What time did you last finish work? I don’t mean when you left the building – I mean when did you actually switch off from work? 6pm? 11pm? 3am?
Our ‘always on’ culture encourages us to be constantly available via email, Twitter, WhatsApp, SMS, the list goes on. Small wonder that primary classroom teachers now work an average of 55.5 hours a week (based on the 2016 Teacher Workload Survey), 17.5 of which are at evenings and weekends. For senior leaders it’s just shy of 60 hours a week, with the equivalent of almost two 9-hour days (17.6 hours) worked outside of normal school hours.
The DfE’s guidance on teachers’ pay and conditions states that beyond the standard 1,265 working hours expected from full-teachers, “A teacher must work such reasonable additional hours as may be necessary to enable the effective discharge of the teacher’s professional duties.” The key words here are ‘reasonable’ and ‘effective’, but how many of the aforementioned extra hours are either of those things? The vast majority of ‘out of hours’ hours are worked at home, late in the evening or over the weekend.
According to the DfE’s own research published in March this year, “All part- time teachers reported that they worked on their non-working weekdays,” effectively seeing their days off as ‘unpaid PPA time’ That’s time when staff ought to be relaxing and recharging their batteries so that they’re ready to work at their full capacity during the working day – delivering superb lessons and making a difference for pupils.
It’s clear that these long hours are counter-productive, yet they persist across the sector. The well-documented health issues related to excessive working include increased risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke, amongst other things. Yet there still remains a deep-rooted acceptance that a successful teaching career involves excessively long term-time hours, usually topped off with a few working days during the holidays.
It should be noted that school staff tend to be conscientious and don’t mind working hard – in fact, many thrive on it. I can count on the fingers of one hand the teachers I’ve encountered in my 24-year career who ‘weren’t really into it’ and still have a couple left over. Yet this conscientiousness, coupled with a high accountability culture, works against staff when the jobs to be done simply can’t fit within a reasonable working week. We know this is leading to acute retention issues, but the long-term health impacts are even more pernicious.
So ask yourself this – are your school’s policies inadvertently adding to invisible hours worked at home? Is your data collection proportionate and focused on supporting pupil progress? Are emails sent during evenings and weekends? Do senior management model healthy behaviours? And are any new initiatives considered in light of their impact on workload?
Sam Collins is the founder of Schoolwell – an online directory of wellbeing resources for schools; visit schoolwell.co.uk or follow @samschoolstuff
