UK Teacher Workload (caution: 'unteacher-like' language)

Disclaimer: all info included in this article is from my own teaching experience. I am fully aware that other teachers in the UK will have had significantly more positive and/or negative experiences than my own.

I've been a teacher for almost 8 years (starting at the age of 30 after working a number of roles in private industry), working in state-run schools and academies. I started training just after the Conservative/LibDem coalition government was formed, and was told by the course leader in the first week that there would be momentous changes (not necessarily positive) in teaching as a result. She was not wrong.

My Postgraduate Certificate in Education focus was Social Science, something the government decided they didn't really give a shit about. As Margaret Thatcher once famously said, 'There is no such thing as society.' They proved this by reducing the monthly bursary to £440 for the year I training, and then scrapped it altogether the following year, whilst offering £1000 a month to those training to teach ICT (along with 'golden handshakes' of £5000 for staying in their first teaching position for at least 12 months). As my first school placement was a 105-mile round trip, this all went on petrol between September and December. Thank fuck for my wonderful parents who allowed me to live with them rent-free for the duration of the course.

All went relatively swimmingly and I passed the course with master’s credit in July 2011, did a bit of supply work in a lovely special school, and landed a great maternity cover role teaching Geography in a state-run school only a 12-minute drive from my house. I rocked up at 7.30am and was out the door as soon as the kids finished at 2.50pm. I had time to mark in my 5 free periods, and would often spend my afternoons at the gym or out at the pub with colleagues. I could get used to this.

Problem was, I wasn’t a Geography specialist, so my contract wasn’t renewed after having been there almost 18 months. It wasn’t until shortly after I left that I found out that things there had started to become somewhat unpleasant. Teaching assistants were pulled from every subject area apart from English, Maths and Science. Every teacher in those three subjects were given their own dedicated TA who would set up the classroom at the start of the day, tidy up after each lesson, and sometimes even do ‘tick-and-flick’ marking for each group. All remaining TAs were fired.

My first thought was, ‘how awful’ and, ‘I’m sure that’s just an isolated incident.’ Holy shit, was I wrong. I moved to an academy in a prominent university city the following September and experienced the full might of the new education business model in my first academy.

Gone were TAs. Seriously; I didn’t meet a single one in my 2 years in that role. The internet system was so crap that there was a 6-second lag between picture and sound when I attempted to play video of any length. Kids don’t deal well with that sort of bullshit. I couldn’t print in colour for TWO YEARS (colour’s pretty important when you teach Geography), and the IT department couldn’t figure out why. I knew why; Cambridgeshire schools received £600 per student less than the average in England, the lowest in the entire country. The three blinds in my classroom were falling apart; it took 8 months for them to be fixed.

And then came workload. Contact hours with the students started at 8.25am and ended at 4.30pm. ‘That’s only an 8-hour day’, I hear you opine. Fair enough, most people work more than that these days. But that was CONTACT time. That didn’t include marking, planning, emails, meetings, break duties, report-writing, data entry, CPD, progress checks, parent’s evenings and the myriad other things expected of us (including the 2-and-a-half hour round trip each day). In a normal school this would be seen as a significant workload. In a severely underfunded school where nothing works, it is IMPOSSIBLE.

After about a year I had my first nervous breakdown. I went back after the doc gave me massive doses of anti-depressants and the academy-employed occupational health officer gave me a cursory look and said, ‘Well, you’re not physically shaking, so you’re good to go’. Management decided that, rather than gently reintroduce me to my role, they’d guilt-trip me into working even more hours and try to identify a pattern in my absences so they could essentially manage me out. I lasted another 8 months before having a second breakdown and didn’t return.

I decided to give teaching one last shot. I got a department head role at a new school in a different city. We only had years 7, 8 and 9, and I was given carte blanche to completely redesign the entire Humanities program of study. It was lovely for a while. SLT were amazing, the kids were lovely, and I felt more relaxed in my new role than in any previous teacher (or non-teaching) role. I worked from 7am till 5pm, but it didn’t bother me, because the working environment was so supportive and everything WORKED. I was in teacher heaven.

Fast-forward two years and we start our very first year 11 run at the new GCSEs. The government, now no longer a coalition, but a full-on Conservative ‘majority’, have seen through Michael Gove’s reforms to ensure GCSEs are more stringent. This means that the content of the Geography course has grown by almost a third, and there is no longer a foundation exam for lower-ability students. There is also no coursework. Basically, if you are either a lower-ability student, or you struggle with exam pressure, you’re fucked. Thanks, Gove, you horrendous human mince balloon.

The total change in course content of course meant a complete redesign of two years-worth of lessons. That’s 39 weeks x 3 hours x 2 years. That’s 234 new lessons to plan. Awesome. For those of you who already teach in the UK, this will come as absolutely no surprise. The issue wasn’t in the redesign. We knew these changes were coming. What we didn’t know was just how much extra work we would get on top of it. We are expected to work 1265 hours a year, and that is what we are paid for. That works out at roughly 32.5 hours a week. Yeah, good one.

This extra stuff, on top of the rest of my workload, caused me to have another long period of absence due to work-related stress. Management were lovely and supportive, and have done everything they can to get me back on my feet. This included a long phased return and amended duties, for which I will be eternally grateful.

I’m dropping my leadership role as of September 2018 in the hope that the stress of admin will be somewhat relieved. The following is my calculations of what I will ACTUALLY do from September in the hope that people will realise just how much teachers in the UK are being shafted by government reforms. Obviously, some teachers will have it better, and some worse, and this is simply a demonstration of the expectations of me and the teachers I currently work with.

Teaching time
22 hours x 39 weeks = 858 hours

Book marking
25 books x 7 classes @ 3 minutes per book (very conservative estimate) = 8.75 hours
8.75 hours x 20 (marking is currently fortnightly) = 175 hours

Form time
2.5 hours x 39 weeks = 97.5 hours

Data entry – once per half term
25 students x 7 classes @ 2 minutes per student = 6 hours x 6 (half terms) = 36 hours

Report writing
25 students x 7 classes @ 5 minutes per report = 14.5 hours

Meetings/CPD
1 hour x 39 weeks = 39 hours

Parent’s Evenings
5 sessions @ 3 hours each = 15 hours

Planning
Roughly 4 lessons a week for me (this is WAY lower than a lot of teachers) = about 3 hours a week = 117 hours

Break duties
1 hour x 39 weeks = 39 hours

Assessment marking
25 papers x 7 classes @ 5 minutes (conservative again!) = 14.5 hours x 12 (2 per half term) = 174 hours

Grand total = 1565 hours.

I’ve left out stuff like show rehearsals, getting students breakfast when they don’t get fed at home, completing child protection forms, calling home regarding good/poor work and conduct, sending and reading emails, EHCP paperwork, and shitloads more that I can’t remember right now (I’ve been typing for two hours now).

So it appears that I do at least 300 hours’ work for FREE per year. I will be on roughly £36k from September. That means that, in order to simply deliver an education to my students, I’m being screwed out of approximately £8,500 a year.
In summary; shit money, ridiculous workload, wilfully deaf government, and at the time of writing, 4,500 teachers on long-term absence with stress.

And people wonder why teachers are leaving.