Should we work a 51-hour week?

The DfE wants to lift limits on teachers’ working hours, but marking books at 11pm is already a widespread practice. Michael Tidd considers where the line should be drawn...

Every teacher has, at some point, had to answer that question: why did you want to be a teacher? The chances are you have your own answer ready prepared for these occasions, and the likelihood is quite high that, when asked about the highlights of your job (August aside), your answer relates to events in the classroom. Most teachers went into teaching because they wanted to teach. It sounds daft said like that, doesn’t it?

So why is that teachers who on average teach for around 20 hours per week are working another 30 hours on top of that to get the job done? That’s what the DfE survey results show: the average primary school teacher has a 51-hour working week. The actual teaching of children makes up less than half of this time, so what is the rest being used for?

The DfE’s submission to the teachers’ pay review body this year indicates that it wants to lift the statutory limits on teachers’ working hours to allow schools to look at extending the teaching day. Can that even be a realistic prospect if teachers are already working such long hours. Somewhere along the line, something’s got to give. But what?

The job is already a challenge of balancing the various pressures on our time, whether it be the need to mark a set of books, plan a sequence of lessons, make appointments with parents or prepare resources for the following day. Perhaps one of the problems of the never-ending list of jobs is the tendency towards repetition without thought; after all, on the occasions where we do find ourselves with a moment to think, the thoughts are usually about what tasks still remain to be done.

Of course, the very fact that you’re reading this article suggests that you are a reflective practitioner, so might I direct you now to reflect? Presumably each time you pick up the magazine, it is with the hope of learning something new or finding something innovative that might help you to improve your practice. Let this issue be the one that leads you to reflect on the things you do and consider what can be changed – or even discarded.

If the most important part of the job – the reason we came into the profession in the first place – is the work we do with children in the classroom, then isn’t it also reasonable to expect this to make up the majority of our working hours? Of course, finding ways to cut corners is never going to be easy in a job that carries with it the responsibility of changing young lives; but equally, we must have something of a professional duty to ensure that our working hours are productively spent for the benefit of the young people in our care.

Many of us will have seen a new teacher, or trainee, who is working hour-after-hour each night to scribe lesson plans and produce resources, only to teach lacklustre lessons through exhaustion. On more than one occasion I’ve pointed out that spending longer on the plan than the lesson is a bad use of time, but the 20/30 ratio of hours spent suggest that it’s not a problem unique to NQTs.

As teachers gain more experience, we tend to become quicker at planning. We draw on experience and resources to save time, and yet still we’re working endless hours. While in other roles technology might be seen as a time saver, a way to reduce workload, often in teaching it seems to have become a time-eater. Displays become ever more elaborate, resources ever more fancy, every item is laminated… and to what end?

Perhaps part of the problem is teacher envy? If Margaret in Year 5 can create fantastic displays, then so should I. And if Katie in Year 2 is marking every book with three different coloured highlighters, six types of post-it note and a plethora of coded gel pens, then perhaps we all ought to be.

Of course, leadership teams have their role to play in all of this too. Might we sometimes be at risk of expecting teachers to do everything that can be done, rather than focusing on what should be done? But when that leaves the essentials of planning good lessons to be done at 11 o’clock at night, or piles of marking looming at half term, then maybe we need to make choices about what really matters… and what needs to go by the wayside.

About the author

Michael Tidd is a Year Leader at Vale First & Middle School in Sussex. You can read his blog on education at: michaelt1979.wordpress.com