Working during holidays

[BrightMauveLion]

Which staff actually go into school during the holidays? Are the SLT there often out of term time? Do they get paid for working during the holidays? How often will the school usually be open? (Large secondary/senior)

SLT might be requested to go in during the holidays, less so at Christmas bit perhaps before term starts for meetings, or in the summer for results analysis and results day. They don't get paid extra for it (or not at any school I've worked at) because they don't have the same limit on hours once on the leadership pay scale.
Other staff might go in on the holidays - I'm going in this week at some point to sort my displays out - but it's not compulsory

Site staff, IT staff, some office and other non-teaching roles depending on the time of year and what jobs needs doing. The summer holiday is a good chance to get maintenance work done without disruption.
Teachers including senior teachers may choose to work at school if it is open rather than at home.
Seniors leaders may be required by the head to do some school-based work. There is sometimes a TOIL option for this in
lieu of pay as SLT can’t be paid for those days if on standard leadership contracts.
It totally depends.

Our site team is not opening the building at all during these holidays. They will open up about an hour before we get in on the 6th so hoping that the heating will be working! The rest of us will be working on our laptops at some point during the holidays to prepare lessons/curriculum/catch up on marking to a greater or lesser extent. We tend to find that SLT or Lead Practitioners have greater flexibility over whether they work in school or elsewhere.

Does anyone work at the weekends, and what hours does your school open during term time weekends?

I do lesson prep / marking / respond to emails during weekends. But I don’t actually need to be in the school building to do this. Why the question?

Our school isn't open at all during weekends.

Never opens during the Christmas break and very rarely during other holidays.

It's open usually the first 2 and last 2 weeks of the six week holidays but our head makes sure it's closed for at least two weeks so everyone is forced to take a break.

I don't work weekends or many evenings now but I know many of the younger less experienced staff seem to think that working makes them better teachers 🙈🤷‍♀️

I don't work weekends or many evenings now but I know many of the younger less experienced staff seem to think that working makes them better teachers 🙈🤷‍♀️

Many of the younger and less experienced staff don't have the bank of resources or even the subject knowledge us old lot do, so of course they'll be working more. In training it could take me as long as 2.5h to plan a lesson fully from scratch. Nowadays, I have the skeleton presentation and suitable worksheets at hand and a lesson takes me 20-30min if planned from scratch and not just adjusted for my class and I don't spend hours researching how to teach something or even just to double check that I've got my facts right.

I rarely go in over the holidays. Exceptions are 1-2 hours for displays maybe once a year, if I have forgotten some paperwork, or results day. I do work from home because even with evening work it's impossible to stay on top of my teaching load AND carry out all of my extra duties, but again, it amounts to 1-2 hours a day for the few days leading up to the start of the new term, unless I'm also marking mocks, which, naturally, takes a lot longer.

@ThrallsWife I agree, but some of the stuff I see them do is totally unnecessary. One teacher makes lists of everything, planning upon planning. She obviously needs it for her own piece of mind.

I never mark outside of school (mostly because I took a set of mock papers home a few years ago when my daughter was a toddler and she coloured in the diagram on one of the papers! Since then I keep everything in school). However, the flip side is that most of my planning/lesson tweaking is done at home, this doesn't really bother me as I do it with the telly or a podcast on. I might do a day or two over summer in school, just for the peace and quiet so I can get prepped. This year I have a full Level 2 and Level 3 spec change so it's gonna be a busy one 😭

I don't work daft hours because I think it makes me a better teacher. It certainly makes me a worse Mum! I am Head of Department in an RI school and the improvement lead wants me to make base resources for all our lessons. I have delegated two year groups' worth but it is still a mammoth task. For various reasons I am the only one who can conduct the year 11 speaking exams and mark their writing exams so hoping for a lot of gained time in the last half term! Well there's bound to be something else they want us to do by then, isn't there?! Not sure the TLR is worth it...

I agree about the TLR, I really regret becoming a HOD. I was desperate to move up at the time and I felt like I'd spent too many years being 'just a teacher' so I had to prove I was ambitious and to open a door towards SLT. Now I know that I don't want SLT so I wish I'd not bothered.

We all need to move past the idea of being 'just a teacher'. The place can't function without us. I do like being able to influence the department, but the TLR does not make up for the massive extra workload. Still, there aren't people queuing up to take our jobs so we perhaps have more leverage than we think! Here's to a calmer 2025.