How to achieve a work life balance?

[Lizay27]

Interested to know how others (particularly those with children) achieve a work life balance.

I seem to have not mastered this and literally feel like I'm working myself to death!

Do you have specific days where you do specific tasks like planning / marking ?

I think this depends very much on the stage of your career and which subject you teach. For example, ECT English teacher is going to have a lot more to do out of school than a tech teacher who’s been doing it for years (I mean no offence to tech teachers before anyone jumps at me!)

Towards the start of a career, you don’t have a bank of resources to call upon so planning takes longer and you’re not practised so marking takes longer. Later on, you learn how to speed it all up!

Top tips:

• if you can, get all of your marking and planning done in school. At the start of my career, I was regularly kicked out by the site team, but it meant home was ‘home’ not an extension of school
• get a hobby! Or do some kind of night class. I did drama / dress making / pottery, just so that one night a week wasn’t teaching related
• keep at least one day of the weekend sacred. You need a rest.

I've decided this year that I'm going to do all my class teaching related jobs in school. If I don't finish, I'm going to be winging it in lessons. I work in a 4 form entry school though, so lots of planning is shared. I'm SLT, so have accepted that some of those responsibilities will have to be done outside of school, but that seems OK for the money I get.

I'm in school 7.30 - 4.45, I have an hour and a quarter 'break' time during that day. If I work through those and end the day with no marking, then I can manage it I think. Once I have a lunchtime meeting though, I'm stuffed.

Aiming to go part time at xmas as well, which should sort all this out. Sadly.

I've been teaching for 15 years, so I'm fine just "doing stuff" in lessons. I'm also at a school abroad and we are quite relaxed about most things. Our planning is shared (four-form entry) and if my lessons aren't all singing and dancing, then it doesn't matter, either. SLT don't do learning walks, we rarely have observations, we don't have planning or book scrutinies. However, my classes perform very well. The children and their parents tend to be very happy, so there's no reason to change things. I'm good at my job! (It has taken a move abroad to admit that to myself and get my confidence back.)
I'm in school between 8am and 5pm during the week. Ds is currently in the nursery on site and will join our Reception class next year. What doesn't get done, doesn't get done. I can always catch up on it the next day. I don't work after school and I don't tend to work on the weekend.

I'm a year 3 teacher and the only year teacher there so nobody to share planning and resources with.

I go in an hour earlier to try and get work done (usually marking or planning) and try and continue this during Ppa but there's always something that pops up whether it's a meeting or cover so it seems that I can never actually get the work done.

Due to covid (I'm overseas) students are to remain in class during lunch which means no lunch break for me. Used to have a working lunch but now with the constant interruption of students, it's impossible!