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PrimarySecondaryHealth & Wellbeing

Teacher Workload – It’s Time to Stand Up and Just Say No

Schools, heads and students are all under pressure and teachers are jammed into the middle of all that, so it’s inevitable that workload is an ever-increasing issue. But it really doesn’t have to be that way…

Sarah Bedwell
by Sarah Bedwell
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It’s 9pm on a Saturday. It’s cold outside, the fire is lit, and it’d be an ideal time to be kicking back reading a great piece of fiction or watching a movie.

Alas, what’s in front of me isn’t a book or a bowl of popcorn; there are piles of books, folders and exam papers. It’s our subject review next week, I’m being observed on Monday and there are learning walks on Tuesday. As a result, my weekend is decidedly less leisurely than normal.

As a teacher, I know that high workload is crippling teachers across the country. Endless marking (books, mock exams, assessments, single marking, triple marking, upside-down-standing-on-your-head marking…), changes to specifications, SATs preparation, Ofsted preparation, appraisal, reviews, learning walks and scrutiny of every aspect of teaching often mean that the actual teaching portion of the job is the smallest focal point of any day.

Schools are under pressure, heads are under pressure, students are under pressure and teachers are jammed into the middle of all that. It’s inevitable that workload is an ever-increasing issue.

But it really doesn’t have to be that way. The vast majority of teachers are employed under School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions, which caps directed time to 1,265 hours per year, plus a reasonable number of hours in order to complete duties including planning and assessment.

Whilst the word ‘reasonable‘ isn’t defined in terms of how many hours per year that may be, there’s no call for teachers to be working until midnight every night and every waking hour of every weekend. That’s both unreasonable and unsustainable.

All too often I see teachers posting pictures of marking and talking about how many hours they’re working in their own time on social media. It’s gotten to the point of almost being a kind of Workload Top Trumps, where you show your commitment to the job by attempting to work yourself into an early grave.

I recall seeing one tweet from a head of department who hadn’t had a single day off in months, and this included the summer holidays. What good does that do?

For your students, it means that you’re not at your best because you’re not getting any rest. For your colleagues, it means that you don’t trust their professionalism and abilities enough in order to delegate tasks to them.

We’re starting to see individual schools taking up the challenge of reducing workload. We can’t rely on the government to take action on the issue – although I’m sure that lovely poster sent out last year did wonders! – so we need to be doing it ourselves.

The unions have been campaigning on workload for years, but it too relies on members standing up and saying enough is enough.

So what can we do? We can stop being doormats and simply complying with requests and new initiatives that increase workload without improving outcomes.

We can stop trying to reinvent the wheel every time a new specification comes out or someone comes up with a new theme to teach.

We can share resources, we can support each other in saying no when it’s appropriate, and we can work smarter, not harder.

We can use better strategies in class to manage marking, such as whole class marking instead of writing the same comments on each book. We can be more aware of our terms and conditions and ask unions for support if policies are unreasonable.

We can just say no.

At the end of the day, being a teacher is a job. Sure, it’s an enjoyable one, and sometimes it’s rewarding and sometimes it’s challenging, but it’s still a job.

Working over a few weekends or a day or two during holidays isn’t so terrible, but if you miss out on living your life because you’re too busy working, then you’re only doing yourself – as well as your family and your students – a disservice.


Sarah Bedwell is a former English and now non-specialist Science teacher in the North West. You can follow her on Twitter at @FlyMyGeekFlag.

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