Damian Hinds promises to cut teacher workload and hours to improve teacher recruitment and retention

[noblegiraffe]

He is going to make a speech today pledging to 'strip away” pointless tasks to allow teachers to “focus on what actually matters'

You might be reminded of the 21 admin tasks that it was agreed that we shouldn't do under the workload agreement (that were removed from the pay and conditions document and replaced with a vague statement saying we shouldn't do clerical work).

But this time the focus seems to be on measures that school put in place for accountability purposes, and excessive marking "Because that’s what endless data cuts, triple-marking, 10-page lesson plans, and, worst of all, mocksteds are: a distraction from the core purpose of education. And a costly distraction at that"

The government will pledge not to make any changes to the curriculum other than those already announced (times tables tests) in the rest of this parliament (so 2022) - but we've heard that before and then they have made necessary changes.

And he has promised to work with the teaching unions and professional bodies specifically on recruitment and retention.

I guess the shit is finally hitting the fan at the DfE and they can't stick their heads in the sand any more?

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/damian-hinds-pledges-action-strip-away-teacher-workload

Yes, noble. There is a huge issue around autonomy versus a neo-liberal system that wants to systematise everything and make everything comparable in easy ways. And, of course, that is being driven, in part, by the retention crisis. You can see that some schools might want to make the role of 'teacher' extremely explicit, extremely non-autonomous, so that anyone (NQT or teacher with many years experience) can be slotted into the role, perform a set of explicitly demarcated functions, and produce clearly predictable results.

This has benefits - not least the one that it doesn't matter if the machine teacher occupying the role changes every year, or even every 6 months.

I'm sure one or two of us have been in schools like that.

My feeling is that, ultimately, it's not a great way to work. Your idea of autonomy, flexibility, individual teachers taking decisions about cost-benefit (with a widened notion of cost) is pretty much in direct opposition to this other model (which I've called 'neo-liberal' just to be provocative, really. ) I suspect it's more gratifying for an individual teacher to work in your system. Though, perhaps, it might bring it's own stresses (you have to believe in your own judgements - and that can be stressful).

Interesting times.

By the way, I completely agree with lowdoorinthewall and FallenMadonna about the link between funding and exclusion. And I think you actually made that point/had that insight earlier, BoneyBack, even if it was only implicitly.

I'm aware of students not going to alternative behaviour provision that they really need because there's a waiting list. I'm aware of students who need to go to a special school who have been rejected due to lack of places. I'm aware of students who desperately need to be seen by CAMHS who are going to be waiting for many months.

All of these delays place an additional burden on teachers and schools. No wonder Damian Hinds was heckled by headteachers when he dodged the school funding question.

You can't cut teachers' workload while continuing to make cuts to funding for public services.

“That is why, as a starting point, I intend to use our new Curriculum Fund to make it easier for schools and teachers to share and access high quality teaching resources.

And I will work with the profession to help teachers to access a broad set of quality curriculum and teaching materials – that teachers and leaders can adapt for their schools and classes, without having to write them from scratch.”

Someone is a stakeholder in Doddle?

There are a lot of commercial companies who will be looking at this announcement very closely - Complete Maths, Twinkl and the like will be worrying it's going to take their business. Or they'll be wanting the contract.

TES will also be worried about the announcement that they are looking into setting up a free website to advertise teaching vacancies (as will MN).

Have been thinking about this a lot. I honestly think that the single biggest thing that would make a difference to teacher workload is having readily available support and alternative provision for pupils who need it. If I have to spend my whole lesson working with children who can't access the learning/don't have the ability to work independently/have behaviour problems and so are disturbing the rest of the class, then I can't be giving verbal feedback to students or marking as I move round the room. Not only does that significantly impact on my ability to give timely feedback and support to other pupils at a time when it might make a difference to them, it means I'm left with piles of books to mark at the end of the day (primary). The progress of all other pupils is hindered - fine as a one off as all pupils need extra support sometimes, but not fine when it's every lesson, every day. Having TAs as 1:1s for pupils with EHCPs means that I then need to plan and resource completely separately for them, which adds to my workload outside the lesson.

I understand why schools have so much involvement in safeguarding, but look at all the extra responsibilities heaped onto schools without any additional funding. Wouldn't it be great to have family support workers in every school who could take a lot of that load away from teachers?

When I started teaching 13 years ago we assessed children in October, February and May and just reported an NC sub level. Now it's weekly/fortnightly updates to an electronic system with a myriad of different statements which have to be ticked for each child. I genuinely can't see how much better progress children make because I do that, and apart from the ability to produce lots of lovely graphs, I really can't see that such close tracking of pupils makes any difference to their attainment.

I went into teaching because I enjoy teaching and helping children to learn and progress. I really enjoy planning and resourcing lessons which will excite them and take them on to the next steps in their learning. That is work I'm happy to do and I would be very sad if that was taken away while the things I list above remain.

Having said that, I work in a school where we use the Government approved maths textbook. It certainly doesn't mean that every class in a year group is delivering identikit lessons - to be most effective, it needs to be tweaked and adapted to meet the needs of the individual classes and in my mind, that is what teachers should be spending their time doing. Maths No Problem say that they tell teachers what to teach so that they can spend their time thinking about how to teach it. I'm happy with that.

The reason only one maths textbook was approved last year was because the Government didn't want to put match funding into products that didn't meet their rigorous list of criteria (freely available on the NCETM website), which included support and guidance for teachers. In primary maths that is crucial as too few teachers have the subject knowledge and experience to teach really effectively. Sadly, they don't have the time to develop their subject knowledge and with so few teachers lasting more than 5 years, they don't have long enough to develop the necessary experience. Unlike when I started, there aren't older, experienced colleagues around to support them either. It's a real mess.

The worry about the introduction of government-approved schemes is the deprofessionalisation of teachers and if it’s introduced explicitly to help non-specialists teach, then that will then be seen as a solution to the teacher shortage. Who needs trained teachers if you just need a content delivery manager?

Except that no pre-published scheme or textbook will ever suit the needs of every class in the country. To get good results from them, you need to either have skilled and trained teachers, or skilled and trained support for under-skilled teachers, or (ideally) both. We've had two LA advisers come and see what we're doing with maths this year who said that when they heard we're using a textbook based scheme, they hated the idea and felt very sorry for the children. However, when they saw what it actually looks like in the classroom they changed their mind completely and could see the point of it. But I'm one of the first cohort of primary mastery specialists trained by NCETM and I'm not class based - my role is to get all over the school supporting teachers to use the textbooks intelligently. To quote my line manager, we want teachers to innovate the fuck out of it - we don't want people to just pick up the textbook and teach. That's not why we've all gone to university and trained so long.

I suppose it depends on your point of view. A major part of our reason for implementing the textbooks is because of the teacher recruitment crisis. We simply can't recruit enough UK trained teachers to staff our very large primary school, and there's no way we'd compromise by putting unqualified teachers or HLTAs in front of classes for anything more than the odd cover for sickness/courses. That means we are needing to recruit overseas trained teachers who then need to get up to speed with the English curriculum and way of working as quickly as possible. Having textbooks that take the decision about what to teach away from the teachers really helps to ensure consistency and correct coverage across the school and also helps with workload. And knowing what I've got to teach leaves me with the time to think about how I'm going to deliver it most effectively, which is the bit I'm interested in.

Maybe it's the difference between primary and secondary - no primary teacher will ever be a specialist in everything so they need support for the subjects they are less strong in. Intelligently implemented, correctly supported textbooks are a good way of doing this. Shame it's so expensive not many schools can afford to do it.

given that 1 - 3 years in (depending on the subject) teachers are still waiting for the text books from the last shake down up of the education system.

I like the sound of your school toomuchicecream.

Weirdly, it replicates a lot of the thinking - particularly around literacy skills - that were presented during my PGCE. The argument for getting non-conceptual skills like handwriting (and even spelling to an extent) in place, at a level that is almost routine and requiring little, conscious attention, so that you can leave enough processing power, attention, conscious thought and bandwidth available to tackle the higher-order skills. (People familiar with Susan Blackmore's analogy of how the brain works and driving and the work of Henri Bergson will recognise this.)

Love the 'innovate the fuck'. I'm kind of imagining your staff room a little like Simon Pegg's 'Hot Fuzz': a mix of contemporary cultural energy and warm self-irony (along with determination to succeed). It's very appealing.

at a level that is almost routine and requiring little, conscious attention, so that you can leave enough processing power, attention, conscious thought and bandwidth available to tackle the higher-order skills.

Is this about avoiding cognitive overload?
I call that ‘developing muscle memory’ to my classes :)

There are textbooks available for the new maths GCSE - my department hasn’t been able to afford to buy any.

This shared resource thing sounds expensive (either buying books or photocopying resources). Damian’s aware that schools don’t have any money, right?

And he’s only promised to halt curriculum change to 2022, 4 years. What then?

Yes, noble. Cognitive overload. I have cold at the moment and my vocabulary is suffering. That was exactly the term I was trying to circle in on.

What is it like in primary in terms of schemes of work and so on? There’s a national curriculum so presumably every teacher in the country is teaching the same thing so can’t you just go on TES and download it all?

For secondary maths, my school writes their own scheme of work and tests. I’m not entirely sure why as the exam boards produce them with end of topic tests and everything already written.

The people upthread who were hoping it was going to be made easier to exclude pupils will be disappointed:

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/hinds-orders-dfe-review-rising-numbers-school-exclusions

Apparently too many kids are being expelled from school. There’s a suspicion that it’s done to improve exam results. Now where could this pressure to get good exam results be coming from?

Noble,

If you read the primary national curriculum for many subjects, it is very vague.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/425601/PRIMARY_national_curriculum.pdf

Art for the whole of KS2 has a scant 7 lines in terms of subject content. English is heavily loaded with skills, but no context at all, so you can teach 'fronted adverbials of place' based on any text you choose.

Science and Maths could probably be planned as you describe - Twinkl has had a bash for Science, for example. However for most other subjects, the subject content is so vaguely defined (bearing in mind also that academies do not need to teach the NC, though the examined subjects of English and Maths are pretty standard) that what 1 school teaches in a specific year may not be covered in that year, or even at all, in another school.

Whether this is better or worse than the days od QCA when History's defined series of units meant that every child knew about the Great fire of London and Grace Darling and not a lot about whole swathes of the rest is probably debateable...

That is crap, and you don’t have exam boards willing to do it for you.

Would anyone have objections to a more detailed scheme of learning being made available for primary schools?

I destroyed forests preparing resources (primary) during my PGCE. Honestly, i used to feel like: "I am Cat - Destroyer of Worlds" as I stood at the photocopier. And it took hours.

When I was in schools with pre-existing planning, it felt like a liberation - and yes, it meant I would tweak and make something that ended up quite bespoke without having to start from Year Zero every time.

In one school, a scheme of work had been introduced lower down the school in a core subject. Oh, the envy I felt.

But I'm not an experienced teacher. Perhaps it feels constraining for them?

I'm glad about the exclusions announcement but it would be a different world better if that was backed up with the wide-reaching changes needed to really get to grips with behaviour issues.

A cynic postulates that the Secretary of State has mistaken the date, thinks it is April Fools Day already and is having a little bit of fun with teachers. What a wag he is to be sure.

noblegiraffe

I already knew that it wasn't going to be made easier to exclude pupils, in the same way that I know that this effort to reduce paperwork will come to nothing.

I also know that whatever happens people like hinds will always find a way to blame teachers for the shit that they (politicians) cause.

Noble , I think that ship has sailed, most primary schools have worked their arses off and written their own curriculum schemes, and better schools have tried to make things interesting, creative and relevant, and have also probably invested heavily in resources matched to their plans, so any bright shiny new initiative like government approved schemes and curriculum maps handed down from Mount Department Whatever They Are Called Today would go down like a lead balloon.

Toomuchicecream, what you say about constant tracking is so true. An old HMI said at a conference I was at a long time ago " Constantly measuring doesn't turn a chihuahua into a Great Dane, but feeding the right food and doing the right exercise makes it the healthiest and fittest chihuahua it can be."

What I can see happening then is the government introducing detailed schemes of work for primary schools in about 4 years time (because it will take that long) and at the same time will come up with details of how schools should be assessing progress now that levels have been scrapped. Both things that should have happened at the actual time of the changes.

And schools will look at the mountains of wheels that have been invented around the country and teachers will sob that they have to start over with the new guidance.

In the meantime, fuck all will have happened that actually has an impact on workload. Damian will point to his very industrious working groups saying he’s on the case when anyone asks why we don’t have any teachers left. Then we’ll get a new education secretary with their own ideas and we’ll be back at the start. THE END.