Introduction

Welcome to Managing the Workload Agreement.

This resource, formerly The 24 Tasks, has been written because the image of a teacher struggling under an excessive workload and working long days with hardly a break, followed by evenings and weekends given up to preparation, must become a thing of the past. Tired teachers are not effective teachers and a culture of long hours is not conducive to raising standards.

In 2001, PricewaterhouseCoopers published a report called Teacher Workload Study. (This can be downloaded from the TeacherNet Web site.) The report revealed that teachers and school leaders were working an inordinate number of hours (on average between 53 and 60 hours a week) and they were doing this simply to stand still. These long hours were not actually driving change or radically improving the teaching and learning that was taking place. It could be argued that the impact of workload on teachers is one of the most important issues in education today. It is part of recent and continuing debates about recruitment, retention, motivation and morale and is now very much centre stage in the shape of Raising Standards and Tackling Workload: a National Agreement (DfES, 2003), known as the National Workload Agreement.

The dramatic first paragraph of the Agreement makes it very clear that:

This document represents an historic national agreement between Government, employers and school workforce unions to help schools, teachers and support staff meet the challenges that lie ahead. It promises joint action, designed to help every school across the country to raise standards and tackle workload issues ...

The Agreement ends with an equally challenging statement; its final paragraph includes the sentence:

This agreement will be meaningless and undeliverable without practical follow-up measures ...

Managing the Workload Agreement provides this ‘practical follow-up’ with a whole raft of suggestions, strategies, ideas and practical time-saving advice. Many of these will have already been started and, in some circumstances, actually completed. However, there will always be the need to make improvements and even more changes. The ideas in this resource will help to further developments in managing teachers’ workloads and continue to improve their work/life balance.