ENGLISH and Welsh teachers may be jealously eyeing the recent pay and conditions deal struck by Scottish teachers that, among other things, delivered a 35-hour working week.

But while it would appear to be a desirable goal, Scottish teachers have found there is more to it.

The teachers within each school have to decide themselves what constitutes a 35-hour week. Union representatives meet with the headteacher to agree on the number of hours to be devoted to each task, how many meetings should take place and establish the priorities.

It was envisaged that this would allow arrangements to be fine-tuned to a school’s particular circumstances. The important and, until now, alien concept is agreement. The unions and the management have to agree or seek outside arbitration.

Herein lies the problem. The exercise is unfortunately nominal. The unions apportion time to prevent new developments and the head tries to ensure that whatever time is designated to core tasks, time is left over for pet projects.

To assign time to tasks is to attempt to measure the length of a piece of string. For instance, no matter how long it takes to write a pupil report, 15 minutes is typically allowed. A more sensible approach would have been for national negotiators to establish a reasonable caseload. This would allow teachers to manage their own time but protect against burdensome volumes.

Teachers would benefit more from a reduction in number of pupils and a limit on the number of courses. Unions could then exert pressure on managers to reduce class sizes, remove bureaucracy and target efforts more effectively in return for new developments that create additional workload.

It would engender a responsibility to examine carefully all aspects of the job for relevance and purpose.

It would put an end to superfluous and ill-thought-out educational initiatives. Instead, what we still have in Scotland is a pretence that the job can be done in 35 hours. The time left over once classes are allocated dictates how much is given to preparation and marking.

The pay and conditions deal should in time deliver additional resources to reduce time in the classroom and relieve teachers of non-core tasks. But in the meantime there is a determination to shoe-horn the current job into 35 hours. Many feel that if they concede this now, the situation will be irretrievable.

The Government wants a more flexible service which delivers more than just the traditional aspects of education. This can be achieved and many agree with the aims. There is no time bonanza delivered just by doing the sums differently.

For example, the structure of the school week could be modified to get round the anti-social hours aspect of extra-curricular activities and the resulting childcare problems.

Copying the Continental and North American model of an afternoon devoted to sport and pastimes would encourage a bigger take-up by staff and pupils alike. School shows could be rehearsed without the participants burning out with exhaustion. The school environment could be enhanced and inter-school matches could be arranged more easily.

This would be a practical solution to many of the practical problems faced by pupils such as poor health, low motivation and boredom. At the same time it would eradicate the need to perform an impossible time-accounting exercise for the teachers involved.

It is not enough to offer a pseudo control over time to heads and teachers. It is unfair to expect heads to dupe their staff into believing that a task can be done within an unrealistic time limit. It is not ethical in education to abandon tasks because you run out of time. However, it is possible to limit the number of tasks and pupils.

Paul Lamarra was until July Educational Institute of Scotland representative in north Lanarkshire and a teacher at Taylor high school in Motherwell. He has now left teaching to write a book.