Are the staff in your school really stressed?

[christinarossetti]

A question for both teachers and parents/carers.

I've had a number of conversations today with parents and teachers from different schools and realised that there's been a reoccurring theme of teachers saying how stressed they are and parents saying how stressed the teachers seem to be.

Ofsted will be in our school next half-term, so obviously people very stressed.

Is this normal in education at the moment, or is it just the people I know?

Arisbottle - do you think there is actually a lack of understanding in secondary schools of what is required of primary school teachers by the government and OFSTED? Do secondary teachers have to photograph evidence of everything they are teaching their children and get assessed by the quality of their displays of children's work? I have certainly noticed a hugely increasing trend in my children's lives of having photos taken of their work and of them working and of me coming in to enjoy working with them... I was hoping this would not continue in to secondary school, as I think taking photos rather than interacting with the children is kind of annoying. I am getting bored with all the photos and "evidence." Might as well just bite the bullet and film everything all the time, and have live streaming to the DfE of what is going on in every classroom in the UK every second of the day...

I considered going into primary teaching and every post by a primary teacher makes me breathe a sigh of relief that I did not.

There is no where near as much micro managing in secondary schools IME . I am just left to get on with my teaching and trusted that I am doing a good job.

Arisbottle, in the last school I was in, I and all the teachers had weekly observations. It was a great school, and the HT was brilliant but needless to say being observed weekly was stressful.

I am observed by at least once person a week,but not as a part of performance management. In addition to that our student teacher is in my lessons observing most days. Never stresses me in the slightest,if it was done in a judge mental way I guess it would.

As a supply teacher you have people in your lessons all the time- you never know who you will have, TAs , parents, the Head- I even had the local MP once! It didn't bother me- not even when it turned out to be an Open Morning. It is very different from a lesson observation- they are stressful.

Belledamesansmerci - the point is, I don't think you SHOULD have to be spending every evening doing this sort of thing!

The average working day is 9-5. If a teacher's day was 8-4, that would still give them 5 hours a week where there was time to do marking etc.

It should be at a level that us manageable in 5hrs a week, 1 hr a day, IMO!

Get someone else to do the admin. (I know that's never going to happen, but it SHOULD).

Leave the teachers to actually TEACH!

I had a lovely afternoon with my Reception Class on Friday - they were playing outside and I had set a challenge of building a structure with a new bit of kit they hadn't tried before. They needed a bit of help to construct it not just use it as swords and beat the crap out if each other so I just sat on the mat with them and we did it together. I left my clipboard and camera inside deliberately. I found out lots of things about the way they approached problems and worked together, but all that information is now just in my head and I know from experience that it's 'evidence' that matters in this game. So we'll carry on photocopying whiteboards and frantically writing down every word the children say and taking/uploading/printing/sticking and annotating photos until someone sees sense.

Merry, it takes me at least an hour after school on each working day to put up/change my classroom displays so that they are current, there is a staff meeting of 1 1/2 to 2 hours on one day, then there are the books to mark, the photos to print out and file in my Subject Leaders' folders, the planning to annotate and file for each day and the planning for the week's CW to complete and email to the other staff, the children's respnse to this week's CW to print out and file and, yes, even the photos of whiteboards to print out and file.

Very little of the above seems to be connected with actual learning!

I feel lucky that I have been able to stop full time teaching. I hated the fact that I spent so much of my time working (every weekend, every night) instead of interacting with my own children. When I wasn't working I was thinking about working.

I think the SMT really make the difference between a manageable situation and an unmanageable one. My last post had a HT who only ever mentioned negative things. I bust a bloody gut for that man the last term I was there, worked throughout horrific morning sickness and a miscarriage, covered for ill staff, did everything he asked of me cheerfully. The only comment he made about my work was that I sat down too much when I taught. I was SO glad to leave that place.

I now do a bit of supply in one school. This school got an Outstanding OFSTED a few years ago. It is a happy place to work. It is bliss not to be continually anxious about stuff not done.

Want to teach in Ireland! Have been away from this for a day and reading thru' has made me reflect on what it is that is actually stressful, rather than simply overloading (although, of course, that in itself is stressful.)

For me there are two big sources of stress. The first, sadly, is 'leadership', which IME seeks compliance rather than commitment. We are told what to do, with no reasons given. Often one directive contradicts another. Working practices are changed with no consultation as to whether it will make life easier or more difficult. You dread being offered 'support', because it boils down to even more monitoring - scruitiny of plans which have to be handed in at such short notice that they can only be written overnight, more frequent observations and book scrutinies. (I have not had to go thru' this myself, but just watching it happen to others is horrible.) The fact that you are a graduate professional is ignored - primary schools seem to be horribly hierarchical and your view counts for nothing.

The second is that assessment of your performance is almost entirely subjective. You can watch a lesson and judge it outstanding if that is what you are expecting/want to see; the same lesson viewed by an observer who thinks the teacher is a bit crap could be judged RI. And although observation is not the whole picture as far as performance management is concerned, it will colour the way everything is seen. With PM being linked more closely to pay, it is just going to get worse, with SLT's having even more power to (mis)use.

Belle, I'm not saying that you DON'T currently have all this to do (I have friends that teach), I'm saying that a lot of it is just not necessary.

Is taking photos of whiteboards totally necessary to teach Johnny how to multiply? Is making sure displays are current going to help Annie write using correct Grammar and full stops?

And if I remember rightly, it never used to be the TEACHER'S job to do the displays - it was always the Classroom Assistant's job to do.

The loss of Classroom Assistants has made a fairly stressful job an intolerably stressful job.

It's the lack of support staff that is causing this. Which pisses me off. We wouldn't lose the Country's best teachers to stress if they still had classroom assistants to do the 'admin' type jobs.

Please excuse the capital 'G' in grammar there - I post about DS1 possibly heading to Grammar school, so now Autocorrect assumes that the word 'grammar' should always have a capital. I think Autocorrect needs to go back to school!

I do wonder if this is a primary/ secondary thing.

I am a member of the leadership team so I have additional duties, but in terms of being a teacher I do the following. I plan, I teach and I assess. I do not do paperwork ( unless you are including reports ), I don't tidy my room, my displays are changed in the school holidays unless the class are putting up something they have done.

I would not work in an environment that expected me to spend an hour every day photocopying, filling in forms and changing displays.

I do think there is a definite primary /secondary divide.

It is becoming increasingly normal for primary heads to dictate how teachers plan (one school I know of asks for 5 sides of A4 per lesson with 5 way differentiation ) then there is APP for every pupil for every subject plus observations/evidence /files/folders etc etc

The silly thing is that when I started teaching you didn't have a TA and you had to put up displays yourself, but it wasn't stressful - you just got on with it.
I hate to do without a TA these days and my first question on supply was always - have I got help in the classroom?

I don't have a TA and I still put up displays myself

A draw back if the 'old' days of teaching was that it was possible to be very lazy and possible to miss out lots of things and repeat things they had done before. But most teachers were hard working, conscientious, very professional and good teachers. Unfortunately in trying to get good practice from all 'the baby got thrown out with the bath water' and everyone is made to conform- sometimes a brilliant teacher can be very different- but they are not allowed to be.

We used to have to try and match INCERTS which we assessed to with the Skills Ladder that we planned to. They did not correspond. No one on SMT seemed to care

We also certainly had a great deal of planning evidence to produce, although not quite as bad as 5 side of A4 per lesson

Of not if.

Actually I love displaying the children's work- it isn't something I would want to delegate.

Hmmm.... one of the comments from our recent Ofsted inspection was that we should be continuously differentiating within our differentiated lessons, constantly responding and adapting to each child's learning. So 5 sides of A4 sounds about right......

We have schemes of work which are produced as a department, each lesson will be a few bullet points.

I then write a few lines in my planner.

That is the extent of my planning documentation and we have made clear to staff that no more is expected when OFSTED come in.

I quite like doing displays. I do mine over the holidays or I pay my own children to help me do them one evening after school. I do not have to do them though.

ofsted didn't look at my plans or workbooks
am constantly micro-managed about trivial issues but left bewildered about the bigger issues eg HT gave old TT to inspector and so was expecting a completely different lesson which I had to pull out of the hat

The best teachers my DC's have had have either been the NQT's or those in their last year or two before retirement.

The ones that have been doing it for 5-15 years are the ones who look permanently stressed, tired, and worn out.

I don't know what the answer is, I just know what I want from a teacher, as a parent.

I don't care about Ofsted - out of the 4 Primaries my DC have attended, the best one for my DC's was the one that was never rated higher than 'satisfactory', as it was a school on an army estate with an exceedingly high turnover of pupils - by the end of Y6, you were lucky if one of your original 15-20 pupils from YR were left in the class!

The 'Outstanding' school my DC's currently attend is anything BUT.

They struggle to differentiate effectively for my DS1, who is working on lvl 7/8 in Maths, and lvl 6 in English, and they found it impossible to differentiate at ALL for my DD that was still on p-scales in Y6.

What matters to me, as a parent, when looking for a school is : How do they differentiate for 'high flyers', and how do they differentiate for DC's with SN's? Can they manage my DC's medical issues effectively? What do they do in the event of bullying?

Anything else is irrelevant, really. If my DC's all left Y6 able to read, write, and have FUNCTIONAL maths skills, I don't care about the displays, I don't want teachers doing paperwork instead of teaching my DC's, I don't want job shares because it is too stressful for my DC's.

That's all I want from a teacher, but Ofsted rules and sodding paperwork make that impossible.

I remember at school helping the Classroom assistant pull the staples out of the wall so that she could put up a new display. We used to clamour to be given that job!