Teacher workload cut by 5 hours a week since 2016

[noblegiraffe]

...claims the DfE.

www.gov.uk/government/news/teacher-workload-cut-by-five-hours-a-week-over-past-three-years

Is this your experience? Mine feels like it has increased in that time. We’ve had a new head and they are definitely making more demands of us.

There have been some reductions:
-less book marking as all assessments tend to be test-based and homework automated
-fewer requirements to change displays frequently
-less report writing, especially extended ones

However:
-a doubling of parents' evenings plus some extra rewards evenings etc. to make up for the lack of reporting - I used to be able to do a class set in a hour and now spend 3 hours sitting in parents' evenings
-expected contact via telephone has increased from almost none to 15+ expected per week (one per set per week sounds so much nicer, doesn't it?) - an increase of about an hour, if I'm lucky
-safeguarding and associated form-filling has gone through the roof - from maybe once a year to almost daily in some cases
-results-based PRP means covering my arse several times over - add an hour per week
-expected "supporting" (read: monitoring) of colleagues takes up 1-2 hours extra per week with learning walks, feedback, follow-up etc.

My workload has definitely not gone down. And that isn't even taking into account that I can guarantee to be on cover once a week.

Oh, and my classes have increased by 10 kids on average, while the number of different classes I teach has trebled.

Wow atropa, you win the thread!! Is that a crazy MAT school??

I agree completely. On average my workload decreased but that’s because I left in summer 2018.

doubling of parents' evenings

How?? Directed time surely wouldn’t allow for it.

expected contact via telephone has increased

Oh, we have this too. Every time a kid breathes out of turn it’s a ‘can you phone home?’. As if phoning home is something that takes a couple of minutes, when usually it takes that long to get the number, then you phone, they’re not in, you leave a message and end up chasing them all day. It seems that managers who have very few lessons and an office with a phone don’t appreciate that classroom teachers don’t have time to be on the phone all day.

How did your head remove SEN paperwork? That and LAC paperwork seem to take over my life!

I’m primary and the ‘deep dive’ is crazy.

I'm an NQT so can't really comment on how workload has changed, but my school has a policy of phoning home every time you set an afterschool detention - in theory I get why but we also have to set an after school "homework club" detention after two missed homeworks, so it can end up being a lot of kids.

I'm in science so we are a large department, and we have 2 phones available (one in my hod's office so not always available) so there are some evenings where you are literally queuing and waiting for the phone. Plus every communication has to be recorded.

I can see that it works, and I can see why it's a policy, but it takes up up so much of my time.

Although in 2016 was everyone writing new schemes of work for new gcses? Could this have been making workload even worse?

So like, it's not OK now but for some people it was even worse in 2016?

Yep, a MAT. And one of the typical ones, too.

Directed time doesn't come into it. We are, apparently, well under DT budget. Because daily briefings, detention duties etc. have somehow vanished from it.

Sansa, telephoning achieves nothing if parents aren't supportive, do nothing to foster positive relationships if you can't find the time for positive phone calls or are the fifth person to have to ring home in a day because of some policy. The parents we want to contact have wised up to it and disconnected their phones. We still have to try ringing and then record it, for the "paper trail".

Mine certainly hasn't decreased

Mine decreased - but I moved to private so I no longer do anything "because ofsted will want to see it". It was 2016 when my HoD asked us all to do a quick add up of hours worked that week to get a snapshot and I was annoyed because it was a light week - 47 hours when I added mine up! Now I average about 45 and I'm a much better teacher because I'm not knackered all the time.

Ha ha ha ha ha

One of our trainees has just commented on this on Twitter

a) she believes the figures
b) she believes it it reasonable anyway to work 10 hour day's [sic]

Well, if this is the future...

Personally, even if it is true that teachers work 10 hours days (which is not true of many) it is still in excess of teachers throughout Europe and exceeds average working hours in the UK. I am a little surprised no one has come on this thread yet to tell us we are all lazy, mind.

It does vary dramatically from school to school, person to person and at secondary level by subject. I'm currently doing consultancy in a school and they do not work the kind of hours often cited here at secondary level, even those teaching core subjects. The head has a policy that all required work should be able to be completed during the period 8.30-5 min-Friday

But how does s/he ensure that happens in each and every department?

I have noticed a big change in our school over the last 10 years just by looking at the car park!

@SansaSnark yes. I did the survey in 2016 at my last school and we were having to write new schemes of work for GCSE and A level and make the resources (basically write our own textbook as a department, we divvied up chapters) because no textbooks had been published for the new spec which was very different to previous ones.
I probably do work 5 hours less a week now to be fair... as in, 75 not 80....

I would say my work on reformed subjects and lesson planning is ongoing. Some subjects were reformed last year and in the last wave.

@Pumpkinpie66 Yeah, that makes sense.

Falling by 5 hours (if true) from an already extremely high level doesn't mean workload is reasonable. People can also (maybe) cope with a high workload for a year or two on the understanding it will drop a lot in the future, but like you say dropping from 80 to 75 doesn't mean workload is now sustainable.

I don't believe or disbelieve the figures, I guess- I agree really busy people may not do the survey anyway! But it doesn't really matter if workload has fallen if people are still finding it unsustainable.