The education secretary has to be congratulated on leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to ensure that schools are fully staffed. It is understood that Damian Hinds’ previous attempts at tackling the recruitment and retention crisis failed in converting starters to full-time teaching. And unless those at the top understand the key barrier to the success of their newest scheme to make part-time work more accessible, it, too, will follow the same path.
I have known cases where job-sharing has worked very well to the satisfaction of all parties - in primary schools. But, as a full-time head of department at secondary level, managing many different configurations of full-time staff, part-time staff and of timetabled classes, I can see serious drawbacks to the scheme.
The job can’t be easily divided into work-friendly segments, except at A level where it’s more desirable to share classes than to tie them to just one teacher. However, in the time when my department taught shared classes, the experience only added to workload, rather than cutting it (as we had hoped). The coordination and continuity needed to execute this job-sharing does take extra meeting time that, often, busy teachers just don’t have in a normal working day. And trust me, having to meet outside school hours is not a popular resolution to this problem.
The biggest questions around job-sharing are whether or not the school is prepared to fund the coordination hours or whether these will come out of the budget of the job-sharers. The role will involve two people collaborating at each data-drop, two teachers for parents’ evenings. As an add-on effect, the job of the manager is only made more complicated.
The burden of teacher workload
If job-sharing and part-time working are ever to be attractive, they have to be fair to people in full-time posts as well. At present, one of the chief attractions of a part-time job is that pastoral duties aren’t always included in the contract. The pro-rata pay is based on lessons taught - not the other significant time-consuming elements of core hours and teaching tasks. But then, the full-timers are the ones who usually write the pastoral reports. Some schools try to even up this imbalance by involving part-timers as deputy for -tutors and as mentors; but this still leaves the paperwork in the domain of the full-timer.
This can laed to a significant skewing of a full-time contract, whereby many lessons will appear in clumps with little space for breathing, just in order to accommodate a part-timer who is in for a few days a week. Quite understandably, the part-timer doesn’t want to have a patchwork quilt configuration of lessons, so the teaching times need to be sustainable.
If the interests and time of full-time and job-sharing employees could be protected and tasks fairly distributed, that would be a step in the right direction.
I can assure Damian Hinds that it is not only male school leaders who are concerned about the real disadvantages of a job-sharing scheme when the working patterns of a school are still as they exist currently.
When Mr Hinds asks women why they are not seizing the opportunity to return to teaching at the first available moment, he overlooks the fact that women have already experienced excessive workload before birth (the most arduous labour of our lives!). Why would they want to go back to that?
The raising of a child is too precious, but also too all-consuming, to add the unnecessary stress of never being good enough, never having enough time and never having enough sleep into the mix. The school holidays haven’t compensated for any of this in a very long time.
This doesn’t just affect parents, but those who are also carers. These teachers have similar problems: they may need that clear divide between work and home, they may need to drop everything in order to provide instant support. Teaching in its current form just does not give them this opportunity. No matter how understanding a school is, there is a lot of stress caused by having to ask and arrange a short-notice cover. Caring is exhausting, but it also leaves little room for any over-spill from the teaching day.
But where the latest initiative really misses the point is in supporting those teachers who left classrooms full-time in a gesture of defeat; the ones that deserved more than to cope with the demands that currently exist. This role wasn’t the one they signed up to in their training years and it’s certainly no longer the one that reflects their vocational and professional values.
The Department for Education has done some excellent work bringing together ordinary teachers from across the spectrum of education. It has funded and supported really valuable, thought-provoking and practical solutions to some of the worst symptoms of workload. While Damian Hinds hasn’t been slow to make public statements about emails, planning, marking, data-drops and the unintended side effects of edtech, it’s a bit like weeding the edges of an overgrown garden: unless you mow the grass, it’s relatively pointless.
Something much more fundamental needs to be done, something more than understanding what we can reasonably expect of teachers. Until we revisit the teachers’ contracts, until we decide what the core tasks should be and until we strip away the administrative burden in whatever form it takes, we will be no closer to resolving the shortfall in the teaching professionals so desperately needed to expand classrooms.
At the end of the day, if we want to solve the recruitment and retention problem then we need job-shrinking more than we need job-sharing.
Yvonne Williams is a Head of English and drama in the south of England.
