Part time request turned down

[Loafbeginsat60]

I teach in Scotland in a 6 teacher school. We are all full time apart from the teacher who provides CCR cover.

I'm currently full time but have used my councils flexible working policy to request a 0.8 role instead

My reasons are that I have no before / after school childcare on the day I wish to drop (childminder no longer works Fridays), I have my In-laws to care for and a busy farm life at home.

Basically I need a day to myself in the week without kids at home so I can get all my planning, marking and home chores done!

I'm running on empty and feeling burnt out so I thought dropping a day would make a huge difference to me.

School have said no, my job is full time and they can't manage without me one day per week. No word of them recruiting anyone else, just that I have to be in school full time

I have appealed (not yet heard back) but wondered has anyone else successfully gone from full time to part time? How did you achieve this - with a job share? Supply? Were your council / school supportive of you.

I was pretty surprised that it was an outright no without even looking into it.

Interested to here what others experience has been please?

Thank you.

I imagine it would be very difficult to find a job-share partner for you. I can't imagine many teachers wanting to work only one day a week - both from a financial point of view and in terms of job-satisfaction.

I think job-shares can work well. When my daughter started reception she had two job -share teachers. It was absolutely fine but they had much more of an even split (can't remember now whether it was 2.5 days each or 3 for one and 2 for the other).

I'm not familiar with the term CCR, but assume it's similar to PPA in England. I wonder whether the CCR teacher would be interested in increasing their hours to take on an extra day's work? If I were you I might sound them out.

If they are positive, you could put forward a proposal to the school for how it might work.

We have quite a few teachers who come in for supply one day per week so I was hoping one of them might fancy a one day contract.

Also a lot of teachers round here can't get full time contracts so they work a day here and a day there in different schools.

It's quite common to have part time contracts in two to three schools locally.

Fingers crossed someone might fancy it! And yes CCR is the same thing as prep time

Could you go into your head's office with potential solutions?

If you go in and just give them a problem to solve, you are less likely to get what you want.