early labour at school on Wed and imagine how disruptive that would be for the porr little mites!

Sorry, porr=poor. Thought I'd better correct it before a thread is started about poor spelling in primary schools too.

Hello daisy. I totally agree with what you said.

I am not a teacher, but a parent who is fortunate enough to work pt. As you said, a jobshare can work very well, and it might not work so well.

I feel that in my job, where I work pt and work with people who work pt, we have to take the attitude that the arrangement can work and even work very well, with some adjustment on our part.

Naturally sometimes it can break down, as can any working arrangement. But we owe it to our daughters to keep an open mind and not look for issues until they actually become obvious. Children are incredibly robust, more so than we as parents sometimes give them credit for.

Being sniffy about teaching jobshares or teachers who go on maternity leave is terribly unhelpful to the change in mindset people need to develop if our daughters are going to have the acceptance and flexibility in the workplace that we are agitating for.

All the best for the birth BTW.

My ds had job sharing teachers for a while. Actually given that one of them was the deputy head it was fairly essential that there as someone else who positively wanted to teach for 2 days a week, as otherwise I'm not quite sure how the school would have managed it. They were quite different sorts of teachers, and ds clearly enjoyed Thur/Fri more than Mon-Wed, as the deputy was much stricter (as deputies often are). They ran all the parents evenings etc together, so I suspect they either worked harder than they should, or cost a little more than a single teacher (or both). Oh and he had one year with a single year group, and one year with a mixed group. The mixed one seemed to work better IMO.

You know, there have hardly been any posts on here that criticise teachers for having children, or returning to work part-time. In fact I think there's been a grand total of one. The vast majority of posts are from people saying that jobshares have worked well for their children, or from outraged primary teachers

A few of the posts have been from people saying that jobsharing doesn't seem to be working well for their children. People are allowed to express this opinion, aren't they? And to mull over the whole structural issue of flexible working and jobsharing, given that primary schools seem to be at the bleeding edge of this development?

I think some of you are being just a little over-sensitive here. You're reading 'the jobshare didn't work well for my DC' and you're hearing 'the BITCH went off and had KIDS, it's FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS'. (I know a bit about being over-sensitive on MN, as those of you who've seen me on SAHM threads will know.)

I think job share can work perfectly well but obviously works best when the two teachers plan to work, or have owrked, together for quite a while.

Sickenss and a high turnover of teachers is quite another issue.

One good point of a job share is that if one of the pair is ill the other can often cover and they can sort out the hours between them afterwards. This is much better than having a teacher covering who doesn't know them.