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Teachers are stressed: let admin do the work

Posted By April First On 19/03/2008 @ 12:40 pm In News | Comments Disabled

Five years ago work/life balance was the big thing in education.   Teachers were working too much, and were doing things they shouldn’t be doing. 

So the government had a great idea - under the branding of “remodelling” they created a new deal under which a whole load of tasks would move away from teachers and go to teaching assistants and administrators.   It was known as the Workload Agreement.

Unfortunately “Agreement” was a misnomer, since no one on the admin side actually agreed anything.   As a result of all this all three unions representing administrators in schools (Unison, PaTT - now known as Voice, and GMB) saw a huge growth in membership.  And the SEA was formed.   Schools began to realise that they had to consider the well-being of administrators as well as teachers.

Now the specter of teacher stress is on the rise once more.   Teacher unions such as the ATL are claiming that all the new education policies over the last five years has undermined attempts to agree a proper work/life balance and led to increasingly stressed teachers.

The latest idea is that schools should record absences caused by stress and pass this on to government.   They also want more staff wellbeing programmes in schools and colleges.

What is interesting among all the facts and figures developed is that the union says that for school managers the biggest change has been in the amount of extra responsibility (96%); for heads of department a higher workload (91%) and more administrative duties (91%).

This should be a warning sign for everyone in admin because the simple answer for any school will always be - give the administration to the school office.  Especially when the union is saying that 70% of teachers said their health has suffered because of their job, and over 50% are stressed by working in education.    For school leaders and heads of department the figures show 75% and 73% respectively complaining.

It is quite obvious that a wholesale dumping of extra duties on the school’s admin staff would be impossible, and obviously the unions will be alert to this possibility.

There are other ways to deal with stress, and indeed there is a volume on this - “Recovery from Stress - A school manager’s guide to helping colleagues” which we published a couple of years back.  There’s full details on [1] http://tinyurl.com/34gpte

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