Reducing Teacher Workload

The issue as seen by the DfE and some unions.

The DfE have produced a free toolkit to help teachers reduce their workload. Basically you set up a committee to arrange after school meetings to fill in forms to identify what you can stop doing. (There is a PowerPoint to show you how to do this.) Then OFSTED checks that you have held the extra meetings and kept a record of what you are doing to reduce workload. To make sure you do not fall foul of OFSTED, each teacher should keep a daily log of what they have reduced, and by how much. They then record this in the school's central log of what work is being reduced so that they can show this to OFSTED. The DfE are likely to produce league tables of which schools are reducing their workload enough, and any that does not reach the Expected Standard for reducing workload will be turned into an Academy. (If such schools are already part of a MAT, they will be rebrokered to be taken over by another MAT that has a better record of keeping records of reducing workload.)

How teachers see the workload issue.

What Follows?

When schools report that this DfE initiative has not actually reduced workload, OFSTED will produce guidance saying that they do not require schools to reduce workload and that this is in effect a myth. They will instruct all of their inspectors who have been on their in house Workload Reduction Inspection Course, to stop insisting on seeing the school's central log of workload reduction targets, and NOT to record workload reduction comments in OFSTED reports.

The DfE View

Mr Gibb said he was proud that workload reduction was a key target for English schools and that according to PISA we were becoming world class at reducing workload records. Many more children were now in schools with outstanding workload reduction targets.