How is your workload?
We’ve been reading a lot of articles in the TimesEd these last weeks about how teachers’ work-loads haven’t really reduced, in spite of regulations in England trying to limit working hours. The results from a survey of 3,453 UK teachers suggests that over the past five years:
- Under 4% thought the workforce agreement had reduced their workload substantially
- 38% through their workload had reduced slightly
- Half thought there was no difference
- And the rest actually thought their workload had increased
In fact, judging by the response to the article, the problem is even more severe than that. As one teacher puts it:
In my present job we have an entire afternoon’s PPA time AND an entire hour set aside for subject co-ordination. You’d think this would help… How wrong I was. I have more time, and now I have more to do … I have always longed for the day when I could use plans developed in one year for the next year, but constant innovations and curriculum changes have always prevented this from happening. I have had to do new plans each year… These were unchanged ideas re-jigged on to plans that stretched to 3 sides of A4. So I still have to do the bulk of my planning on Sunday…. The basic rule of thumb seems to be more time, more work.
Government meddling and bureaucracy aside, the more-than-obvious point made in the article was that ‘somebody has got to do the work’. Although classroom assistants and extra central admin staff can pick up some of the burden, tasks like marking and lesson preparation have to be done by the class teacher. But that is where Teachable is trying to help.
We haven’t come up with a way to halve marking time YET, but we can halve your preparation time by providing all the material you need on one easy to use site. The question is: is there more we can do? What else would save you time?
