Discussing teacher workload can feel a bit like Groundhog Day, and the most recent evidence suggests there’ll be no escape any time soon.
Almost two-thirds (61 per cent) of teachers say they are working longer hours than a year ago, according to Teacher Tapp, up from 47 per cent in 2018. The same Teacher Tapp study also reminds us yet again that teaching is far from a 9-to-5 job. The proportion of teachers now working a 50-hour-plus week is 48 per cent.
Workload has a corrosive effect on the sector. The NFER’s annual report states that “workload is the reason most cited by ex-teachers for why they left teaching”, and right now that is particularly pressing because too many teachers are leaving before retirement age.
Workload is a complex problem but it’s the contribution made by lesson planning that we are most familiar with at Oak National Academy. It is the single most time-consuming, non-teaching task, and an activity almost all teachers need to do. So we have pulled together the data from our platform along with research we have conducted among teachers in a new report, Teachers’ Views: Workload and Curriculum to explore it in more detail and what might help reduce it.
To search or to create?
The more research sessions we conduct with teachers at Oak, the more apparent it is that teachers approach lesson planning in two distinct ways (plus a combination of the two), each with its own benefits and pitfalls.
One approach is to create resources from scratch, which 46 per cent of primary and 29 per cent of secondary teachers say they do. Some of our own research participants told us that using readily available resources can feel like a ‘cop-out’, as if they are not doing their jobs properly, which might explain this
The second is to search for existing resources. This might seem on the surface to be a cure-all to make lesson planning less time-consuming, but the 5,000 teachers we surveyed told us what is hardest to find are high-quality, evidence-based and free resources.
Ideally, they want these to be easily adaptable and sequenced into full schemes of work too. All of which makes finding resources online a significant exercise. A Teacher Tapp survey found that the average primary teacher spends between 1 and 3 hours searching for resources each week, and secondary teachers up to an hour.
Rightly, more than two-thirds of teachers say that they can’t imagine using resources created by someone else without adaptation. After all, they know their pupils and contexts best.
A change of culture
The NFER also notes that a sense of autonomy is an important factor in teacher retention. However, we should remember that teachers add tremendous value during lesson delivery itself, regardless of the resources they use. It is they – not resources – who provide explanations, continuously check for understanding, give feedback and build relationships.
Lesson planning is a vital part of the job, but lots of teachers we talk to see the benefits of drawing on externally-developed resources. As part of our independent annual evaluation, ImpactEd found just under half (42 per cent) of Oak user teachers said that using the resources reduced their workload, on average by 3 hours per week.
In turn, this allowed them to spend this newly found time on other things like supporting more vulnerable pupils. Non-specialist teachers in particular found readily available resources created by specialists helpful with their planning process.
So perhaps the focus on lesson planning as a driver of workload needs to be more nuanced. Planning lessons is a series of complex processes, of which creating or finding resources is only one. External resources have a part to play here and should not undermine teacher autonomy. If we can get the balance right, teachers will have more time to do the things only they can – and get closer to a reasonable working week.
They are the ones in charge. Resources should take the back seat.
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