Supporting Staff to Manage their Workload
Teaching is a vocational role, where it is common to feel the “job is never done.” Leaders in our schools, including our Governors take the well-being and workload management of our staff seriously and are constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency whilst maintain our ethos of care and service to our community.
Every job, by its very nature, has a ‘workload’. We all have job descriptions setting high standards and work to be done and that is what employees are paid for.
We regularly review teacher and support staff workload in order to ensure that it is reasonable. We do this as a part of our weekly staff briefings, leaders meetings and in discussion with staff. Our Phase, Year and Team leaders play a strong nurturing role in creating a positive, planned out and manageable working culture for all teaching and non-teaching teams.
Here are some of the things that we do in our schools in order to help staff to manage their workload well…
- Planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time is available to teachers in a ‘block’ of time with their year group colleagues. This supports novice teachers in particular and means organisational activity is shared amongst the team.
- Teaching assistants receive fortnightly professional development training and additional training e.g. phonics, precision support so that they are better able to support teachers with teaching, assessment and planning
- Dedicated leadership and Early Career Teacher release time.
- Curriculum champion release time in order to fulfil their development planning
- Long term, detailed medium term and weekly curriculum planning and resources are centrally produced – meaning teachers are adapting planning to the specific needs of their own class on a weekly basis in response to their assessments.
- Meetings and training are punctual, part of a planned use of time, have a specific objective linked to our schools’ improvement plans and are fit for purpose.
- The detailed termly calendars with all events mapped on to them, are available for staff many weeks in advance to help them plan their time efficiently
- Meetings with parents and carers to discuss Special Educational needs plans (LSP plans) are held during directed time.
- We hold an Academic Review Day in the autumn term (the longest term) where teachers meet with parents within school hours, rather than the usual long “parents’ meetings” after hours in the dark of winter.
- Teachers do not run after school clubs unless they wish to or it is part of their leadership duties and they can manage the additional responsibilities.
- The formats we use to report to parents on pupil progress have been refined many times so that they are fit for purpose and not onerous for staff to complete and are useful to families.
- If teachers so wish, they have access to the school in the evenings, at weekends and during holidays in order to suit the working styles and circumstances of different individuals.
- Work emails and correspondence are not expected to be responded to out of hours.
- The schools uses an instructional coaching approach – all teachers and many support staff have regular coaching to develop their practice in a co-produced and supporting manner.
- The leadership team support staff with communication with our parents and guardians.
- Admin and premises teams meet weekly with their team leads in order to review and organise work according to agreed deadlines.