If teachers are contributing £15,000 of unpaid work to the economy each year, that’s around half the salary of a new graduate teacher before tax and student loan repayments (‘Daylight robbery’: two in five UK teachers work 26 hours for free each week, 23 February). It demonstrates that in spite of all the workload research and initiatives, and efforts by schools to write wellbeing policies and show staff that they are valued, any success in reducing workload is marginal.
There’s an enormous gap between the image propagated by the Department for Education’s Every Lesson Shapes a Life adverts, which show smiling teachers engaged in constant life-enhancing interaction that makes a real difference to pupils’ educational progress and wellbeing, and the reality of long lonely evenings spent glued to a computer away from family and friends. If the DfE doesn’t want to show this downside, perhaps it should do more to cull the excessive unproductive bureaucracy that’s destroying the profession.
Too often, workload solutions are “tips” and “hacks” – quick tactics to cut corners rather than long-term strategic solutions that address the burgeoning bureaucracy that is directly responsible for poor recruitment and retention rates. What is really needed is a full-scale job evaluation to identify the core educational activities that teachers are uniquely able to perform. Leaders should evaluate using the mantra from the DfE’s 2016 Marking Policy Review Group report to ensure that all tasks are “meaningful, manageable and motivating”, and cull the rest.
Or the government could cough up the extra cash to pay teachers properly. Sadly, Gillian Keegan’s request for unions to consider the impact of pay demands on school budgets is a clear indication that, once more, schools will be underfunded and such redress is unlikely.
Yvonne Williams
Ryde, Isle of Wight
• Do you have a photograph you’d like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers’ best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
