TM4T Using Your System 3.2 - Knowing that Teaching can be an Office Job

It is difficult to find a teacher with much experience in commerce or industry who is not amazed at how inefficient some UK schools are, how time-consuming their processes are, and how heart-achingly pointless some of their office activities appear.

Inevitably, if you are working in an environment with inefficient bureaucratic systems and inadequate management controls, your work will prove stressful. This has been proven in a million offices across the globe. If you are to be successful in teaching - effective and efficient - you need to be able to rise above this, focus on your own objectives, focus on what is important, and spend as little time as possible shooting alligators. You cannot solve the problems of the school, its governors, its neighbours, its management, its students, their parents and the government single-handed. Don't try.

So: what does a teacher actually do in their 'office' role - in the bit of their job which isn't teaching? What needs to be achieved in this mysterious 'PPA' time? In secondary schools in England and Wales, the answer is 'it depends'. It depends on the school, on the seniority of the teacher, and on the teacher's subject-discipline; it also varies from year to year, and depending what time of year it is. To look at a list - a breakdown of what one teacher does, click here

It is really quite a lot. The first important thing is that you must be able to differentiate between two types of work. The first type is non-negotiable. This little pile includes only two things:

a) Anything directly involving Child Protection, or the safety and well-being of the students in your care. (Note: to understand about Health and Safety, click here).

b) Anything involving the marking of external examinations or formal qualifications.

Any work in these two categories must be done, to the letter, in the manner and to the extent prescribed by your school, the governing body, the local authority and/or the examination board. You cannot cut corners, make a value judgement, consider opportunity cost or even grumble about it too much.

Everything else is negotiable.

That doesn't mean that you haven't got to follow school rules, of course, or heed policy, or take guidelines into account. It simply means that you have to balance the amount of work involved against your other commitments, and be prepared to explain your decisions. Opportunity cost does apply to everything else.

So, ignoring the non-negotiable tasks, you need to assess what you actually have to do outside the classroom.  How much of your 600 hours must be spent on the tasks here - or on other tasks not on the list?  On this point, dear reader, I cannot give you a numerical answer.

Schools, subjects and teachers are different - you need to decide which are your top five non contact time-stealers and work on them specifically. Consider:

• what is the best way to achieve your objectives

• what do you actually, physically DO (stand and talk, tick boxes on a form, post letters, make phone calls etc)

• ask yourself whether anyone else could do this work on your behalf (elves, support staff, office staff, parents)

• ask yourself what the best time, place, and method is to do the rest of the work.

• look for ways to streamline and ideally automate the tasks you have to do.

This last bullet point 'look for ways to streamline' may seem like magic-wand-advice. For more specific guidance, click here.

You should develop efficient methods of doing all routine tasks. For a list, with discussions of how to tackle each efficiently, click here.