How should this be managed in an equitable way?

[Babbitywabbit]

Interested to hear how this sort of situation is managed in other work places. I head up a large Dept in a secondary school. Like many schools, we have a large number of part time staff. Some of the full time staff in my Dept are currently unhappy with how their roles are being negatively impacted by part timers.

So, provision in my (core subject) is 4 lessons each week for all pupils. A full time member of staff would teach 5 classes for all their lessons, totalling 20 lessons per week. 5 classes worth of books to mark, reports to write, parents to meet with.

In the cases of job shares, the two job sharers equate to one member of staff, so the work is split between them.

However, we also have some part time staff who aren’t on job shares and this means that full time staff are ending up with split classes. Although their weekly teaching hours is the same, there is obviously a lot more work in terms of planning, marking, liaising with parents, appointments at parent evenings, if you are teaching a wider spread of classes.

I only have a certain amount of control over timetabling. The school timetable is put together and with part timers who are contracted to work specific days, it inevitably falls to full timers to cover the other days. One member of my dept is being increasingly vocal about how unfair this is... and I can see her point. She’s a fantastic teacher, and as a full timer feels she can get the best out of her pupils (and arguably the best results, which actually has implications for her own appraisal and pay) if she can teach her classes all week. However, to accommodate part time staff, she can’t do that; she’s ended up with split classes. Our most recent parents’ evening fell on a non working day for one of the part timers she shares a class with, therefore the full timer had to do all the appointments herself.

Obviously this issue has gone to our HR manager (but that’s as far as it’s gone, no decisive action has happened yet) but I’d appreciate views from anyone about how this type of situation is managed elsewhere.

As a manager myself, it’s not directly impacting on me, but I am feeling increasingly that it’s unfair on the full timers I manage. I understand that everyone has a right to request flexible working, but I’m feeling now that some requests are being agreed by our governors without really taking into account the impact it’s having on existing colleagues. Surely it’s unfair for full timers to be negatively impacted and have an increased work load? I feel it’s maybe masked to an extend because in terms of actual teaching contact time, there is no increase of hours, but as any teacher knows, the more pupils you teach overall, the greater the workload in terms of planning, assessment, differentiation, report writing ...

Would welcome thoughts and advice from others in this situation.

Couldnt you allocate say, 3 PTers to 2 classes? So each FTer has 5 classes, each 2 JSers share 1 class then 3 PTers share 2 classes with the 3 grouped together according to what days they work.

Theoretically it works out so long as part timers work on days that all fit together neatly.... unfortunately in practice it doesn’t! With the whole school timetable presented to me as it was in August, there is no way I can timetable classes in my subject without full timers having split classes. I think I’ve done what I can to minimise it (and that took bloody hours ) but the problem still remains

I am not a teacher and have no idea how it works, but I would try to work on the basis of what is fair. That is fair in terms of:

• pay and working time so if an efficient full timer works 70 hours a week does an efficient part timer who works 35 hours a week get paid 50% of a full time salary or is there an imbalance?

• are the full and part-timers doing the same proportion of the good and bad bits of the job whilst also working to individuals strengths and preferences?

• is the parents evening scheduled on the one day of the week they all work or if that is genuinely not possible why is the full timer doing this out of hours when the part timer is not unless the full timer is getting paid extra for flexibility?

Do you have control over changing any of this? Are you able to speak to someone who does?

Then I would go through a further checklist. Are the full timers being as efficient as possible? Is there anything they can delegate? Is the real issue that the part-timers are having proportionately less put on them or are they less liked by their colleagues or even by you or do any of you have a really strong ethic of working lots of hours which is being challenged.

Sorry this may not be helpful but I find myself about to be in a similar situation albeit in a very different industry and these are some of the things I have been thinking about.

Goodcat- thanks; you’ve been really helpful in clarifying each point which needs to be considered, and also giving an objective perspective from outside the teaching profession.

I think the key difficulty is (perhaps) specific to teaching though. In a core subject like mine, where there are lessons spread across the whole week, it’s so much better, from the perspective of planning, assessing, liaison with parents, for the teacher to teach a class for all their lessons. Although the contact time with pupils remains the same, whether you’re seeing one class for 4 lessons, or 2 classes for 2 lessons each, we all know that once you double the number of pupils, the real workload increases a lot.

There’s also the factor of appraisal and pay... often a teacher’s progression up the pay scale is linked to pupil progress and attainment, and the less control an individual teacher has, the less accountable they can be for progress

The parents’ evening thing is an odd one. As a salaried professional there is in reality not much limit on what can be expected, and full time staff are definitely expected to attend parents evenings for all classes they teach, whereas part timers don’t have to attend on their non working days. That would be reasonable if it split neatly pro rata but in reality, the full timers are having to teach a greater number of pupils because they have to share classes with part time staff, and therefore they have to work proportionately more evenings.

I’m all for streamlining working practices wherever possible and I’m definitely of the mind set that being a sharp worker is what’s important rather than how many hours you slog. But this situation seems unfair to me... bottom line is, the optimum timetabling would be for a class to have one teacher for all their lessons, which the full time staff want to provide, but can’t because of part time staff. I’m not sure the governors and/or SLT fully get the impact on the full time staff in my dept

Can I add that it also impacts on the students. Not every student finds this split approach easy to settle into in all subjects.

I'm not a teacher but I thought some schools had part timers at say 0.6 of a timetable rather than mon - wed. The timetabling is then done in the best interests of the pupils and if that means a 0.6 teacher has to come in on 4 days so be it. It also seems unfair that full time staff work effectively unpaid overtime but part timers don't given that parents evenings are not in anyone's core hours. Is it possible to change the flexible working requests that granted in future? I can see that changing current ones might not be possible.

I'm not a teacher but agree with Goodcat about looking at how everyone uses their time. Would it be feasible for staff to a do time and motion study for a couple of weeks to help clarify the tasks everyone is doing and the time it takes?

I agree with others it is the way your flexible working requests have been granted that cause the issue. When I consider fwr in my team I always look at the whole team and make sure we have cover across the week / tasks. I am not in a school but am surprised as head of department you don't get input to say no you can't have set days etc. I have friends who work part time in schools and their days / hours vary school year to school year. Unfortunately you are stuck in a less than ideal situation as day to day management seems removed from HR type management.

I work part-time and my hours are spread over all 5 days of the week, but as a professional I think sometimes you have to work on your non-working days eg for parents evenings. A few months ago I was asked if I could work a full day for a project (without time off in lieu, which I am sure would be standard if a similar request was made in the teaching world). Of course I said yes. Caveat: I don't have a small child so childcare issues don't arise, but if you know in advance the dates of parents' evenings etc you should be able to make arrangements in most cases. You'll know the people who genuinely can't because eg their partner works in the Forces etc.

I am not a teacher, but I think the issues can be the same.

The biggest problem, IMO, is that part timers work part time hours and (perfectly justifiably) do not work outside that. FTs generally speaking work over and above their hours. This means that 1) if something extra needs doing, it is almost always one of the FT that picks it up, and 2) two half timers do not do the same amount of work as a FT.

I'm not sure what the solution is though. I find myself saying 'thank you' to my FT staff very often, to at least recognise their greater contribution [not sure if that really helps though]

Wouldn’t help for KS3 - but for KS4 could the school split across eg language and literature or across modules or sciences ? That way gcse classes could be split, each kid gets two books, each teacher maintains marking responsibilities.

Agree re parents evenings not mattering which day they are on, just need to push back on that.

I think changing days of the week would be a sensible and likely viable option unless someone wrote contracts with days written in (wouldn’t say this is standard practice) but that splitting across 3 days work 4 days is a sure fire way to Really piss off your part time staff. That might be worth it for you but I don’t think the loss of good will would be worth it in my eyes.

Surely the parents evening just needs to be a whole staff (or all staff that teach say, year 8 have to come in for Y8 parents evening) attendance thing, whether it's your day to be in work or not?

I think you certainly have a case going forwards to only allow job shares or FT contracts and it would be worth speaking to the head and governors to see if that could be achieved. I'm wondering if any of the pt workers are flexible on days so that you could convert them into a job share? Also can you make sure the exam years always get dedicated teachers so that the teacher who was concerned about results can at least have dedicated classes for GCSE years?

I don't see why the full time staff have to do all parents evenings alone if it falls on a part timers day off.

If the parents evening is in the evening, the full timer is working outside their normal working hours and there it if not unreasonable to ask the part timers to also participate in these activities.

Ricstar you’ve hit the nail on the head- I’m doing the day to day management but have not thus far had as much control over part time contracts within my dept as i perhaps should. Of course the other aspect is that I’m not a specialist in HR (and why on earth should I be... the legislation around contracts is a massive thing!) ....
thank you to those who’ve responded; it’s helped to clarify in my mind that current practice in my school is not always fair to full timers. The parents’ evenings are the first thing to tackle... they always fall outside core hours so there doesn’t seem any logical reason why Full timers should work them but not part timers, and I can see it’s particularly galling for full timers who are only teaching that year group to accommodate a part timer - and then end up doing the entire parents evening because the part timer doesn’t work that day.