ENGLISH and Welsh teachers may be jealously eyeing Scotland’s 35-hour week. But they would do well to pick through the implementation experience before aping it. It would appear to be a desirable goal but, as Scottish staff have found, there is more to it.

Who decides what constitutes a 35-hour week? Well, the teachers within each school do. 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 and it puts the emphasis on input rather than output. No matter how long it takes to write a pupil report, 15 minutes is typically allowed. If there is a genuine desire to reduce workload a more sensible approach would have been for national negotiators to establish a reasonable caseload. Teachers would benefit from a reduction in number of pupils and a limit on the number of courses.

Unions in Scotland don’t seem very enthusiastic about this fight. They 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 initiatives.

Instead what we still have is a pretence that the job can be done in 35 hours. Time left over once classes are allocated dictates how much time is given to preparation and marking. There is no question of a teacher’s class contact being cut if the arithmetic doesn’t figure.

The pay and conditions deal should in time deliver additional resources and relieve teachers of non-core tasks. In the meantime there is a determination to shoehorn 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 extracurricular activities and the resulting childcare problems. Copying the European 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 accounting exercise for the teachers involved. A more imaginative approach to many ingrained practices could produce similar benefits for all.

It is unfair to expect heads to dupe their staff into believing that a task can be done in the time claimed and at the same time demand the same level of professionalism. It is not possible or ethical in education to abandon tasks because you run out of time. However, it is possible to limit the number of tasks and pupils.

The 35-hour cap on the working week is arbitrary. No one will ever be able to justify to pupils and parents that there simply isn’t the time to deliver education. Union members deserve a rigorous system of task management and not just a time accountancy exercise that in itself creates workload for headteachers and teachers alike.

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