Register during PPA time

[Heshcher]

Who takes the register in your class during your PPA time? My school expects me to take the register during my PPA time which is quite inconvenient because my pupils arrive any time between 8:40 and 9:30. It's a specialist school (think dance or football specialism) in a county town with pupils arriving by taxi from all over the county. Traffic has a huge impact on their travel times and there are always lots of children coming late because of traffic or their transport coming late. My PPA starts officially at 9:00. I'd either have to stay in the classroom for the first half an hour or pop in and out every few minutes to keep an eye on who is arriving. There is no teacher covering my PPA for registration time, so the class are left with the TAs until the specialist teacher arrives 30 minutes later. There is no classroom computer and I take my laptop on PPA with me. I'm not able to / allowed to have the register open on the interactive whiteboard, so there is no option of the TA doing the register. I end up wasting the first 30 minutes of my PPA trying to get the register organised and I can't help but feel that I shouldn't be responsible for the register when I'm not responsible for the children. What do other schools do?

Whoever is responsible for the children should be responsible for the register. You're right, it doesn't make sense that you are doing this. If the school has a TA responsible for the students, they need to properly resource the TA with a laptop.

That sounds really poor organisation. It’s not PPA if you have to be in a classroom to register kids. I guess you need some other colleagues onside to make a push against this.

Could you print a paper list and ask the tas to complete? Then at 9:30 or whenever registers close, you would just need to transfer onto the register.

TA would do a paper register in my school. Office would put it on the system officially I think.

That's such a waste of time for you OP. Whoever is in charge of the class should be doing the register. If they can't access it, the office prints a paper copy off.

You can refuse to do this because you can't be directed to do anything at all during your PPA time, it's your time to spend on work tasks as you see fit. A paper register is an excellent idea, if that doesn't work for whatever reason, your SLT need to find a different solution.