There are good reasons for making strenuous efforts to reduce teacher workload. Here are some:
- It is too heavy. This is my thirty-third year in education and although I don’t remember a time when teacher workload wasn’t an issue, I think that the conditions in which teachers work now are worse than they have been at any other time in those thirty-three years. Why? Because of:
- the steady erosion of teachers’ pay and conditions over the last number of years – this issue is absolutely not unique to teaching/schools, of course, but it is one factor, and a big one
- the relentless increase in school accountability, reflected in schools in England facing accountability measures (Ofsted inspection, school performance tables etc…) that are amongst the most stringent in the world (see my anecdotal note below)
- the impact of austerity on schools, including the breath-taking reduction in the wraparound services that schools used to enjoy far more of – health services, social services and SEND support services, for example; these are now achingly difficult to secure
- the dramatic growth in learning issues and mental health issues among children and young people in recent years, that teachers and other staff in schools face head on every day
- the failure of investment in education to keep pace with inflation, the degradations in support services and the extraordinary increase in students’ needs
It is these things in combination that make the basic job in the classroom more challenging now than it has ever been. Of course, almost all of this is true for school support staff, too.
- The attempt to reduce workload obliges us to reflect on the most important activities teachers should invest their time in – as Dylan Wiliam once out it, you have to stop teachers doing good things, so they have time to do better things: paying close attention to teachers’ workload helps us all with deciding on what matters most – the things that provide ‘the biggest bang for the buck’
- Teacher workload and wellbeing are closely linked. When leaders pay close attention to workload, it helps colleagues to feel valued – even when there are no easy solutions – and reductions in workload reduce the risk of teacher absence and burnout; happier teachers teach better
- The rate of drop-out in teaching is very high: it is estimated that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all new teachers leave the profession within 3-5 years. This leads to chronic teacher shortages in schools, with schools forced to change their curriculum, and/or use long-term supply teachers, and/or deploy teachers to teach outside their specialism
Reducing teacher workload is hard to do, but it’s right, and it’s worth it.
