Editorial: Achieving workload reduction vs managing workload
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 129 No 6, 23 August 2024, page 5.
With the most recent announcements by the Minister for Education relating to initiatives to address teacher and school leader workload, it is important to consider what steps we as professionals can take to also address workload.
This year there have been discussions about more release time, additional non-contact time, and more professional collaboration time as an imperative in our EB log of claims. Some believe that these are a step toward workload reduction, but I see them more as a mechanism to support workload management.
Workload arises because we are being asked to do more within the same amount of time. Non-contact time and collaboration time help us manage these things, but they do not take away the workload. Schools and classrooms are becoming more complex and we as a profession need time to differentiate, to meet, to collaborate, to plan, and to teach students with complex needs. However, to have the space and time to do these things, we some things have to be removed.
The word that has been used to describe this is “de-implementation”, or the removal of initiatives that have been replaced by others. How many times have we seen a new program rolled out, without the previous program in the same space being removed?
One example is five-week data cycles. The Data Joint Statement and the school data plan were developed to provide guidance to schools about what data was necessary/mandatory versus data that was “nice to have”. Many schools have developed school data plans with a consideration of “mandatory data sets” and then other data sets. Some schools have never stopped operating on a five-week data cycle.
De-implementation is no longer doing things that “have always/previously been done” and starting to do something that addresses the workload – i.e. taking away and not adding to.
The five initiatives arising from the workload survey that are currently open for consultation – including parent engagement – are designed to do just that .
It is important that we also address the myth that teachers and school leaders work 9am to 3pm and are only paid for five hours of work a day. Teachers are paid a salary, not an hourly wage, and the remuneration of a teacher is not limited to rostered duty time. The department uses five hours of sick leave to represent a day because that is the time that they know teachers are required to attend school.
We all know that teaching is a profession that requires work outside of rostered duty time. The question is, how much work? Over the past five years, the QTU has referred to a calculation of less than 42 hours per week. The calculation uses the weekly hours of a public servant and the number of weeks per year they are required to attend work, and applies the outcome to the school setting.
This is then divided into discretionary and non-discretionary time. These constitute the time necessary for a teacher to do the work of teaching (i.e. to plan, teach, assess, report and develop), the time that school leaders have to attend to functions of leadership and ensure that teachers can do the work of teaching; the same time that heads of program and principals have to teach and ensure the work of teaching is done.
What does this look like in a weekly context? There are potentially four points of non-discretionary time within a week:
- rostered duty time (RDT) (25 hours per week)
- flexible student free hours (if being taken as a twilight/added to a meeting/used for APR etc)
- meeting times
- bus and playground duties (PGD).
How these occur in a school week is subject to consultation and agreement at the LCC. Consequently, given the provisions of the award, agreement and regulation 7 of the Education General Provisions Act, a member’s non-discretionary time, or the time they are required to attend school in a given week, could be between 27 or 28 hours (25 hours RDT + 90 mins meeting + 30 mins SFD + 45 mins PGD). The remaining time is discretionary – teachers and school leaders determine when and where any work outside of non-discretionary time will be performed.
De-implementation sits in both discretionary and non-discretionary time. If we take away tasks/duties, or place limits on them, then teachers and school leaders will have more time to do the things directly connected with their roles. We should all be considering what it is that we do at a school level and at a personal level that we are not required to do. When we take those things away, then our workload will start to reduce.
Conversations with the department on what other strategies of de-implementation can be adopted continue.