By Grace Rigg, Headteacher, Kennet School
There was a time when teaching was the best job to do as a working parent. Some people who don’t work in schools or are not married to teachers still view it as a job that fits around the family. You get the holidays, of course. Except you don’t. Not fully. Results days are slap bang in the middle of August. Summer schools take place in summer. Expeditions and tours take place at weekends and holidays.
Only yesterday I was asked by an uncle about my hours (as Headteacher to 1886 children and 300 staff), “Is it 9am until the end of the school day?”
No. No, it is not. It is 7:30am-5:25pm with two evenings a week until 9:00 or 10:00pm.
“Gosh, you must be exhausted.”
It is doable, however, through discipline and a flexible approach to staffing. Here are my top tips to make it work:
- Ensure tight school calendar process. Start in the April for the year ahead. Ask Heads of Department and Heads of House to calendar events, meetings and commit to these. Have a calendar day where you display the year ahead and ask for comments from all staff. Establish the calendar culture that nothing is added to the calendar and nothing is removed. In this way you enable diary planning way in advance which helps all staff to make arrangements. It also means you capture positivity of staff planning ahead rather than asking staff to do more during the year. This approach helps with staff retention too. If a staff member has become excited about to going Cern with their best work buddy in February, they are far less likely to jump ship in the meantime. Make sure evening commitments are spread across the senior team, Heads of Department and Heads of House and they don’t land at the same people’s feet each time.
- Embrace flexible working. This really is the biggest challenge in schools. How to compete with the fridge raiders working from home? The answer is be flexible where it is possible to do so and staff according to people’s strengths not just about fairness. Allow part-time working at any level of seniority. As Headteacher I make sure I pick up my own children once a week, I take them home, give them tea, do an activity, or host a playdate and then head back to school for an evening commitment if there is one. I offer this to all my senior team. I allow staff to be flexible where it fits. Certain jobs can be done from home. A SENDCO can write up an annual review from their kitchen table. Give people time to go to their children’s school recital or celebration assembly. Create a cover culture where staff know lesson cover is a no-no but that the times around this are flexible. Emphasise that to do this there must be low staff absence for medical reasons. Allow part-time arrangements which include teaching until 2:00pm every day so they can pick up their own children each day, or starting later so they can drop off their children. Let staff take PPA away from school site where this works.
- Introduce contact hours and email limitations. In order to establish healthy work-life balance the two must be allowed to be separate and this, I believe, must be led by the top. I introduced a no email rule outside the hours of 7pm-7am and weekends. Whilst staff can absolutely work at this time, they must delay the send to working hours. I have also discouraged the use of WhatsApp out of work hours to colleagues. The reasoning for doing this is to ensure that staff don’t leave at 5:00pm, take part in their home activities and come in the next morning to realise the floor has shifted due to other colleagues exchanging messages late into the evening. If you leave at 5:00pm, you should come into work with the same situation at 7:30am. It also stops the underlying anxiety of checking work messages outside of work. Emails do not need to be monitored outside of working hours.
- Do not ask for unnecessary work to be completed and simplify expectations. Thankfully the profession has moved away from lesson plans produced for every lesson or heavily annotated context sheets; however, I think we need to go further and only encourage work that makes a difference to children (stating the obvious!). Encourage no marking policies but meaningful feedforward structures. Encourage a move away from meticulous PowerPoints or reinventing the wheel worksheets. Encourage a thoughtful 10 minutes planning- what didn’t stick last time and needs revisiting? What core knowledge am I attempting to make stick this time? What is my I do, we do, you do example with visualizer? How can I explain this to X,Y and Z so they get it?
- Be strong with parents and support staff. I start every address with parents stating what can and cannot be expected of staff. They cannot be expected to turn around communications home in under 48 hours. They cannot be expected to meet with parents unless there is a pre-made appointment. They should not be providing updates outside of the reporting structures. They are not one-2-one tutors and are responsible for 300 children roughly and cannot therefore provide individual support. Do not expect staff to provide work for children who are not in the lesson. Do not expect staff to catch children up individually outside of their teaching allocation. Do not expect staff to create bespoke lessons for individuals needs instead encourage a tilting of the teaching.
Overall, the message has to be, teaching is a fantastic job and it is totally doable within the working day. If team culture is secure it can be a flexible job too. Leaders must not celebrate working all hours that God gives but celebrate those who have found a way to get the job done efficiently.
The only way to do this is to make it not all consuming.
Allow people to walk away from school, leave it behind and focus on their own families.
