England’s teacher shortage is fuelled by burnout and unpaid overtime. New working patterns would help without compromising results
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an you guess which professionals in England work 26 hours of overtime a week without compensation, give up time with friends and family to deal with the workload and often find themselves on call in the holidays? Not CEOs, bankers or even doctors, but teachers. No wonder, then, that teaching vacancies are at the highest level ever. Workload is the top concern that teachers cite for leaving the profession, with almost as many quitting as those who joined last year. The consequences are stark: a quarter of English schools do not have a physics teacher, and many key subjects aren’t being offered at A-level in the poorest places.
The 4 Day Week Foundation believes that a shorter working week could alleviate these pressures if trialled in a way similar to the Scottish proposals of a four-day week, with a flexible fifth day that allows dedicated time for marking and lesson preparation. This means the work that teachers are currently forced to do at weekends and evenings would be integrated into the working week instead of being unpaid overtime.
The foundation is not proposing sending pupils home for a whole extra day, which should assuage parents’ concerns about having to pay for childcare. Instead, it suggests teachers get a four-day week in the classroom, while schools remain open five days. The argument should be compelling for a government that has pledged to hire 6,500 new teachers to deal with the ongoing crisis, but without any clear plans of how to do so.
