Teachers are being “bullied” into holding revision sessions outside of school hours to compensate for poor parenting and “lazy students”, the NASUWT conference heard today.
The union’s annual conference this morning passed a motion expressing “deep concern” about “debilitating pressure” to carry out such “interventions”.
The motion noted “the de facto lengthening of the school day through the expectation that teachers will deliver extra lessons outside of the normal timetable”, and highlighted “the bullying of teachers into running ‘booster’ and revision classes after school, at weekends and during holiday periods”.
Members also voted for the union to consider instructing teachers not to hold sessions held outside the school day.
Proposing the motion, Louis Kavanagh, of Solihull, told delegates that pressure from school leaders to run such sessions “instills a sense of guilt in teachers such that they feel they are never doing enough”.
He said the demands came from the “data-targets-accountability agenda”, and school leaders thought it would make them look good in the eyes of inspectors.
Some of the demand for revision sessions was “born of desperation, frantically compensating for a poor learning culture, lazy students, pitiable parenting, ineffectual school discipline measures and structures putting all the burden on the class teacher,” he added.
“If the classroom teacher is to be held culpable for everything, then the student is responsible for nothing - and the school is absolved”.
Katherine Carlisle, of Birmingham, told the conference “intervention amounts to exploitation of teachers,” and said one friend had already run three such sessions during the Easter holiday.
She said teachers were “pressured or coerced” to use their unpaid time to run interventions, with school leaders telling them it increased results by 10-15 per cent, students would be grateful, parents were demanding it, or it could be good for their career progression.
She added: “In essence, teachers are guilt tripped into running intervention sessions”.
Mark Cope said interventions were “viral because it’s poison that spreads and is in danger of becoming normative. It has become normative in most secondary schools that the school day has been lengthened by proxy. For most young teachers, it’s not ‘will you do’, but ‘when will you do’”.
John Godkin, of South Derbyshire, said that workload was the biggest problem in schools, and teachers were being bullied into taking part in these interventions.
The motion also called for the union to continue to campaign for inspection bodies to include the work-life balance of teachers in their frameworks.
