Teachers - Slaves to the System?

Before I go any further on there’s something you should know…I love being a teacher.

Being in a classroom and witnessing ‘lightbulb moments’ gives satisfaction and delight like no other job. I’ve learnt something new every day – a topic I’ve covered a dozen times or more can suddenly be brought sharply into focus by a student who finds something within it that I have never realised before.

I enjoy the back and forth banter that goes along with teaching a group of students; in-jokes and wacky group dynamics sometimes reduce me to tears of laughter.

Nowadays the tears aren’t quite so happy. Neither mine, nor the colleagues I’ve regularly seen fighting back tears in the staffroom, weighed down by the pressures of a profession out of control.

One of the major issues is time, or the lack of it, in which to do the job.

Everything needs to be done now, preferably yesterday, in triplicate, to satisfy the ‘data monster’ and the obsession with becoming a good / outstanding school.

Teachers will know all about ‘directed time’ and what it means, but for those who don’t, it is the surprisingly small amount of time that teachers are actually paid for. It is 1265 hours over the course of an academic year.

A new teacher (outside London) is paid about £17 for each of these 1265 hours. This might not seem too bad given the minimum wage being significantly lower, but this is not just a starting salary for a graduate, but a post graduate with extra training and a specialist post graduate qualification.

Still, those in teaching know that it is IMPOSSIBLE to do the job without going way beyond those 1265 hours.

A ‘bog standard’ classroom teacher should have about 2.5 hours of time a week on their timetable (PPA) allocated to plan, prepare and assess. In other words: plan lessons, create resources and do all their marking. The rest of their time is spent teaching, being a tutor, in meetings, or on duty at break time. Directed time does not include lunchtime; teachers do not get a paid lunch break, despite often working through it to provide activities for students, prepare for the afternoon lessons or any number of other tasks there is not enough time for.

A classroom teacher has 22-23 hours of lessons on average per week and may be required to teach PSHE, or provide other educational activities, during tutor time.

If a teacher were to spend just 5 minutes planning for each of those 22-23 hours of lessons this totals 110-115 minutes, leaving just 35-40 minutes per week of directed time to create resources and mark everything their students have produced during the week. Oh, plus write reports, answer emails, enter data into the latest colour coded spreadsheet or any of the other myriad of things needing to be done.

Using this simple mathematics it is demonstrably clear that the way in which teaching is structured in the UK means that teachers are expected to work unrecorded amounts of overtime, every week, in order to complete the tasks needed to avoid being put into capability measures.

I’m pretty sure any teacher doing only 40 mins or so of marking a week would soon find themselves in a dire situation, buried under an avalanche of unmarked work, and five minutes per lesson really is not enough to address all of the skills, plan all the different activities and embed the differentiation required to suit the multiple strands of ability within the average class, even if it is finely set. If it is a truly mixed ability class then planning and resourcing will take even longer.

Just imagine what would happen in schools if all teachers worked only the 1265 hours of directed time. The whole system would collapse.

What actually happens is that most teachers work an extra 2-3 hours per day or more, at weekends, and in the ‘holidays,’ just to keep up with the required planning, preparing and marking - working somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week. Often MANY more.

This extra unrecorded work reduces a newly qualified classroom teacher’s hourly rate to about £10 per hour and a classroom teacher at the top of the upper pay scale to about £18 per hour.

Apparently, teachers are professionals, but how many other professions would work so many unrecorded hours? Would a solicitor do that – would they get so far with sorting out a legal situation and think, “You know, I need an extra few hours to work on this, but I really can’t charge my client for that time,” – is that a realistic situation?

Yet money is not what I am concerned about.

The terrible cost of this unrecorded work is felt in the home lives of teachers and their families. Too many teachers are burning themselves out, and their chance of a decent home life, due to the pressure of fulfilling the, quite frankly, impossible demands of a job that has spiralled out of control due to ever changing regulations and ever-increasing demand for data.

Fortunately I have no children, so I have not neglected them in my need to keep up with the demands of the job. I fear for colleagues who do have children. Especially those who stay at school late into the evening, desperately trying to conquer their mountains of marking so that they can give timely individualised feedback, which can then then be responded to by students in order to create the demanded “dialogue”. When do they get to be with their children and watch them grow up?

However, I neglected myself, and I know I am not alone.

I reached a tipping point.

I became unwell - suffering from ‘Work Related Stress’ brought on by trying to keep up with a workload that is impossible to keep up with.

Is it any wonder that graduates are shunning teaching for professions where you: endure less pressure; don’t have impossible demands made of you; are not political footballs; are not required to be the cure-all for the ills of society?