“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
LP Hartley. The Go-Between.
How is it that teachers, as opposed to almost any other profession, are expected to work outside of their contracted hours for no extra money?
The open-ended teacher contract
Since 1987 teachers have had a strange clause in their contracts (the “Jordanstown Agreement“) which most other employees would never sign up to in a month of Sundays. Namely:
A teacher shall be available to work “…for 1,265 hours in any year exclusive of time spent off school premises in preparing and marking lessons…”
So while teachers’ hours were set at 1265 hours per year, teachers were also caught in a position where working in their own time – unpaid – was acceptable under their contract. Yet, while even at the outset this clause was limited to “preparing and marking lessons“, it has been used instead as the workload equivalent of a blank cheque.
If a teacher wasn’t able to get all their work completed within their working day, then this clause appeared to justify the expectation that they’d do the rest of the work at home in their own time. Before you could say “that’s not what the clause says”, teachers were writing reports, doing exam and coursework marking, updating handbooks, analysing results, writing reports for Governors, doing CPD, planning schemes of work – and prepping the odd lesson – in their evenings, weekends and during their (unpaid) holidays.
Pretty soon this became an expectation. “That’s the job,” people would say, and teachers would nod and sob while reaching for the Jobfinder. So how did a clause in a contract which facilitated some additional lesson preparation and classwork marking, explode into the extraordinary free labour we see teachers doing today?
The problem lies with almost forty years of educational change across these islands, coupled with poor implementation of some of the central tenets of the Jordanstown Agreement.
Teaching today is unrecognisable from teaching in 1987
1987 was a very different time for teachers in Northern Ireland.
On the day the Jordanstown Agreement was signed, there was no world wide web; no email, no Google Classroom, no SeeSaw, no online meetings, no league tables, no school development plans, no social media, no Wikipedia, no ChatGPT, no Children’s Order, no SEN Codes of Practice, no eILPs, no Promethean screens, no three stars and a wish, no ban on corporal punishment, no Microsoft Word, no smoking ban, no electric cars, no EdTech Influencers, no “when the adults change everything changes“, no “book looks”, no “beak peek”, no “six-week planners”, no coursework of the type we have today, no continual assessments, no Kahoot, no SIMS, Inspector Morse had just finished its first season, the Amiga 500 was the most popular home computer, and “Star Trekkin’” was number one in the charts.
From “Star Trekkin'” by The Firm
When workload exceeds working time, the shortfall is paid for by teachers working in their free time.
In the almost 40 years since Jordanstown was signed, teaching has changed beyond recognition. And while the profession has become more evidence-based and arguably more professional, filled with innovations which give learners the best chances in life possible, the workload has increased as well. This swamped the teachers’ working hours with demands and, bit by bit, the amount of work which spilled over into teachers’ free time increased inexorably, leading to the workload crisis we see today.
As time passed the need to clarify and expand upon the Jordanstown Agreement grew as well, particularly regarding workload management. Successive rounds of industrial action led to successive agreements between management and teachers emerged, setting out clear contractual obligations upon school leaders regarding managing the time of their teaching staff. Central to these was the Directed Time budget, a mechanism which has existed since 1987 and which was designed to make the best possible use of the 1265 hours.
Unless Directed Time budgeting is done properly by Principals, and unless staff follow and track those DTBs properly, none of the contractual workload agreements – from Jordanstown to TNC 2024/2 – will ever work.
think1265 is not about creating a stick to beat Principals with; rather it’s about using the tools which already exist to finally beat the perennial problem of teacher workload.
think1265 is about all of us – school leaders to schoolteachers – doing Jordanstown (and amendments) right at last.
Christmas break in…
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