The 35 hour week in Scotland

The 35 hour week in Scotland
A real work-life balance can never exist while teachers’ open-ended contracts mean that we are required to continue to work way beyond our ‘directed time’ of 1265 hours. The call for an overall 35-hour working week is therefore gathering support.
Many teachers look enviously to Scotland, where the 35-hour week has been included in teachers’ contracts since 2001. But research carried out for the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers shows that the reality has proved very different. Just as in England and Wales, contractual promises to reduce workload mean little if they aren’t backed up by the funds to employ additional teachers.
Before we all rush north of the border, the following quotes may sound all too familiar:
“ The time-use diary indicated that teachers overall are actually working 45 hours per week on average, increasing further with increasing status.”
“ Teachers’ expectations were raised by the Agreement that their overall workloads would at least reduce … However, most teachers sampled in this study are reporting an increased workload since 2001”.
“ For many teachers, a key element in this expression of non-sustainability and overwork was the experience of what some called ‘initiative overload’ ”.
“ There was consensus that the 35 hour working week is not being met in reality, but also there is acceptance that the job may take more hours to fulfil to a professional standard”.
“Many teachers said that everything they do is essential; very few could identify anything they would willingly ‘give up’.”
The last two comments – even if written in the words of a university researcher – point to one of the difficulties in a workload campaign.
Inevitably, there will be some teachers who believe that their ‘professional responsibility’ is to get the job done – however long it takes. Of course, we have to explain that just burning yourself out does no favours to either teachers or pupils in the long-run. Stressed teachers do not make good teachers.
But the major difficulty is that teaching isn’t a job where there is an easy hiding-place. If you haven’t prepared the lesson, photocopied the materials, marked the books in time, then getting through the lesson can be tough. So many teachers end up struggling on at the weekends to prepare what they - and their management - think they need to have ready.
That’s why a demand for a 35-hour week can’t be separated from the need for more non-contact time to get the work done within that working week.