Secondary school cover - how does your school organise it?

[Fieldday]

How does your secondary school organise cover? My school does it by a rota - so every teacher who is under allocation is given the number of potential cover lessons according to their under allocation - plus everyone ‘takes one for the team’ per week. This is the same for both full and part-time teachers. As a part-time teacher I’m feeling this is very unfair, but at the same time it could be a better deal than most schools. I’m very curious to know. Thanks for your help.

This only seems fair if you have an extra PPA session per week. I’ve just left a school that used PPA to cover maternity and long term absence. Some people ended up having no PPA for weeks until the unions got involved.

Thanks Mutters123, gosh, you have definitely proved that my school is not the worst with that anecdote! The poor kids having a string of cover teachers, let alone the teachers.

I’m at an independent school so our PPA time is definitely above that of the maintained sector, but it still strikes me that part-timers should be given a proportionate amount to our full time colleagues in the same school or we are effectively getting less PPA time than them. Duties are another issue (all staff, regardless of FT or PT have two). But I’m particularly interested in the cover as 3 lessons a cycle is a whole chunk for me on my timetable.

Cover Supervisors are used first - probably cope with 80% of all cover, but are increasingly difficult to recruit so no idea how this will go in the future. All staff have one priority cover slot a week, whether FT or PT, we have normally have 3 staff earmarked for each slot so if a teacher is required you have a 33% chance of being used. Under-allocation isn't really a thing, TT would be rehashed to avoid - other ways to deal would be being assigned a Skills group, or more junior staff may share a class under a mentoring/team-teach approach.

PPA is definitely proportional. Duties are different as we are split-site, so commutes/duties are evened up.

We've got cover teachers, who provide cover, if needed. Additionally, everyone has dedicated "cover" sessions on their weekly timetable. If you aren't needed for cover during that period, it's extra PPA for that week.
I'm at an independent primary, though.

Any non-PPA is up for grabs, basically. Which makes it a massive PITA for TLR holders whose PPA allowance isn't increased to allow for discharge of extra responsibilities and whose dedicated meeting times don't get timetabled in, but who do have the extra one or two "frees" on their timetables to do so. Inevitably, we don't get to have them in order to cover, so can end up with up to 3 covers per week.

Oh, and almost daily duties.

Current school, PPA and manage time is protected. If under allocation, the additional slots can be used for cover but it is done on a rota and fairly.

Previous school, again, if people were under, those slots were labelled as 'cover' and could be used. They also used to ask for volunteers to cover classes a lot last academic year as there was a lot of absence and not enough supply staff to be had. I was HoD and my team were badly affected by absence for lots of reasons - I often gave up PPA/management time to try and cover what I could so that classes at least had some specialist lessons 😔 bloody hard work though and very nearly broke me!

Current set up is better and we are less affected by absences so I feel like this year has been massively easier for me!

I think it does sound unfair to part timers- do other part time staff feel this way too? If you raise the issue collectively, then you're more likely to be listened to than just you bringing it up individually.

If it's a specific issue with your timetable this year, perhaps you could discuss it with whoever organises the timetable, and swap one of your protected PPA slots?

Presumably in an independent school, you don't need all staff to do one cover a week anyway?

That sounds rubbish. Most of ours is done by cover supervisors who are great. If your class is out on a trip, you are normally used to cover those leading the trip, so you end up in front of the same number of classes. For everything else, the cover supervisor emails and asks for volunteers. It's a nice school and someone invariably does or it goes to SLT to do. In gained time in June/July we are still emailed first to check availability before it is assumed you will cover a lesson.

In terms of duties, they are done proportionally. F/T non-SLT staff do 2 per week. 0.4 - 0.8 do one. Less than 0.4 can do them at their choice.

I did no cover this last year (0.4 P/T) and was used maybe twice in an emergency the year before (when I was still F/T).

Our school embodies the spirit of “rarely cover” and uses cover supervisors and supplies for all planned absence and nearly all unplanned. As it should be.

One of the problems with cover, which is often caused by having part-timers, but may affect both full- and part-timers, is that there can be quite big fluctations in the number of staff available in any given timetable slot. If you happen to be one of only two members of staff free on Wednesday period 2, then you get a lot more cover than someone who is one of six people available in each of their frees. (Especially if, as I saw happen, the SENCo tended to have meetings with external agencies in that slot, despite it being one of their few timetabled teaching slots - I was never sure that was really unavoidable.)

If that's part of the problem, then it's really down to whoever organises cover to try and do what they can to compensate - perhaps blocking out those two teachers' other frees so at least they don't get called on at other points in the week, or persuading someone to move their timetabled meeting out of that slot. Or they might be able to identify a part-timer who might be able to cover as supply occasionally. (On one occasion, a colleague of mine was unwell but said they couldn't go home because they had a cover that afternoon and knew that there was nobody left on the cover list if they did. As it happened, I was part-time and due to go home at lunch - so I said I would stay in.)

One of the most novel ideas I ever saw was the cover coordinator who ran a "fantasy cover league". You selected your "team", which had to include the right number of staff at each level of the hierarchy. Each time one of your team did a cover, you got a point - and if it was you, that scored double. Towards the end of term, they had people requesting to do a cover to try and win the league!

What was the winning team's prize?