Balancing teaching loads in schools

[onemassivegeek]

Hi everyone- hope you don't mind helping out.

Does anyone know of a secondary school that, in someway or another, recognises that certain subjects have much larger teaching groups than others? Especially at A-level. And then perhaps what that system is.

Many thanks for any input.

😂 😂 😂 No

PE teachers are living the freaking dream this year. No marking and no fixtures.

"Many thanks for any input."

Note to self...

Sorry my response wasn't helpful. Middle of a ridiculous day and huge workload disparity between subjects currently.

At our school, core subjects sometimes get an extra hour of PPA a week to recognise the extra pressure and big class sizes. This depends on staff availability though.

Yeah I raised this earlier this week and got nothing helpful back. Basically got told to stop moaning. Sorry that's not very helpful.

@HercwasanEnemyofEducation

😂 😂 😂 No

PE teachers are living the freaking dream this year. No marking and no fixtures.

Brace yourselves...

... our PE staff get EXTRA frees because of fixtures. Even this year when there aren't any.

Extra frees for larger A level classes was often mentioned in the heads 'state of the nation' type speech on the first day of each year.
My department had those biggest classes.
Never had any extra frees, intact usually had highest contact rate due to lack of specialist teachers, but other depts disliked us for it!
Reminds me of speeches by another leader!

Nope, we have huge classes in my subject, ( 23 in one of my y12s) despite it being a science, and one year when i used to teach another, very vaguely related subject I had 27!
Meanwhile mfl and music are consistently praised for their excellent results when they have less kids in the whole cohort than I have sharing a balance ( groups of 2,3,4,5 standard for them)
No acknowledgement of the differences just look how well they do 😳

Oh yes.... MFL and their awesome results.
Okay... you need a 7 to get in against our 6
You have 6 lessons per week for 3 students. We have 6 lessons a week for up to 20 in a class.
One of your German students is actually German.

MrsH I'm sure I've shared outrage at that timetabling decision before.

MFL results are always skewed as only the brightest choose them. It's a bit like our btec child dev course used to get praised for its value added every year. The teacher had 5 kids and wrote their coursework for them.

I'm biology. Classes are massive and filled with kids that only picked it coz they didn't know what they wanted to do. Some of them only with a 5 at gcse as they argued they would have got the required 6 if they'd done the exam. (Even though they'd only been entered for foundation). -sigh-

Ditto @hedgehogger1
We always get some weak kids who though a science would be good, but this year takes the for that, i have a couple in one class who i reckon would have scraped a 4 if they had actually sat an exam.

No. And as a core we often moan about it. Some GCSE classes are very small whereas everyone does ours and the papers take a long time to mark.

@HercwasanEnemyofEducation

😂 😂 😂 No

PE teachers are living the freaking dream this year. No marking and no fixtures.

And in my school no lessons except for exam classes. Compulsory PE is suspended.

That’s online lessons. I’m busting a gut doing live lessons at least a third of the time (more because one of the alternatives is recoded ones which - well, who has the time? Easier to go live) and marking for a full allocation.

I was head of a humanities subject - A Level classes usually 25 plus, and never under 20. Top set GCSE classes with 32 in them. All of the cohort entered for GCSE. For this I got NO extra frees, and no extra pay to be HOD - despite the fact that the core subjects were on a far higher scale - and had a 2nd in dept.... and a head of KS3.

And our GCSE results were the highest in the school for years.

A couple of years ago the head cut our contact time - and gave it to the core subjects. And then had a go because our GCSE results went down (still way above the school average.....)

Oh - and when a kid wanted to do A Levels and the other subjects refused to take the because they couldn't cope then we were made to take them. And worked our socks off with them - and then had to explain why we had some grade Es from kids who were weak and never really want to take my subject in the first place.