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workload

12 rules for schools – Rule 2 Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

2018-01-23T15:33:40+00:00January 22nd, 2018|Featured|

This is the second in a series of posts adapting Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules of Life to the context of eduction. You can find my thoughts on Rule 1 here. Please note, Peterson talks about a lot of other stuff - much of it religious - which I'm largely ignoring. This is just my partial take. According to this study, one third of every prescription a doctor writes goes unfilled, and, over half of those people who do collect their medication won't take it correctly. Why would this be? Why would some one who felt ill enough to visit their doctor not then [...]

The role of teachers is not to make managers’ lives easier

2016-02-29T19:17:28+00:00February 29th, 2016|behaviour, leadership, workload|

"To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them." Benjamin Disraeli Questions about the purpose of education divide and bedevil: there's no real agreement about what education is for. But what about teachers? Surely, even if we disagree about what exactly teachers ought to teach we all at least agree they should be teaching children something? And - at least in theory - I think we do, broadly, agree that teachers should teach. Whatever your ideological stripe, you probably agree that the education of children - whatever that means - is the main thing. Everything else is peripheral. [...]

Why I like ‘tick n flick’

2015-12-16T14:40:28+00:00December 16th, 2015|Featured|

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Ockham Tick n flick - the practice of flicking through students' exercise books and ticking to indicate that they have been read (or at least seen) is widely used as a pejorative term for the laziest type of marking undertaken only by the most feckless, morally bankrupt of teachers - generally gets a bad press. Perhaps this is unsurprising; in the worst cases it suggests a hurried post-hoc skim through pages of work in order to give the unconvincing appearance that books are being marked. No one [...]

Marking: What (some) Ofsted Inspectors (still) want

2015-12-05T12:59:28+00:00December 3rd, 2015|workload|

It is up to schools themselves to determine their practices and for leadership teams to justify these on their own merits rather than by reference to the inspection handbook. UPDATE: There is a happy(ish) ending to this sad story. As you will no doubt be aware, Ofsted has gone to great lengths to clarify its position on marking. In October 2014 it very helpfully published this clarification document which, from September 2015 has been incorporated into the Inspection Handbook. In it, several pervasive myths relating specifically to marking are addressed: Ofsted recognises that marking and feedback to pupils, both written and oral, [...]

Workload, retention & accountability: One policy to rule them all

2015-11-22T09:52:46+00:00November 22nd, 2015|leadership, workload|

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. Rudyard Kipling There's a lot wrong with the way schools are held to account which result in perverse incentives for school leaders to treat teachers less well than we might want. There are also huge fears about a recruitment and retention crisis in education:  Teachers seem to be leaving the profession in droves and new cannon-fodder is failing to step up to the plate in sufficient numbers. Teachers feel overworked and under-appreciated. The two reasons most often cited for leaving the profession are unnecessary workload and poor behaviour management [...]

What to do about workload?

2015-03-11T09:33:00+00:00February 7th, 2015|leadership|

Work is not a curse, but drudgery is! Henry Ward Beecher To much fanfare in the press, the DfE has released the findings of its Workload Challenge survey. The idea is straightforward: to prevent teachers from getting "bogged down with unnecessary tasks" so that they can instead devote their time to "prepar[ing] young people for life in modern Britain". Apparently, the survey generated more than 44,000 returns. The chief culprits for the waste of teachers' time are Ofsted, government and "hours spent recording data, marking and lesson-planning." No surprises there then. Here's the government's solution: As well as continuing its commitment [...]

Why ‘triple marking’ is wrong (and not my fault)

2020-05-02T22:15:05+01:00November 29th, 2014|leadership|

You can't blame celebrity edubloggers for teachers' unreasonable workloads - Albert Einstein In his indefatigable efforts to get schools and teachers to recognise that much of what is done in the name of demonstrating progress for Ofsted's benefit is a pointless waste of time, apparently, Ofsted's National Director, Mike Cladingbowl has been blaming me for inventing 'triple marking'.[i] This is an accusation I refute. As I understand it, the phenomena of 'triple marking' of goes something like this: You mark students' work They act on your marking You mark students' work again. The logic is that in responding to students' responses to [...]

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