Leadership development in schools could be improved, says this teacher, and workloads must be tackled.
“I teach modern languages in a high school. That means the school takes from Years 9 to 13, so the youngest pupils I teach are aged 14. It’s a big school, in a well-off area.
I am currently taking a development programme for middle leaders run by the National College for School Leadership: a government agency which aims to build leadership skills in the education system. It’s a good way of improving things in your school, as you’ve got to identify a gap – something you can change in your school to improve results. You then come up with a strategy, which must be approved by the head, and you put procedures in place to achieve the improvements over time. The course teaches you to deal with things you don’t normally know about as a teacher, such as understanding higher-level data on results.
Although this course is positive, I think the development of leaders in schools generally is awful: schools don’t necessarily appoint the right person for the job. Instead it can be based on politics, or the opportunities for development go to people who are already doing well. A lot of it comes down to money: teachers’ pay increases with responsibility and seniority, so it can be cheaper to give extra responsibilities to someone who is already on a higher pay scale. Rather than promote someone and pay them £8,000 extra to do an entirely new job, the school will try to manage with someone senior taking on those responsibilities for £2,000 more than they are already paid.
The workload for classroom teachers is just far too much. I don’t mind working hard, and I just get on with doing the work; but if I sat down and thought about how much I do now compared to when I began teaching, I think I’d get quite stressed out. It’s not because I’ve taken on more senior roles; there’s just so much expected of you. We are constantly having to justify what we’re doing, with senior staff trying to manage our time rather than letting us, as professionals, get on with our jobs. There’s a lot more admin and extra reporting to parents – we write reports every half term, but it becomes meaningless because we don’t have time to make the reports detailed enough to help parents.
I think senior staff feel pressure from having to hit targets, but the targets tend to affect classroom teachers as much, if not more than senior staff. If we’re under pressure to improve our GCSE pass rate in a subject, then teachers with full timetables often have to put in the extra hours and the extra initiatives to make sure the kids get through.
Many schools are also facing pressure because they are thinking of applying for academy status, as a way to get more money. The academy scheme used to be for underperforming schools, but the status is now only given to high-performing schools – and while government has relaxed the criteria a bit since it came to power last year, a school still has to reach certain criteria and prove that it can run itself to become an academy. That means some schools are stuck: unless you can afford to put in extra resources to enable the school to reach those criteria, everyone working there has to do a lot more work.
A few years ago the government introduced a policy called Rarely Cover, which said that teachers shouldn’t have to cover lessons on a regular basis – the idea was to help reduce
our work load. So now our school has ‘cover supervisors’ who take lessons if teachers are ill or away. But the drawback of cover supervisors is that they’re not trained teachers, and the kids don’t respect them. It just means that when you get back to your class you often receive from the supervisor a list of complaints about bad behaviour, and things have happened that you then need to deal with. It ends up more work for you. Personally, I’d rather do a cover and save someone the hour-long hassle that comes with taking over after a cover supervisor, in return for other teachers covering my lessons and saving me that extra work. I think most teachers would prefer that arrangement, if the money spent on cover supervisors could be spent elsewhere to reduce our workload.
Another thing that has got worse is the paperwork around taking kids out for trips. I used to run a ski trip, but had to give it up for family reasons. Obviously, there are dangers involved with a ski trip, but now the procedures involved are so onerous that no-one else would take it on, so it’s just stopped. It’s going to reach a point where no-one’s willing to put their job on the line – which is what it can come down to – to give kids these experiences. That’s a shame, because these experiences can be really positive. Many of us enjoyed them at school ourselves, but now the kids we teach won’t have that opportunity.”