‘A brave new world for educators’: teachers respond to nine-day-fortnight proposals

Schools in England are facing a recruitment crisis, with burnt-out teachers quitting and new graduates wanting jobs that offer greater flexibility and less stress.

In response, Dixons academies trust is to allow teachers to work a nine-day fortnight, while the Department for Education says schools can let staff take their free periods in blocks to work from home. We asked teachers and school leaders if those innovations would help solve the crisis.

Anonymous

Secondary school history teacher

Since I qualified four years ago, I have seen half the people I qualified with leave the profession. That’s a travesty and unless we have innovative, flexible thinking in managers and they stop treating teachers like workhorses, the situation will get worse.

Anything that reduces our workload and allows us to plan better and do all the admin associated with teaching would be welcome. A typical day for me is 11 hours long, starting at 7am and finishing at 6pm. I get a half hour for lunch and half an hour early break every day. But those two half hours are often working – meeting students, planning and phoning parents. We also have to do four breaktime duties over a two-week period. That means we have in effect about an hour and a half free to eat and talk to colleagues every week.

Teachers burn out for a reason. Standing in front of five classes of teenagers with varied needs and working to ensure each can access the work and learn is really hard.

Caroline Derbyshire

Chief executive of the Saffron academy trust in Essex

It’s a really noble ambition of the DfE to look at ways for teachers to use their time more flexibly. The idea that you can work from home where possible is a strong one but the reality is less rosy, because it means the pool of teachers who can cover for their colleagues is thinner, and the cost of supply teachers is astronomical.

The schools looking at timetabling to release staff – it will be interesting to see how that plays with parents, and if it means increasing working hours or online teaching.

The biggest improvement would be recruiting more teachers so that staff had a lighter timetable. There’s been an incremental creep so that teachers have fewer free periods, and they are like gold dust. If you could reduce the contact time staff have by recruiting more staff, by giving schools the budget to do that, that would be the biggest help. But that costs money.

Stuart Lock

Chief executive of Advantage schools in Bedfordshire

I’m attracted by the idea of teachers working a nine-day fortnight, especially the potential for teachers to be well rested and do a good job, and for teaching to be more competitive with other careers. I think it’s innovative, so I’ll be very interested to see how it works.

One of the issues over retention is “stressload” rather than workload, and that’s exacerbated by lack of autonomy. Teachers already work significantly longer hours than contracted, and they get very little autonomy over their time. If they are having a bad day they can’t go for a walk because they’ve got a classroom full of kids to look after. What I would definitely say is that stress, workload and poor behaviour are the things we really need to address.

I understand the intentions behind these suggestions, but I would like to see more detailed implementation before I consider what the unintended consequences are, because we need to remember that schools are run for pupils and to make sure they learn, and that can’t get lost in these proposals.

Becks Boomer-Clark

Chief executive of Lift Schools (formerly AET)

It’s great to see some creative thinking coming through the sector as we all work to grapple the challenges of recruitment and retention.

Many of our schools enable staff to work from home during the week, and we have recently introduced individual learning accounts which allocate £100,000 of professional development to every principal in our network of schools. In addition, our school leaders are eligible for sabbaticals after five years of service with us.

These measures have proved very popular in recent recruitment rounds, leading to many more people applying to work with us.

Glyn Potts

Headteacher of Saint John Henry Newman RC College, a secondary school in Oldham

All of these are initiatives that we should be exploring, particularly for the younger generation of teachers who are more likely to demand a more flexible approach to working.

Dixons have stolen the march on a number of us but that might well be because of their size – they have the ability to manage it. Finances are the issue for most institutions. But it’s a brave new world and I imagine this is going to be the new way for educators to look at things. I’m following the approach and I will see what the outcomes are.