Campaigners have urged Bridget Phillipson to give teachers in England and Wales a day out of school every week with no loss of pay. The 4 Day Week Foundation believes that shorter working weeks can reduce burnout, improve productivity and support better work-life balance. What’s not to like about that?
Quite a lot, actually. The aim is not to introduce three-day weekends but allow teachers to work from home one day in every five. Teachers like me certainly need time to plan schemes of work, prepare lessons, mark our pupils’ work, and deal with the next crisis. We need more of it during the school day. But that does not seem to be the plan.
James Reeves, the 4 Day Week Foundation’s campaign manager, explained that a four-day week, ‘isn’t about doing less, it’s about working smarter’. Does the man understand what teachers do all day?
The workload needs to be cut, not squeezed into fewer days
Imagine a job where you are required to attend five or six 50-minute meetings every day of the week. And not just sit there, checking the occasional email, you must chair every single one of them. There is no secretary to assemble the papers and write the minutes – that’s also your job. There might be as many as thirty attendees, and you are responsible for seeing that each one of them completes their action points.
Welcome to teaching! The workload is relentless and exhausting, and expectations are sky high. It is no wonder that teacher recruitment and retention is a never-ending problem for schools.
On some days, a full-time secondary-school teacher might get one ‘non-contact’ period; on other days, none at all. However ‘smart’ you might be working, that is not enough time to do what must be done. That’s why many teachers start early – I am in school by 6.30 a.m. most days – or work late, and why others cart mountains of work home in big plastic tubs to be completed after their own children are in bed.
If James Reeves’s masterplan is not about doing less, then all those meetings, currently scheduled over five days, would need to be jammed into four. After that treadmill of back-to-back meetings – sorry, lessons – I would hardly be in a fit state to do anything on the fifth day.
That does assume all those meetings can be scheduled. Timetabling is an art that I also know something about. I have been writing school timetables for nearly 20 years. They are complex problems in four dimensions: teachers, classes, rooms, and time. Unlike, say, Sudoku problems, timetabling solutions always involve compromise. The goal might be harmony and symmetry; the reality is often expediency. Those so-called ‘free periods’ are the gaps left at the end of the process. They occupy the space in which nothing else would fit.
I have often explained to headteachers that while a school timetable can do anything, it can never do everything. Prioritise a four-day week for teachers, and there will be consequences elsewhere – unwanted split classes, for example. That might mean that a GCSE class has two geography lessons each week with Mr Andrews, and a third with Miss Brown. That is not ideal but when Mr Andrews is working from home, he is not in school to teach the class.
Needs must, and schools make split teaching work. Though it does help if the two colleagues have time to talk to each other. But there will be fewer opportunities for that if four-day working becomes a thing. Even on days when both Mr Andrews and Miss Brown are physically in the building, more of their time will be spent standing in front of a class. It is just not thought through, but this is what happens when ideology trumps common sense.
Teachers do not like long stretches of back-to-back lessons without a break. I know that because they tell me when I am working on next year’s timetable. If Phillipson has any sense, she will listen to teachers at the chalkface before inflicting another externally driven ‘initiative’ on schools.
Then again, if the 4 Day Week Foundation had followed its own ‘mini manifesto’, they would never have tried to sell the idea that ‘it isn’t about doing less’. The foundation’s goal is a maximum working week of 32 hours by 2030.
That is a world away from the reality experienced by teachers. Government data from 2024 suggested that the average full-time teacher worked 52.4 hours per week. Working too many hours may cause teacher burnout, and that issue should be resolved before entertaining whimsical suggestions about a four-day week. The workload needs to be cut, not squeezed into fewer days. Only then will teachers be able to find the time to do the job properly.
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