Scoins.net

I have, of late, been wondering about this very topic. I wrote in the past about the value of gardening as a process that produces food but that for this to have an economic value the time spent in gardening must been written off as enjoyment, leisure or some-such, since the produce harvested is not so extremely much better than can be purchased for a lesser cost.

In a similar way I am beginning to question employment, and teaching in particular. I have claimed in the past that teaching is not the stressful environment complained about by so many, but have since learned that I was in a privileged position. I have also said that workplace stress can be exceeded elsewhere—and I hold to that—but it would remain true that there is employment which is relatively less stressful than teaching, even teaching in a 'nice' school.

Now, some of the stress is self-imposed. Teachers are largely self-motivated, which is why it is known as a calling, a vocation. This means that many in academia will do a lot of work 'for the students', quite possibly beyond that which is necessary and that which is sufficient. Kids are not perfect learning machines by any measure, so one would expect even the most hardened workplace critic to expect a high level of redundancy in delivery of content. For me, that redundancy is way too high throughout most of the twelve to fifteen years we have of education, but that is a personal opinion based on very limited observation.

Those outside teaching understandably point to "all those holidays".  Let's have a little look at that. Schools in England are supposed to run for 380 'sessions', where a session is a half day, so children should attend 190 days and teachers should expect to do 195 days [1]. That's 39 weeks a year, leaving, apparently, 13 weeks not at school — which sounds absolutely brilliant, doesn't it?  That doesn't tell you how long a 'day' is; it doesn't tell you about lesson preparation, time spent on the phone to parents, time in meetings, time marking, doing activities. Nor does it tell you about the trips with kids outside those working weeks and the additional work attached to them. If you're any sort of senior teacher, you'll be in school for the second half of August worrying over results — but I suggest that these days are often in lieu of some of the trips that other staff will have made.

What would be acceptable as a working week in return for 39 weeks of work? Simply taking a 40 hour week for 49 weeks a year suggests 2450 hours, and therefore suggests that a teacher, if paid at a similar rate per hour to an equivalently qualified person, might deliver some [48/39*40 =] 50 hours per week. And if you like the idea of a 35 hour week, a 48-week year, (1680 hours a year) would suggest 43 hours a week.

I have reported on other pages that across my teaching career I averaged 55 hours a week.  55 hour weeks for 39 weeks a year implies 2145 hours a year. Outside the expected 39 weeks, I was often included in school trips (mostly for being a Mountain Leader); I often had CCF Camp and I often had CCF courses — many years I exceeded the allowed 50 CCF days per year, very few of which would simultaneously be 'school' days, so we can easily call that 44 weeks, often filling weekends, equivalent to perhaps 49 out of 52. So not in any sense part-time. A typical office worker does 1600 hours per year; the Working Time Directive, WTD, [2] conflicts with this school experience and the let-out, I think, is two-fold: 

(i) each school should have a working time agreement as part of the contract and this is something unions and administrations have been surprisingly poor at achieving — even as the administrators themselves work silly hours per week.

(ii) each 17 week period includes a significant amount of 'holiday', which in theory at least brings the average total down significantly. The situation where boarding occurs moves one far nearer the 'exceptions' list that the NUT (inset text box) specifically excludes: Where 24-hour staffing is required (in boarding, on any trip away) working time is not measured and you're 'in control' of your own time. This last is, presumably, where independent schools succeed, but 'in control' is not how I would describe very much of teaching, though that would very much depend on your manager.

[2] makes it clear that 48 hours is the maximum in any week. Many teachers will scoff at this. Across a year of 50 weeks that suggests 2400 hours a year is a maximum. I doubt that I ever fell to this level and have recorded several years exceeding 3000 hours, once over 3500. ²  Okay, I kept on doing it, so I accept that a lot of these hours were from choice and I certainly enjoyed many of the years in the job. But I was mostly lucky in my employer and colleagues and I don't stress as easily as many — or perhaps I actually enjoy a level of stress that others would find abhorrent. I apologise to my family for those years spent at work and not at home. 

Was it worth it? In money terms those weeks 'away' were a net financial benefit, since CCF pays by the day and many if not all of the activities would have been pursued by me outside any non-teaching employment. So, in a sense much of my leisure time was spent as part of my work; that is a net benefit if you get on well with the kids; it is also a net benefit if your leisure activities are not those of your family.  if you don't get on well with the kids, or if the kids make the time away really stressful, then this is not fun at all and probably the net effect is negative. So you consequently drop the activity or the offending kids — or you fix the problem some other, better, way. That's also a part of the job, really. So I think one should compare the 2400 hours per year rather than any larger figure, and also accept that some teachers will successfully reduce their year to more like 2100 hours per year. Which is still more than the stereotypical 'office-worker'. 

Pay? I rarely exceeded £35k per year, so that makes for an hourly rate of £10 to £15. At current pay rates a teacher might expect to receive £25-40k depending on years in post, so £10 to £15 per hour.  When working in China, and the boss, I was quite well aware that my hourly rate was the least of the foreign staff, simply because my hours were so high. Living costs were very low, so this was net gain by comparison with living in Britain; certainly I made capital gains across that time (i.e., earnings exceeded spending, so there was income that became capital).  Median pay in the UK is £27k implying between £11 and £12 per hour. My wife, when only recently qualified, was paid too little to meet the minimum requirements for residency (60% of median, £16800 after tax) which made her pay around the statutory minimum. I say this rather invalidates the years (time and money) put into qualifying.

Is this good pay? Well, that would depend very much on what you think is fair return for work proffered  It depends too on whether you think teaching is a worthwhile career and whether you are prepared to accept lower income in return for the privilege and enjoyment of being in some sense allowed to be a teacher. This is what a vocation is, and this is how our society rewards vocational work. For comparison, look at nursing pay grades and you'll see a similar pattern. Is it adequate pay? Well, it should be. Yet I worry at the number of past colleagues for whom retirement is anything but comfortable — that seems to me to send a message that the pay was not adequate. Particularly, I suggest that teachers are relatively well educated so that you might also reasonably expect them to have made sensible provision for later life. 

Is teaching worthwhile now? Sitting on the other side of the spousal relationship, so that I'm the one at home while she goes off to teach, I am no longer of the same opinion I was when being the one enjoying teaching. My wife sleeps at home, but I see her very little since it seems that every waking moment is spent onsite or at her desk. Work is continuous when onsite (lunch is quite clearly not downtime and too often lunch simply doesn't happen); her return from work gives us some interaction, almost entirely filled with moaning about school, release of suppressed temper — I am not at all enjoying being married to a teacher. The working day runs from 08:00 to 17:30, but usually 18:00. Every evening includes at least three hours work and weekends include usually six to ten more. There is a weekly duty night and across a year there are probably ten weekends with a day or partial day at school. Taking Friday night off (I disagree with her, but it is what she does) leaves us with an apparent working week of 70 hours. I thought this was high, so I looked again, to find a range; I see the fewest hours as 55 and the most as 75, but observation says that a week of 55 is bracketed by heavier weeks, which implies that 55 is less than necessary. Though all measures are themselves measured against the particular teacher's version of 'necessary'.

It would be unfair to say we two teachers are equivalent and we are, of course, only two data points. We are similarly qualified. Our subjects are very different; this is, a little to my surprise, relevant. Maths lends itself to black & white, binary thinking. Stuff, especially lower down the school, is simply right or wrong. This makes a lot of marking very swift. Actually, that is true while the work is right. This would seem to not translate to language, but it might be that I am simply far more ruthless in opinion, which could be down to differences in age or gender quite as much as subject. Another factor that occurs to me is that maths for me was always streamed, while language classes seem not to be. I see that as a difficulty, but have been told that this is so common it simply becomes part of the teaching landscape, so one adapts lessons to use this as a positive. I can accept that.

Where the subjects are decidedly not equal is the time given per week per class. For KS3, Y7-9 aged about 11-13, maths would have a lesson a day, 3 to 4 hours a week, just like English. However, Modern Foreign Languages [MFL] do not; in a 'good' environment there just might be the same timetabled time for all MFL as for English, but usually less. That means that the competent student will have less than half as much teaching time on any language as they do for Maths or English. Is Maths somehow a bigger subject? [No, says the devil inside me, it's a bugger subject].  If so, how is this justified? What seems to have happened is that subjects are judged not equal; some are more equal than others, as is seen by the time devoted to them. Among the consequences, students with widely separated lessons take correspondingly longer to 'remember' what happened in the previous lesson. From a timetabling point of view, then, it would be far more effective for two-language students to run languages in different halves of the year, pushing lessons closer and reducing the memory drag. That would also require exams to be on offer more than once a year, which would all be more efficient in the short term. What works against this, of course, is the memory loss around to the next academic year. Another consequence is on the teacher's side; for two equivalent teachers of Maths and MFL, the linguist has twice as many different classes as the STEM specialist. So more reports to write, less opportunity to engage with the students, so less rapport and further consequences follow. Bad behaviour from the bottom set (or worst, the second-from-bottom set) may also be unequal, but I'll bet that both teachers think they have the worse of the matter; the linguist has twice as many 'bad' pupils while the mathematician has the same bad pupils twice as often.

It is also unequal for me to claim to be equal to my spouse as a teacher, since I have 30 years of service and she has a small fraction of that. What I say applies or does not is coloured by more years (experience, compromise, opportunity, forgetting the bad, etc) and indeed by that experience we both have being not actually shared, neither current nor at the same school. These are not equivalent experiences even before we compare subject biases. 

Our teaching demands are more different still. I taught mostly sixth form, so I had more classes than most mathematicians (more than those at other schools, more than most of my colleagues). So I might well have 3 classes Y7-11 and maybe 7 classes Y12-13, many of which would be 4-lesson weeks as half of an A-level. This would push my report count high, especially if I picked up some additional class such as IT or Physics. My spouse teaches primary and secondary so she has had classes in every year group from 1 to 13; immediately she has more classes as a newly qualified teacher than I did when a long-established one. Worse, she has classes for half the time I would — as explained already. On top of that, the Y11-13 material might well be 1st language (the students already speak Chinese) but might easily separate into A-level and two versions of the IB. Just the second condition, two versions of IB in the same room is equivalent to me having to teach Mechanics and Statistics to a combined class. The only thing we have in common in Y12&13 is class size; my Further Maths students were the cream of the school, the 1st language Chinese, especially those entered for 2nd language Chinese, are at the other end of the spectrum.

So are our experiences of teaching the same? No.

Worse yet, outside the teaching timetable I was in demand (or allowed to move myself to places that suited me personally) to do things that others would call leisure activities. I was effectively paid to take exercise and, in other workplaces and as already said, these are things I would have paid to do (and now do so). Taking mostly boys for things deemed to be exercise is a lot less difficult than handling a reluctant class outside the timetable, especially at a school that offers enough alternatives for effectively everyone to be doing their preferred choice. This is not hard work in the same way as the classroom might be, and we should recognise that more lessons, when others are at play, is worse than more lessons when others are teaching.  But my wife has a different experience, despite being, relatively speaking, quite as physically ept (the opposite of inept) as myself. Her after-school activities turn out to be mostly extra lessons in disguise. Due to her gender, her CCF activity is clearly baby-sitting (where my CCF was active, involved and stimulating, hers is determinedly boring down-time, virtually baby-sitting). Sport has moved to a position where additional qualifications are a must, emphasised by her school offering a narrower selection than I became used to. Some of these differences of experience are quite clearly gender-related. On her behalf, I resent this. Just because I'm a pushy, aggressive male and she is a far slighter, much more pleasant and more passive (only relatively) personality, so she is pushed into positions she does not enjoy for reasoning that seems to me to be only underlining faults in the curriculum generally. 

Some further differences follow, which are more personal still. I'm quite happy to allocate time for a task and then make the task fit into that time. My spouse takes almost the opposite approach—she says it follows from the primary training—and the job goes on until it meets the suitable standard. Which in effect means that she has no standard in mind (I'd suggest 'good enough') and so the work, whatever it is, follows Parkinson's Law and fills the time available. Plus some.

End result, even if we had the same job, I'd get it done in fewer hours. I'd get away with this from being a bloke, from not putting up with non-essential nonsense, by being a bit more self-disciplined and by drawing 'good enough' at a lower standard than she would. Plus some bluster to help matters along. I'm not the nice person she is. I'll argue with anyone and usually get away with it. Is she overloaded? By the measure that says the stress experience is too much for her, then quite definitely overloaded. Is there recognition of overload? You're kidding. I am most unimpressed with the management, in style, competence and ability. ¹ But that is secondhand information forming an opinion. Further, and relevant to both the perception of treatment and what is likely to occur, there are further significant differences: I have no issues with use of English; as a bloke I'm half-expected to use temper as a weapon; I don't take prisoners and I'm openly intolerant. Of many things.  I'm not a nice person and I'm a frequently difficult employee. My missus is nice and not difficult, so she tends to roll over when pushed to do more; she has difficulty expressing herself precisely in English and she doesn't think as fast as I do (a mixed blessing; faster thinking doesn't mean better thinking). In short, she is easily bullied. Which might describe what is occurring.

Following on from that list of what are in effect complaints then, from a spousal perspective, I actually think my wife might be better off stacking shelves in a supermarket—I pick that as a common choice for a job represented as needed and yet by assumption very low in skills or standing. I recognise that time spent not-earning very often includes spending; if no inflow, there is surprisingly increased outflow. It is difficult to spend money when you're at work and very easy to do so when not at work. This means that a shorter working week would likely, at least in the short term, result in more spending. Minimum wage of £8.21 per hour for a 36 hour week would be £14k — half the pay and almost no tax for half as many hours; so actually not half the pay at all. I can't say this is unattractive. The difference that ought to apply is that typical minimum wage work is also likely to be very variable, to be what I might call weak employment in the sense that a) the job can easily disappear and b) the hours may vary at very little notice.  Yet the salaried work that is teaching doesn't feel—at the moment—to be the permanent post it should; she is threatened each week with 'failure' (not getting fantastic grades irrespective of the numpties in the class), with her subject language altogether being dropped (which you'd think was grounds for redundancy rather than unemployment (throw away Mandarin in preference for Latin, would you believe?) It doesn't matter whether she really is being bullied, though I have no good idea how to establish that; it matters that she feels bullied. It matters that I don't see my wife enough to call her such; I don't sleep as much as I used to, but we're still at least one hour and usually two adrift every night and a lot more at the weekend, so the idea of 'time in the bedroom, together', is a concept but not an event while in term. I am in some despair at this situation. When we reach a moment of 'holiday', time not at school, she is too tired to work at actually having a break and the age-old observation that downtime for teachers is much the same as deferred sick-days is uncomfortably true. Given that her mix of 'activities' includes no sport because these turn out to be hidden lessons, there is pitifully little gain (in the sense that 'leisure' might overlap with 'work').

This is not revealed as employment that fulfils psychologically, that makes one feel good about oneself.  While my rate of pay was perhaps low, much of the time was pleasurable and quite a lot was time I would have spent on a very similar activity; she is not in such a position, so many of the values that make teaching worthwhile (worth not being paid well) are rendered irrelevant. Thus I question whether it is a career, since there is no prospect of matters improving; a career surely is something that has a sensible progression in a desirable direction. If teaching is a vocation but not a career, that brings us yet again to the conflict between caring and being professional.    

 I do not see this version of teaching as rewarding.  I am likely to agree with her when she eventually wants to give up. From a purely accounting viewpoint, at such a moment we are significantly out of pocket. The cost of the UK qualifications and lacking of earning throughout that period plus the associated living costs amounts to a figure that the small excess of income over expenditure we currently enjoy will take more than a decade to cancel out. Or, to look at that slightly differently, is not rewarding at all.

Add into the mix that one solution route is to go teach outside Britain. That this route is one we have negated by committing to Britain (Brexit was a significant factor in that set of decisions for us) and we are in a bad place, one that suggests that change is required. 

We could change the employee, the employer or the employment.

DJS 20190929

Edit 20191119, bothered at failing to sort out the WTD ²

The employee can change on the inside by reconsidering attitudes and skills. In a sense, to change a strategy.

The employer can change its behaviour; it may be persuaded to change behaviour;  the employer can be exchanged for another.

The employment can change similarly; by changing the mix of tasks undertaken by the employee within teaching, by moving to a different field within education or, indeed, by moving away from teaching entirely.

[1] The School Day and Year (England) - Parliament.ukhttps://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk › documents  link to Briefing Paper 07148, 19/7/2019, HoC Library].

[2] https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours

[3] https://www.teachers.org.uk/edufacts/workload

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-workload-survey-2016  

[5] https://www.teachers.org.uk/files/Workload-A5-7037.pdf

1   In the event that someone reading this thinks they might be one of the senior staff relevant to this description, do not take this personally as criticism. Instead, look at is as the result of communication breakdown, which takes at least two parties to be faulty. What I see is strongly filtered by the time it arrives home. This is parallel to the parent who contacts school to complain about teacher-pupil relationship breakdowns in that the 'complaint' is based on only one side of the tale. I've worked at places where any contact from parents was automatically labelled complaint. Further, because emotions run high when telling such tales at home, they are prone to exaggeration. So the owner of the ear being bent has no basis for moving the credibility or content in a sensible direction. Worse, perhaps, the complainant doesn't recognise all of what has been said (not 1st language), hasn't reliably understood context and is often badly informed (in terms of understanding measured against information provided or available) what objectives pertain. This is a recipe for repeated difficulty; it is a difficulty repeated with every second-language operator to some extent. The environment needs to learn from this (see the Learning Business, essay 227). 

Never blame the people, blame the system instead; that way, both parties can agree to help change the system and neither is part of the problem while both can be part of the solution.

2   I've not done well at discovering how this (many hours per worked week) is permitted in schools. I have never seen the required opt-out clause in a contract, yet at some point it must have been waived. I have never come across a working time agreement and, within the independent sector, have never heard of one being discussed.

The argument —that the 48 hour limit is spread across a maximum 17 week period, there is always a holiday included (typically a 13 week cycle) which would bring the average down toward the EU WTD figures— has validity. Any 17 week period would include two weeks holiday and, if those two weeks were empty of work, then one could have done 54.4 hours each week in term, which is pretty consistent with NUT findings at [3]. Second, I suspect that many of the hours a teacher will claim as work falls under some other description for the purposes of the WTD, perhaps because this is time where you're 'in control' in the self-employed sense.

Please note that I left 3sig fig in the 48*17/15 calculation. That is because the 54.4 figure matches the mean from the 2016 survey at [4]. This report is worth reading, even if you only read the executive summary findings pages 6-10. I've copied a minimum at the foot of this webpage.

In my days past I'd have gone to ask a union rep about this. And I'd have received a good answer, as I would have done from the Head himself. She (the boss) cannot do this in the environment of fear that pertains. Being female is a sub-issue, as is English not being a 1st language. In turn one might look to a line manager for support, but that presupposes competence and courage and an environment that allows challenge. This is not so.

There is a different figure, of 1265 hours across 195 days. This comes from the STPCD, THE SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PAY AND CONDITIONS DOCUMENT, which does not apply everywhere. This 1265 figure is an absolute maximum in the state sector and applies to duties as directed, but probably is almost entirely contact-time teaching. So this is often interpreted as the expected teaching load for a year, though the NUT document is very clear that this is not so, including in directed time these items: registration, supervisory duties, INSET days, PPA time, parents evenings and Open days, staff meetings and all contact time, including of course individual pupil meetings. This reduces expected teaching time to 870, being 25 55-minute lessons hours a day x 38 weeks. Note that 5/195 days should be non-contact, e.g. INSET. See page 10's example in [5]. This says that what goes wrong is the stuff that falls outside this, the admin, the planning, the marking. It also says that this is to an extent self-directed time. So the 1265 / 38 suggests a 33 hour week and supports all the shouting that teachers work short years. Conversely, the sampled mean of  55 hours per week, even if only applied to 38 weeks of the year, totals 2100 hours per year (2 s.f. throughout) — all implying some 20 hours a week of collected self-directed work. Or a serious failure of overflow of contact time or directed time. These additional hours are not directed time and very clearly are up to the individual teacher to provide, allocate and deliver. [5]  states that it is up to the teacher to decide the number of additional hours necessary and where and when such duties will be performed. 
All of this strikes me as an area in which both unions and head teachers should be not only active but seen to be so in an entirely transparent manner. Further, it seems to me that every head directly or indirectly should be seen to be concerned for the welfare of the staff and the hours they are putting in (both too high and too low, but perhaps persuading those perceived as 'low' to mentor those 'too high' or to move work around to even matters out. I don't see why the efficient should be penalised, but I do see that best practice ought to be shared and encouraged. I still think mathematicians have some subject advantages.

 

Addendum: Seen on Tech Republic, 20191010, Both India and Nigeria have rapidly growing populations of young people with extreme numbers of children not in school, with 41% of the population in Nigeria under the age of 16, and 10.5 million of these children are out of school. India has the world's largest population of 10- to 24-year-olds, and it is estimated that 47 million of that population will drop out of school by the 10th grade. 

From [4]

Working hours

•  The average total, self-reported working hours in the reference week³ for all classroom teachers and middle leaders was 54.4 hours. As per prior workload studies, primary classroom teachers and middle leaders self-reported higher total working hours (a mean of 55.5 hours) than teachers in secondary schools (53.5 hours) ⁴.

•  Secondary school senior leaders reported longer total working hours than those in primary schools (62.1 hours compared to 59.8). Across all schools, senior leaders reported an average total of 60.0 hours in the reference week.

•  Almost a third of part-time teachers reported that 40% of their total hours were worked outside of school hours (i.e. in the evening, early mornings and weekends) in the reference period, compared to almost a quarter of full-time teachers.

•  Primary teachers with less than six years’ experience reported working a total of 18.8 hours per week outside of school hours. This was two hours more than their more experienced primary colleagues, and an hour and a half more than secondary teachers with the same level of experience.

•  Further analysis showed that teacher-level factors, including perceptions of performance evaluation by management and school-level factors such as phase and the size of the school, had an impact on the total number of hours reported by teachers in the reference week. The largest source of variation in workload was attributable to factors which acted on individual teachers (for example, their level of experience or how their performance is evaluated) rather than those that impacted on the school. The implication is that effective interventions to reduce workload would need to target teachers across the population of schools. 

Attitudes towards workload (Page 9/10)

•  The majority (93%) of respondents stated that workload in their school was at least a fairly serious problem; just over half of those surveyed (52%) cited workload as a very serious problem. This group worked an average of 57 hours in the reference week with 19 hours out-of-school time compared to 53 hours and 13 hours respectively for others.

•  Over three-quarters of staff were dissatisfied with the number of hours they usually worked. Most staff disagreed that they can complete their workload in their contracted hours, have an acceptable workload and that they can achieve a good balance between their work and private life. Those who strongly disagreed with these statements again reported longer total hours, more hours working out of the regular school day and more additional hours beyond their contract.

•  Senior leaders said they used different strategies to try to manage and plan professional time. The most common mechanisms were statutory protected blocks of non-teaching time, working collaboratively with other staff to plan work and using existing schemes of work and associated lesson plans which can be adapted by teaching staff. Over one in five (22%) senior leaders in schools rated as Outstanding by Ofsted reported the existence of a committee to monitor teachers’ workload. The proportion in other schools is 9%.

• Overall, over half of all teachers agreed that their school working environment allows them to collaborate effectively and that teaching assistants are effectively deployed. Senior leaders were much more likely than middle leaders or classroom teachers to agree to these statements, as were primary teachers when compared to secondary.