Bureaucracy is ruining teachers’ lives | Letter

Yvonne Williams calls for a full-scale job evaluation to identify the core educational activities that teachers are uniquely able to perform If teachers are contributing £15,000 of unpaid work to the economy each year, that’s around half the salary of a new graduate teacher before tax and student loan repayments (‘Daylight robbery’: two in five UK teachers work 26 hours for free each week, 23 February). It demonstrates that in spite of all the workload research and initiatives, and efforts by schools to write wellbeing policies and show staff that they are valued, any success in reducing workload is marginal. There’s an enormous gap between the image propagated by the Department for Education’s Every Lesson Shapes a Life adverts, which show smiling teachers engaged in constant life-enhancing interaction that makes a real difference to pupils’ educational progress and wellbeing, and the reality of long lonely evenings spent glued to a computer away from family and friends. If the DfE doesn’t want to show this downside, perhaps it should do more to cull the excessive unproductive bureaucracy that’s destroying the profession. Continue reading...