This one’s not so much a direct tip, but more of my thoughts on how to approach time-management in general.
We have to go back a looooong time if we want to find a year in which “3.30 finish and 13 weeks holiday” was a reality of teaching, and yet that perception of teaching continues to cast a shadow — it is unhelpful that some non-teachers continue to think it is a reality, while for many teachers it succeeds in complicating the work-life balance past breaking point. Some “perk”!
Except that it is a perk, but only when recognised for what it really is: flexitime.
Let’s do the maths
As teachers, we need to be in the building 7 hours a day for 190 days a year, because that’s when the students are, plus we’re contracted to an extra 5 days when the students aren’t. In addition, there will be something like an hour a week (on average) of extra commitments outside of this such as meetings, parents’ evenings, open evenings. Altogether, that’s about 1400 hours. (Most UK teaching contracts limit “directed” time to 1265 hours, but I haven’t deducted “lunch time” from the “7 hours a day” — see below).
In comparison, the average working year in the UK is around 1750 hours (9-to-5, with half an hour for lunch, 5 days a week, minus 28 days of holiday entitlement). Given this is the lot of most non-teachers, it seems a fair benchmark.
“3.30” and “13” are therefore the wrong numbers to focus on. As teachers, we have about 350 hours a year (20%!) of flexible working — when we want, where we want.
Making the mental transition from “a 3.30pm finish and 13 weeks holiday, yeah right” to “I work the same as everyone else, but I get 20% flexitime” really helps me to properly assess my work-life balance. As an extreme example, if I really do stick to taking 13 weeks holiday a year, I know I need to work 9 hours every week of term time outside of the school day and meetings (350 hours divided across 39 weeks). That then becomes the figure to focus on: to allocate those 9 hours across the tasks that I can’t squeeze into the 8.30am to 3.30pm “day” (planning, marking) and to monitor that it doesn’t grow beyond that. In fact, the purpose of this entire site is to offer ways of keeping it below that!
“Lunch” times
My personal view is that it is unhelpful to view this precious time as “lunch” time. Most of everyone’s day runs to a timetable: mine, that of my colleagues, that of my students. Common time outside of that schedule is valuable for all kinds of reasons (quick questions or collaborations, academic interventions, extracurricular enrichment) and the “lunch” hour is it! It’s my “unallocated” hour, not my lunch hour. It’s the richest, most valuable hour of the day most days. (Well, 45 minutes — eating is necessary.) Ringfencing it as untouchable “my time” is counterproductive to my efficiency and, ultimately, my work-life balance. However, it is “my” time in the sense that I am in control of it and considering what my most powerful use of it is is important. Yes, I could use it to relax instead, but I know I will pay for that elsewhere and it’s about the holistic picture.
Impact on school policies
I’ll finish with a plea to any school leaders reading this. The above comparison to an average UK non-teacher’s working week/year can also inform holistic assessments of all school policies that impact on a teacher’s time. I’ve argued above that 350 hours a year is a “fair” working commitment for everything outside of the school day and meetings, parents’ evenings, open evenings. How well do your school’s policies reflect this figure?
As an example, let’s look at the extreme of using all of the 350 annual hours for marking of students’ work. That works out to 18 minutes a week per pupil in a primary school class of 30 pupils, just under 4 minutes a day. At secondary, if a teacher has 9 classes on their timetable (say), it’s an hour a week per class, or 2 minutes per student per week. Remember that these numbers are the biggest they can be. The question is, does your school’s marking policy allow a teacher to mark a primary school pupil’s daily work in under 4 minutes, or a secondary school student’s weekly work in 2 minutes?
Other things also compete for the 350 hours, of course and a similar analysis could be done for lesson planning, resource creation or communicating with parents (in particular, writing formal reports). The issue is eased by including into the mix the protected non-contact time within the teacher’s week, but this is usually only about 3 hours a week and so not a magic bullet.
The difficult conclusion from the maths is that unless all such policies are cut to the bone, it will be the school’s policy to choose that their teachers’ working hours be longer than the national average across other sectors…and if that is so, is there sufficient confidence that this is adequately compensated through pay? Recruitment and retention of sufficient numbers of trained professionals depends on getting the balance of all these things right.
