The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’
It is of course true that private schools are under more financial pressure than ever, and are making cost-cutting decisions that may add to teachers’ workload: one in five private school teachers say they have had colleagues made redundant since VAT on school fees was introduced, while 26 per cent say that their school has frozen recruitment. Yet teachers’ workload is a problem across both the private and public sector, and is the force behind the ongoing teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
In 2023, teachers reported working on average 52 hours a week (hardly an advert for a supposedly ‘family-friendly’ profession). According to an NEU survey last year, 41 per cent of teachers describe their workload as ‘unmanageable’, with a mere 1 per cent of respondents saying it was manageable ‘all the time’. The top cause of teachers’ stress was poor work-life balance (95 per cent) followed by inspection (94 per cent) and insufficient staff levels (92 per cent). Out of the third of teachers who said they had considered leaving the profession in the previous 12 months, 94 per cent said that high workload was the most important factor.
It might seem admirable, therefore, that the NEU has just voted to campaign within and against independent schools that contravene working time regulations. Yet by narrowing its focus, the NEU misses the wider perspective: in all schools, there are too few teachers trying to do too many jobs.
There are many reasons for this creep in workload: more time spent chasing up bad behaviour; higher expectations around marking, extracurriculars and pastoral care; more administrative demands; more time needed to answer emails and communicate with parents. Schools could alleviate the pressure of all of these if they were just able to do one thing: recruit more teachers. If schools were able to hire enough staff that each teacher had one fewer class, or one less hour of directed teaching a day, then this would be transformative for teacher wellbeing.
Better yet, schools could recruit enough staff that teachers could have one day a week working from home, completing all of the dozens of tasks that they cannot do when physically in front of a class. This again would not only help work-life balance, but appeal to the numerous demographics (for example, working mums and Gen-Z) who want flexible working arrangements.
Tackling the teacher recruitment and retention crisis needs to be the government’s number one priority
This is what the NEU should be campaigning for. After all, the whole reason Labour justified imposing VAT on private school fees, and putting independent schools under so much pressure in the first place, is because the end justified the means: the money raised would be used to recruit 6,500 more teachers over the next five years. Eight months into office, and Labour have given absolutely no details or insight into how exactly they plan to recruit these teachers, despite it being one of their key campaign promises.
To make matters worse, this is actually a dilution of Labour’s original pledge, which was 6,500 teachers a year. They changed it to over the course of their term because, according to Bridget Phillipson, ‘this is rather a large number of teachers.’ Yet it is in fact a pitifully small number of teachers. To put things in perspective, last year the UK recruited 13,000 fewer teachers than required, and each year over 40,000 teachers leave the profession. In stem subjects, the problem is so acute that last year we only recruited 17 per cent of the required physics teachers, meaning we would need 3,500 more teachers just to cover this subject alone.
Schools can make tweaks to try to improve matters by, for example, reworking marking policies or setting boundaries around when staff are expected to check their emails. Ultimately though, workload will never drastically improve unless staffing levels increase. If workload decreases, more teachers will stay or join, which helps to keep the workload manageable. Tackling the teacher recruitment and retention crisis therefore needs to be the government’s number one priority. Forget about decolonising the curriculum or rebranding Ofsted judgements. The NEU should be asking why private schools, as well as their teachers and parents, are being penalised for an election promise that Labour have no idea how to fulfil.
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