Silly, pointless workload - share your 'cheating' tips.

[ChipsForSupper]

How far have you all dared to 'cheat' on the ridiculous things that you are asked to do? At my school, it started with a meeting where we all had to give 'written feedback' on something. Some of us realised that it was very similar to a meeting we'd had the previous year so we looked up all the documentation and simply copied and pasted everything. No one noticed.

Emboldened, we began to do the same for other things which we were convinced nobody ever actually read or checked up on such as seating plans, dept progress reports, end of year exam reviews etc

From here we progressed to making up all data.

This week, we have had to do lesson observations on each other and write them up. We copied and pasted them all from last year.

I can't think why it's taken so long for this to occur to us. It's saving hours.

What else can we cheat on?

I've certainly never heard a member of SLT say, "Oh yes, I need to give you another 6 hours of PPA to cope with that new initiative," or, "You're right, that's unnecessary, forget it."

Bloody loved my old head - she'd come into a staff meeting with the line of "OK this is the latest thing we have to do. I know it's ridiculous, you know it's ridiculous, let's work out how to do this in the least workload-intensive way we can do to make it bearable." Sadly she's since retired but she was bloody amazing and we probably worked harder for her because we respected her so much than some of the micro management eejits out there trying to kill teachers with paperwork.

ReverseTheFerret
We have regular staff voice and generally seem to get a 1 in, 1 out on initiatives or they are things that we have to do but will actually help us in the long run (e.g. a me a procedure for X is short term more work but once embedded we will hardly have to use it so it'll save work)

Otjer places I've been in had too many wider SLT types and pepple building mini kingdoms.