‘We need a total culture change’: the UK teacher told to work 60-hour week or leave after having baby
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/dec/21/we-need-a-total-culture-change-the-uk-teacher-told-to-work-60-hour-week-or-leave-after-having-baby
Posted by rejs7
24 Comments
Bloody hell, 80 hours a week? Is that even enough free time to have a cup of tea?
It’s like victorian times she would need a high earner partner. Marrying for security
This does not reflect well on the headteacher at her school.
Two big problems with work flexibility, for teachers:
1) Schools are quite good at supporting/allowing teachers to work part time, but only if they are not in management. As soon as you’re a head of department, head of year or in senior leadership, they will probably refuse any requests to work part-time. This leads to people like this teacher quitting completely and is a serious obstacle to career progression for many.
2) Lots of school management is quite poor quality. Hiring good managers is very difficult and schools often can’t find many willing to do it, so schools end up hiring bad ones just to fill the positions.
Let me guess, only female teachers are going to be asked to do this by a white, male headteacher
Primary is hell. A teacher may well only have 30 to 35 kids to teach but the hours they work and the extra curricular activities they do are ridiculous.
I worked secondary for 15 years and I would honestly prefer the several hundred students whose names I don’t know, the verbal abuse and physical threats over primary. At least you get to stop a 5pm in secondary…if you’re tough enough to resist the management.
This is a huge problem but you cannot be on the SLT and only do 2.5 days a week. You cannot be a key leader of the school and not be in contact half the time. Other roles such as classroom teachers have more flexibility and more can be done to help but leaders role have a huge impact of staff and students.
I don’t think we need a culture change because I believe this sort of request is already illegal under existing legislation.
I understand needing to take a different role due to parenting commitments but I don’t think they needed her to leave entirely, seems a bit much and way to open to liability.
There are two problems here. 1) teachers spending 99.1% of their time doing anything but actually teaching because of scope creep in their jobs, and 2) the actual existence of maternity pay where it’s just assumed that the general public should subsidise other people having babies.
I love empty ultimatums like that……guaranteed I will call your bluff every time……seee ya
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As per usual, non-teachers are desperate to say that teaching is easy and that you have all the weekends and holidays to relax. This is despite the fact that excessive workload is one of the top reasons teachers are leaving the profession (with many NQTs lasting less than three years) and constant first-person anecdotes outlining how much extra work goes into teaching.
Those same critics never step into the classroom to show how it is done though. For such an allegedly easy job, such critics are always reluctant to prove their point.
Having a baby was a choice on her part. If that makes you tired etc then that’s on her..
My wife was refused a flexible working request at a school because “No-one who’s any good wants to work part-time…” They’re terrible.
Having it a baby has nothing to do with it, why should any teacher be working 60 hours?
What about all the school holidays you have. Average it out and your better off
> Vickie Johnson was a deputy headteacher at a small primary school in Greater Manchester working exhausting 60-hour weeks when she became pregnant with her son. “I had been leaving the house so early and getting back late, as well as working weekends and evenings at home,” she says. “I realised I wouldn’t ever see my baby and that wasn’t OK.”
Is there a typo here? Did the news state she’s a teacher, not a banker? 60 hours for a teacher, is that correct?
Teaching is well paid. Especially when you factor in the holidays (yes. I know they work some, they should) and in comparison to other public sector roles
Teachers appear to be their own worst enemies at times too.
There definitely needs to be a culture change around accepted workload and management of kids behaviour and parents expectations.
Don’t you know Kemi Badenoch was doing meetings while she was literally giving birth? Along with eating her steak and chips while the baby was being exited from that cavern of doom.
People who choose to be teachers really are dumb. I tell that to my kids.
Considering most teachers are women and we are doing nothing to attract men to the job I feel driving mums out isn’t the best idea.
also 60 hour weeks is insane.
My friend teaching at a university has just had to cancel most of her Christmas plans due to the amount of marking she’s expected to do in her own free time and being threatened that if it isn’t finished they’ll dock half her pay for the month 🙂 🙂 🙂
As others have said, there is no easy answer here.
She probably would have taken a few whole terms off with one holiday already for maternity leave and rightly so?
Then to run a school needs those long hours and consistency and presence and constant “fire fighting” in the upper roles… which won’t work as well with flexible working hours, unless the job becomes a split role… but does the school think that is a less effective outcome hence the push back?
I think unless the SLT are constantly doing work in school eg teaching snd organizing and behaviour discipline especially, then they’re glorified over paid compliance officers ticking way too many boxes too much of the time. That needs to go… and they need to be directly involved in schools to earn the higher salary not task mastering teachers about compliance… cracking the whip.
Generally Primary SLT do earn their crust however being directly hands on and organizing.
As for general teaching conditions, the pay is not bad but the conditions themselves:
1. Behaviour
2. curriculum teach to test narrow approach for recording and reporting
3. administrative inanity of marking for Ofsted
4. Constant demands to do more dogsbody work eg cover lessons
5. Much less actual engaging lessons with teaching and learning of subject knowledge than all the above overhead.
At least for Secondary, see Mr Rufaeel docus on YT for more on these issues.
Primary also has excessive box ticking and the statements that come in to Seocndary don’t tally with “Student I’d 357899 in Year 7’s actual ability anyway more than not…
I’ve just resigned from teaching after becoming a mum last year. A few of my observations…
(Apologies for poor grammar/punctuation – I’m on my phone!)
1. Despite what people think, the maternity leave package in teaching is actually not great compared to many other public sector jobs and the private sector (although I acknowledge it is a lot better than statutory). My husband got 6 months (!) paternity leave at full pay, while I got 4 weeks. This leads to mums (and dads) going back to work too soon, burning out, and then leaving the profession.
2. “Part-time” doesn’t really exist in teaching (at least, this was my experience). Before having a baby, I was working full-time and working between 50 and 70 hours a week (during term time – significantly less during holidays). I loved the job, enjoyed the long holidays, and didn’t really mind.
When I went to 0.8, I took a 20% pay-cut only to find I was still working at least 50 hours a week. On my day off, I still needed to plan lessons/mark/send emails… My husband kept telling me to just not do it. But if you don’t plan lessons, you have nothing to teach, and you can’t just not mark students’ essays!
3. “Flexible working” can’t really happen in most schools. We were told we could go home during our planning periods, but periods are only 50 minutes… By the time I got home, I’d have to come back.
4. So much time is taken up with non-teaching tasks… organising school trips, chasing up students about missing work or missed detentions, logging safeguarding concerns, Open Evenings, Parents’ Evenings (8 a year!), data entry, emailing home to remind parents about the Christmas raffle… I could go on and on.
5. The job can be thankless at times. Teachers are bashed constantly in the news, and parents and students are more and more entitled and confrontational. Having to justify to angry parents every sanction is exhausting. I promise you, I would really, really rather be at home with my own son than supervising your child in a detention.
I absolutely loved being a teacher, and 90% of my students were incredible, but when you’re a parent your priorities change and it does not surprise me at all that so many new mums are finding it impossible to balance both roles.