An article in Tes last year reported on a study that found that 74 per cent of teachers had considered leaving the profession, with 90 per cent of them pointing to workload as a problem.

Fixing this is never going to be simple. There are many things adding to a teacher’s workload: a full timetable, crazy marking policies, shiny-suited senior leaders who have come back from a course full of ideas. All of this lies outside a teacher’s control. But when it comes to workload, I would suggest that we are often our own worst enemies.

In fact, many teachers seem to agree. In a recent poll that I conducted on Twitter, 67 per cent agreed with the statement that “teachers are their own worst enemies when it comes to workload”, with 14 per cent of the 1,681 respondents strongly agreeing. So what is going wrong?

A ‘vocation’

One problem is that the bar just keeps on being raised. Take holiday revision sessions and after-school activities, for example: back in the dawn of time, when I started teaching, pupils did not come into school during the holidays. Ever.

After-school sessions were extra-curricular clubs done for a bit of fun and to widen horizons. Then, some bright spark suggested that they could run a quick catch-up session in the half term before the exam.

Now, fast-forward on a decade, and you find school car parks full during the Easter break and harried children glumly heading in to yet another exam session. The after-school clubs themselves are gone, replaced with revision and intervention sessions that start in September and which are voluntary for staff only in name.

Then there are the teachers who are happy to spend hours of their free time crafting beautiful classroom displays, making full use of their natural artistic talents and passion for craft. It is wonderful that these teachers enjoy their work so much, but it does make it awkward for the rest of us who are hurriedly stapling a few key words to a bit of backing paper. 

There is a pernicious idea that teaching is a “vocation”, which seems to translate as it being a job that you work at endlessly for no thanks and little pay. The tragic thing is the number of teachers who cling to the idea as a badge of honour.

The huge piles of marking, the sleepless nights and the hours growing dizzy over the fumes of your own laminator all become ways of virtue signalling; of saying “I care” and, by implication, “you do not”. All this might be well and good if it weren’t for the retention and recruitment crisis hitting teaching at the same time as funding cuts are really beginning to bite.

Work smart

We all need to be working smarter and looking for ways to do our job (not our vocation) more effectively and efficiently.

I am happy to say that things do seem to be changing. In my own school, we have a head who is very clear that if we deliver well-planned lessons to pupils who work hard, there is no need for revision classes in the holidays and that any intervention sessions after school should be very well-targeted.

There has been a rise in policies about feedback rather than marking, which take into account what is efficient as well as what is effective. We are also starting to see centralised detention systems that remove a lot of the administration away from classroom teachers. This is all excellent, but now the rest of us need to join in.

So please take the time to be proud that you didn’t need to do any marking at the weekend because you have found a more effective way to give feedback. Share the fact that your planning time has been slashed since you started working collaboratively as a department. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care; it means that you are setting an example for the kind of change that the whole profession would benefit from.

Mark Enser is head of geography at Heathfield Community College. He blogs at teachreal.wordpress.com

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