Teacher overload: some solutions

With "overwork and lack of support driving teachers across England out of the profession", solutions are urgently needed (Special report: Teacher Burnout, 13.05.18). Recent governments have been so anxious about wooing voters with new policies, like academisation and the expansion of free and grammar schools, they have ignored the advice of educationalists, leading to the current crisis.

     The real problem is the culture of exam factory education which has been developed, with Ofsted judgements relying far too much on results` data. Pressure is placed on heads to provide improved results, with the pressure inevitably passed on to the classroom teachers, who are forced to test repeatedly for exam practice. This then leads to inordinate amounts of pupils` work to be marked. More emphasis has to be laid by the inspectorate on the pastoral care offered by the schools, rather than results.

 Parents` expectations of teachers have to be modified; too much work has to be marked, too many reports and progress details have to be sent home. Then there`s the amount of detail expected in the marking, with "what went well" and "even better if" comments, or their equivalents, now expected for most pieces of work. Ofsted should clearly adopt a more sympathetic approach, and issue instructions for all schools: one written report a year, one internal assessment a year, one piece of work marked with brief comment once a term. All schools have to modify seriously their homework strategies, devising tasks which require little or no marking by the teachers, and more parental supervision.

   The role of senior management in schools must change, also, with less attention paid to Ofsted preparation, and more to the effective running of the school. What all teachers would appreciate is seeing senior staff in the classroom, not necessarily with timetables of their own, but stepping in three or four times a week into troublesome classes, or giving younger teachers more preparation time.

       To suggest that there are "signs that the environment is changing" because the new education secretary has reducing teachers` workload among his "priorities" is to forget what every education secretary in the last twenty years has said. Governments will claim that the obvious solution of funding schools sufficiently to enable class sizes to be reduced significantly and the pupil-teacher ratio improved, cannot be afforded. The result is that we are heading for a South Korean model, with most pupils attending private classes in evenings, after a day in their "normal" school, huge pressure to succeed, and an alarmingly high suicide rate among 10-19 year olds.