Experienced teacher and the workload is just ridiculous

[BG2015]

I'm in my 28th year of teaching and apart from 2 maternity leaves I've always taught fulltime. I'm experienced and not easily phased but it never seems to get any easier, the workload is relentless.

I teach in KS1 and the lessons we have to cram into a day are ridiculous. These kids are 5 yet there is no let up.

I teach in a good school, with a realistic SLT. I've taught there for 22 years and I'm looking to retire in the next 2-3 years but a colleague and I were talking today and saying how ECT cope is beyond us. No wonder so many leave.

Slowly falling out of love of teaching.

@AllProperTeaIsTheft I'm secondary and we also finish on 22nd 😔 I'd also rather a bit more time before. Hats off to you running a foreign trip as well!!

It will be long but on top of work, my husband is working away in week 2, so my parents will be helping with my ds who is 9. They are wonderful and I am so grateful for their help but its just harder.
We also have ds birthday party and then the inevitable run up to Christmas activities.
Plus parents eve this half term.

I need to do at least some work this holiday as otherwise, I'll be bloody sinking next half term and as HoD, I need to make sure my department runs smoothly.

@BG2015 Tenerife for Christmas sounds glorious! At least you can count down to that 😁

@AllProperTeaIsTheft I'm secondary and we also finish on 22nd 😔 I'd also rather a bit more time before. Hats off to you running a foreign trip as well!!

Thanks! We are also hosting 6 guests for 3 days from Christmas Eve (only 4 are staying at our house). Fortunately dh will be doing virtually all the cooking!

The young teachers that constantly post on Tik Tok (I won't name them but I'm sure you've seen them), about how they only arrive at 8/8:15 and leave at 3.45 and refuse to do any work outside of the school day, really are not helping at all.

I don't really go on TikTok much. Would love to know their secret.

Apparently they 'work effectively' and do all their planning, markint and other admin during the school day when the children are working. They claim that anyone who has to work outside or ten school day isn't working effectively. I think it screams of they are doing the bare minimum or just lying

Apparently they 'work effectively' and do all their planning, markint and other admin during the school day when the children are working.

What, in lesson time? What kind of teaching is that?!

I sometimes don't even finish what I'm working on with my Y1 class and have to carry it over to the following week. How on earth they do planning during that time is beyond me.

Very very poor teaching in my opinion

My children tell me that their teachers quite often do marking during their lessons. When I said I'd never done that in 28 years of teaching (except occasionally during a silent written assessment with an angelic class) they barely believed me.

Gosh no way could I plan/mark during a lesson 😳
I'm in secondary so I often 'live mark' in lesson but this involves circulating the room looking for misconceptions/errors - either so I can pause the class and do more input or support individually.

I absolutely want my attention on the children when I am teaching, not on other jobs. Same for my department- I would not be happy with my team planning/marking/doing admin stuff when they were supposed to be teaching!

I'm in secondary so I often 'live mark' in lesson but this involves circulating the room looking for misconceptions/errors - either so I can pause the class and do more input or support individually.

Yes, same here.

Interesting the comments about the young teachers. I am rather old and do not access TikTok so have not seen this.

My exerience of the younger teachers is they do the bare minimum and expect everything to be available to them. They expect the lessons to be there and pick them up and deliver without even pre-viewing them. They set quizes and on-line homework so they don't have to mark it.

Lots of my time is spent creating lessons that fit my classes - I have loads of resources but they needs adapting for every class. I organise these lessons 'properly' on our network. Young staff use them and then berate them afterwards or question the worksheet and text book resources. I was so cross one week and maoning about it all that a TLR holder suggested I do not share my resources - I keep them for myself. This is in a department where shared resources have been what we do for years.

The rest of my time is marking written work. The students need to sit an exam at the end of Y11 and Y13 - they have to to write and show workings. They need work marked and specific written feedback given. Not sparx maths in Y11.

My co Y13 teacher has not set the class an exam paper, he has not marked any exam questions. Last year he marked his half of the mock exam - absolute rubbish and completely over-marked. I felt bad that I had to check but glad I did and then had to explain and guide him in re-marking.

Of course I know 'young' teachers need help with all of this - they need to know to set appropraite homework, they need guidance on marking correctly. But, they also seem to think that it is OK to do everything through technology and rarely ask for advice

Hope everyone who has been off this week has had a lovely half term and those who finished yesterday are looking forward to a week off!

I am tentatively getting ready for Monday. Not sure I am braced for an 8 week half term 😂🙈

Need to make a rough plan of the things we are doing/focusing on during this half term as a department.

Hoping the first week back goes fairly smoothly 🙏

I have to say I disagree with this.

I am an experienced teacher and HoD and regularly mark and plan during lessons when the children are getting on with independent work.

If I've done my job properly, I don't need to be breathing down students' necks all the time. Once I've set them up with what they need to do, I expect them to be able to get on with it, and they need to be allowed to get on with it - if they're doing a piece of extended writing, and they're in the 'flow', then me stopping them to check how they're doing is really unhelpful!

I will often leave students for 15-20 minutes at a time to work without interruption, either independently or in pairs/groups, and during those 15-20 minutes I can plan a lesson or mark a couple of essays at my desk. My eyes and ears are constantly open and of course I will go straight to any students who need help (or who I know will need help but won't ask for it), but the reality is, effective teaching is teaching that enables and encourages independence. If my students needed me during every minute of the lesson, I wouldn't have taught them anything at all!

This doesn't work with every class of course - I have Year 7s I can't leave for 2 minutes without needing to redirect or support - but once you're teaching Year 10 and upwards, you should have good stretches of time during lessons where students are getting on with work independently and you can do a bit of your own work. Working smart like this is the only way to get everything done without being a total martyr to the cause. I'm not paid enough to work weekends and I actively refuse to do so now.

@EnidSpyton That heavily depends on the culture in your school and the subject you teach.

In my practical subject, leaving students alone to work independently would be downright dangerous. Longer pieces of independent work are rare, because of the content-heavy curriculum, which means I have to teach 2-3 different concepts every lesson.

And every school I have worked in over the last few years are difficult ones due to the role I play in general day to day school life. So there, behaviour doesn't allow this kind of approach, even in the top sets.

I really don't like the arrogance of some people who think they're doing their job better than others if they are working in the kind of school and subject that allows them to play the system a bit better.

@ThrallsWife

I’m not being arrogant or saying I’m better at my job than others. I’m presenting a different view. Another couple of posters said that marking and planning in a lesson is poor practice. I explained how for me it isn’t and that it works in my classrooms and my subject. I think it is possible in all classrooms to have time for students to work truly independently but that possibility and the frequency and length of it obviously does depend on subjects and school environments of course. In my subject - secondary English - we do obviously spend more time writing than other subjects, which offers more scope for teacher downtime in lessons.

I do resent the phrase ‘playing the system’ however.

English teachers are expected to teach two GCSEs in the same time as one. We have every student for our subjects with no option to opt out of English from the ages of 11-16. Our marking load is far heavier than any other subject and we get no extra free periods to compensate for it. If I didn’t do marking in lessons I’d be up until midnight every night to get through it. I used to do that at the beginning of my career and now I refuse because it’s unsustainable with any kind of life. The marking load of teachers with practical subjects is much lower. While you might work harder in lessons, you have less content produced during them that requires marking outside of them. So the demands on our time and energy are the same, just at different times and in different ways.

It’s not a competition to be the most hard done by. We all work hard and I am simply sharing a way in which I use lesson time to help me manage my workload. No criticism of other teachers was meant in my post. I apologise if that’s what you read into it.

I teach Science. At 3 papers per exam, our marking load is just as heavy, especially with the constant 6-mark question practice in lessons, although marking criteria are different, of course. Students don't get to opt out, either, and our planning load is much higher as we have to plan and formally risk assess every practical activity.

So no, it's not a race to the bottom, but please don't assume that other subjects have it easier elsewhere. I do some live marking in lessons, but if my HOD, who frowns at teachers responding to emails during lesson time, ever saw me plan a lesson during independent practice (aside from test lessons) I'd be put on a support plan.

I "work smart" in other ways.

I'm sorry, @ThrallsWife, your marking load in Science is not as heavy as English. Teachers of other subjects saying this without a true awareness of what our work involves contributes to the continual refusal to give English teachers any more time off time table to cope with the marking. Marking a '6 mark' content-recall or explanatory paragraph is not the same as marking a 6 page essay of literary analysis, requiring SPAG marking as well as engagement with a student's argument and subjective ideas relating to a text. I know you do still have plenty of marking to do, but it is not the same amount or intensity involved in English, as it doesn't take the same amount of time to mark one piece of work. That's not a criticism of you - it's just a reality. It's the same as Art, Drama, Music, PE or Design teachers - no one would try and argue they have the same amount of time-intensive marking as an essay-based subject. They have more work to do in other ways aside from marking that an English teacher doesn't - such as running after school activities - so I'm not saying they don't work as hard, but the workload is distributed differently.

We all of us have different stressors in our subjects and different ways of working, of course we do. English teachers may spend less time planning than Science teachers (though that is not always true depending on the content - try planning Jane Eyre to teach at GCSE - you've got a 500 page novel to read before you can even get started on planning a scheme of work) - but we absolutely do spend more time marking than any other subject teacher.

Your HoD sounds remarkably unenlightened. Have you ever tried having a conversation about smart working and finding out her reasons for refusing to allow you to do other tasks while students are busy working and don't need direct supervision?

I'm sure you do work smart in other ways. I haven't said otherwise. You are responding to me in a very defensive tone that I'm struggling to see as being warranted from what I've said. I have nowhere criticised your personal teaching practice.

End-of-term-itis; I am quite crabby today and probably more so in writing than intended. But I think every teacher can argue that their out of school workload is extremely heavy, like you said, PE are forced to regularly stay after school for activities and competitions, while Drama and Music have to put on whole productions, though as core subjects we are always forced into extra revision after school, too.

And yes, my HoD is being extremely unreasonable with their attitude towards working in class - I am known to take my laptopto duties if I have a heavy load to do, partially out of spite now.

Drama is now 70% written at GCSE, so we have a lot of essays to mark! It's impossible to compare subjects and just winds everyone up if you do.

I totally disagree. It is totally possible to compare workload between subjects. We all have different pulls on our time with differing levels of work involved - practical and Arts subjects tend to do more lunchtime and after school clubs and rehearsals whereas essay subjects get the marking load which can take up far more time than those after school activities. We all know this is true and pretending it isn’t is unhelpful.

Drama is not compulsory at GCSE. You cannot compare the workload of an options subject with a core compulsory subject. I say this as someone who also teaches Drama, so I do know what I’m talking about.

How many whole school shows have you put on? I often work 16 hours days in school then have marking on top of that. I also teach English, and can only start my marking after rehearsals finish at 4.45pm. See what I mean by comparing subjects just making people annoyed?!?!

I teach 2 Yr11 and 2 Yr10 Drama classes. I don't know any English teachers who teach more GCSE than that, so the fact it's an option is irrelevant. For the HOD I get it's extra stress, but that's why English HODs get £10k more than Drama HODs.

Meanwhile Subject leads in Primary get zero £0. So they definitely have the right to be most passed off at workload!!

Comparisons are not helpful I agree.
My school puts English GCSE mock exams in the first part of the week to allow English teachers to get a head start at marking.
I teach another subject and I think this is fair, this is the only concession the English dept has...