As Ofsted Denounces Needless Teaching Duties, Heads Must Keep Up And Give These Practices The Boot
Why do so many schools still persist with time-consuming things that will no longer be inspected? There is a workload crisis you know, says Michael Tidd
- by Michael Tidd
If this is your staffroom copy of the magazine, it may be the month to inadvertently leave it in your headteacher’s office. And if it’s your own copy, delivered to home, well, maybe put it in your head’s office anyway. For as much as I try to write as a classroom teacher, there are some things where headteacher’s make the final call, and I’m beginning to get a bit frustrated by the fact that too many seem not to be keeping up!
There are the beginnings of a seismic shift in education, but in an increasingly disconnected landscape it seems that messages take longer to filter through. It means that things are still going on in schools that just need not be happening. And worse, these practices are going on in the name of Ofsted, which the inspectorate itself will proclaim ought not be happening.
Despite the efforts of the powers that be, there are still plenty of schools where pointless practices persist, and exhausted teachers continue to do the best they can under an unbearable workload. In times of high staff turnover and increasing difficulties with recruitment we ought to be doing everything we can to make teachers’ lives easier. So what should headteachers be doing? Or more to the point, what should they stop doing?
Half-termly data collection
There is no question that Ofsted was once to blame for this one, but it is equally clearly distancing itself from such rules now. What’s more, the DfE Assessment Commission last year was very clear that collecting data more than three times a year is “not likely to provide useful information”. There is no good reason to be collecting data so frequently, and plenty of reasons – not least that of workload – for ditching the data drops!
So why is it, then, that so many schools still insist on collecting data every six to eight weeks? Who are they collecting it for? If it’s for Ofsted, then you can stop straight away. If it’s for local authorities or academy chief executives, then it needs headteachers to stand up and be counted. It is they who must say they won’t expect these things of their staff.
Triple marking
Again, there’s every possibility that it was praise of such practices by Ofsted that led to them suddenly become the ‘must-do’ for schools everywhere. But those days are gone. National Director for Education at Ofsted, Sean Harford, goes out of his way to make clear that Ofsted doesn’t have any expectations about approaches to marking. And again, the DfE’s workload group have added more support, pointing out “the time taken to mark does not always correlate with successful pupil outcomes and leads to wasted teacher time”.
That leaves us with the same challenge: how do we get headteachers to step in and lead a change? As classroom teachers, there is an opportunity to share the good news with school leaders, but then in each school heads and executive heads still have much authority. It’s they who need to make the decision to look again at marking policies to find a better way.
Pointless planning
I’m the first to argue that planning is probably one of the most important things we do as teachers. But to me that means reflecting on what the children know, working out what to teach next, and devising the very best ways to do it. It isn’t about filling out boxes on a standard template that gets submitted to the headteacher every Friday afternoon. For a start, surely headteachers have better things to be doing than reading through the detail of every lesson in their school.
More importantly, as soon as the task becomes about completing the boxes, it loses some of its power. How often do we tell novice teachers that they ought to be prepared to abandon the plan? So why insist on writing it out in such detail in the first place? As the DfE’s planning workload group said: “Planning a sequence of lessons is more important than writing individual lesson plans”.
The reality for headteachers is that if they don’t address these problems, they may find another one exacerbated – recruitment. There are plenty of schools who’d be glad to snap up teachers who’ve had enough of being asked to do too much for no purpose!
Michael Tidd is deputy headteacher at Edgewood Primary School in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
