“Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet.”
Roger Miller
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, email didn’t exist. Then, in 1971, a chap called Ray Tomlinson was working on an early predecessor of the modern internet, and for no reason other than “it seemed like a neat thing to do,” decided to invent email. Ray, bless him, didn’t think anyone would use it… not while there were phones for communication. Today the average person gets about 120 emails to deal with every day.
Thanks, Ray. Thanks for that.
The first email sent read “QWERTYUIOP”, which was code for “I bet in 50 years time teachers will be spending dozens of hours a year dealing with this stuff without being paid for it.”
Cheers, Ray. Nice one.
Handling email is work, and should be itemised as directed time on your DTB.
Caution – this is one of the hardest things to time budget for, and one of the professional duties which will steal way more time that you imagine. To handle this properly needs good communication between members of staff and the Principal / Principal’s team, in order to realistically evidence and estimate email communication time.
We recommend this communication should be in the form of an email. . .
We’ve put together a simple calculator for you to estimate how much time you need for handling emails and communications, but remember this is for a typical teacher – not for TA holders / pastoral leads. It is likely that members of staff holding these positions will have additional needs for communication, and these should be included as part of their TA calculated hours.
Don’t install school emails on your phone. Never. Just don’t. Stop it!
Many teachers will install a client to get school emails on their phone, but teaching Trade Unions strongly recommend that you do not do this for the following reasons:
- Work emails often contain sensitive and confidential information, and if you lose your device you lose control of that information. This could leave school or the employer in breach of GDPR and data protection guidelines, and could compromise your own employment position.
- You do your work when you’re at work, and leave your work there when you go home. This is the only way to develop a proper work-life balance… you know, like almost every other employee in the entire world.
- If you absolutely must have access to emails (for safeguarding emergencies or such) school should provide a device for you.
Contacting parents and other stakeholders is work too, and needs to be included in the DTB.
The call centre industry in the UK is worth approximately $20 billion, or just under £16 billion. That’s six times the Northern Ireland education budget, or enough for almost a full tank of home heating oil, but it clearly demonstrates that telephone calls are work.
As with emails, calculating the time you need in your DTB to make all these calls is difficult, but it should be intelligently estimated based on evidence, and the final allocation of hours should be conservative so a member of staff does not “run out of hours” before the end of the academic year, as DE / EA put it.
This is particularly important for those with pastoral roles, who spend a lot of time in contact with parents.
Should I make calls outside of normal working hours?
If you choose to hang around outside of working hours and call parents on your own volition, then you’re working for free and it won’t go onto your DTB. If you do this to the point where it increases stress and exhaustion and you become ill, then that’s entirely on you and your employer will not be directly responsible for making unreasonable demands on you.
If you do this because it is school policy or it is a specific direction then it must be on your Directed Time Budget.
Note: contacting parents is not PPA – part of your normal lesson planning, preparation and assessment.
It is also not contingency time, unless you are calling about a genuine, out of the blue, emergency – which is what contingency time is for.
If telephone contact time is not on your DTB, or if you have clearly exceeded the allocated time for this task on your DTB, then you should tell your line manager that you are unable to do it as no time has been provided in your time budget. If managers insist that you must do these tasks, then they must remove another task from your DTB in order to make up for this time.
Note: Having to stay behind after school to contact parents can be an equality issue.
Teachers with caring responsibilities, childcare issues, etc may find it impossible to stay after school to carry out these tasks even if time budgeted to do so. If these teachers suffer any detriment because of this (e.g. limited promotion opportunities, treated differently by managers, etc) then this could be a breach of equality law. If in doubt, speak to your rep, Local Association, or directly to the Regional Centre in Belfast.
These conversations can be difficult, so speak to your union rep, Local Association, or Ben Madigan House if you are worried about this. With the new TNC 2024/2 agreement, another powerful approach will be to talk to your colleagues first to see if they are having the same issues. If they are then you could speak to your union rep about raising the issue collectively, which is often an easier way to have these challenging conversations.
Finally
Never, ever, ever, use your own phone number or email address in communications for work. No ifs, no buts. Just no.
Careers (and lives) have been ruined because of this.
Christmas break in…
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