I've never bought into this 'spends most of the summer marking' myth
I cant ever remember getting homework at the end of term before the summer holidays, especially considering you were in a new year when you came back
as for exams or mocks, I mean really, im sure the exam board hire and pay for people to mark these
I might be wrong , maybe someone can enlighten me
Sums up the level of ill informed opinion from people who think that because they attended a school they know exactly what happens. There’s a whole curtain and structure behind you never see.
Put it like this. A standard school day for staff is around 8-4pm every day if you factor in directed time meetings and average them across the year (ie parents evenings, training etc, which can go on to around 8pm some days). Doesn’t seem to bad right? A nice 9-5 generally.
So let’s factor on top this. As a teacher we are performing (teaching) around 30 children 20 hours a week, with an addition 2 hours being directed time for cover for those staff members absent. So really it’s 22 hours. Those hours are teaching a class, managing behaviour, teaching content, checking content. In other words there is no hiding place for you to have a quiet moment or time to work as you are constantly performing. Plus you have the form notices, safeguarding checks in a morning, logging, reporting, data tracking, implementation of strategy, parental engagement. So yeah that’s my 9-5.
Oh except for the fact if you crunched the numbers that means we only have two hours to plan lessons a week and to do our marking, known as PPA. As an experienced teacher it takes me roughly on average 45 mins to create a lesson from scratch with an additional 15 minutes reviewing and ensuring everything is tweaked, but new staff trained will take around 2 hours when doing a PGCE. I teach in a sixth form secondary so I have two additional years on top to plan for, oh and that’s three subjects I teach at sixth form level, not just one.
So let’s be generous and say that it’s a standard secondary school. Year 7-11 so 5 years of ages with two lessons a week for each. That’s 10 hours a week for creating lessons.
I teach roughly 10 groups a week too in terms of one group over two hours. Most schools will expect one piece of marking every three weeks or so that’s formally assessed. Now if we talk about official assessments and a piece of work, 30 kids in a class, 3 minutes per piece to mark? That’s 90 minutes per class on top but I’d say for my GCSE groups an exam paper fully completed will take me two hours to mark per class. 90 minutes for ten classes adds on 900 minutes a day. So thats 15 hours, divided by three for each week meaning another 5 hours on top.
Let’s factor in report writing too and data entry and add on top another 2 hours a week for year reports which we do twice a year and have to be individual.
17 hours additional labour per week minus off the two we have for PPA is 15 hours of additional work per week to do outside of the “9-5” we are contracted to do. Oh I didn’t add lunch duties, morning and after school duties, break duties, printing time, prep time, book marking, meetings with staff members, having to write statements for local authorities over concerns over kids, organising school trips, taking kids on trips and residentials over the weekend which we aren’t paid for either.
Most teachers also have lives over the weekends and children to support so is it any wonder most of this extra work gets pushed into the holidays? This is exactly why we are bleeding good staff and can’t recruit people to go into the profession.
But yeah sure your theory checks out.
