Six Forum: The General Secretary of the NASUWT

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Teachers should be working an average 45-hour week, according to a report commissioned by the government.

But this should remain a "target" rather than a fixed limit on hours, says the School Teachers' Review Body for England and Wales.

Their report also says there should be guaranteed time in the school week for marking and lesson preparation.

But the recommendations stop short of meeting the demands of the teachers' unions, which are threatening industrial action in support of a 35-hour week.

You sent your questions and comments to the leader of the NASUWT teachers' union, Eamonn O'Kane, in a live forum for the BBC's Six O'clock news, presented by Manisha Tank.

Six Forum transcript: The General Secretary of the NASUWT

Newshost:
Hello and welcome to this Six O'clock news forum, I'm Manisha Tank. A new government commissioned report suggests that teachers should be working an average 45-hour week, the figure remains a target and not a limit, according to the Teachers' Review Body for England and Wales but where does that leave the teachers currently threatening industrial action in the fight for a 35-hour working week?

Well joining me from our Millbank studio is the General Secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, Eamonn O'Kane. Mr O'Kane thanks very much for being with us.

First of all, I'd like to get your views on this report that was commissioned by the Government which has come up with the figure of the 45-hour working week.

Eamonn O'Kane:
Yeah well I have to say I think frankly we're a little under-whelmed by the report. There are some parts of it that are good but in some of its recommendations we think it misses the main points. In particular we're quite discouraged by the fact that the review body has not recommended, for example, a maximum limit on the hours that teachers are required to teach. They accept it in principle but unfortunately they then went on to say that they didn't think it should be applied immediately although they may return to it at a later stage. So that's a disappointment. On the other hand on a more positive note the report did recognise that there had to be an allocation of time, specific allocation of time, for teachers for marking and preparation during the school day. Now that at least anyway we think is going some way to recognising the pressures which teachers are currently under in terms of their workload.

Newshost:
Now it's interesting you should obviously bring that up. We've had a huge response from teachers for this particular forum but also from their spouses and I just want to flag up one e-mail from John Bulger in England saying that: "My wife is a teacher and has been for over 30 years." For the last few years he has been appalled at the workload that his wife has, she regularly brings home planning work to do yet no one seems to be prepared to take, what he calls, the common sense step of actually deciding on that limit to the extra work. "It seems that paperwork has replaced trust." And obviously brings up this issue: why can't Ofsted not just trust the teachers to be getting the work done, they're filling in all of these forms because Ofsted has deemed them necessary?

Eamonn O'Kane:
Yeah well that's a perfectly fair point and it's one of the problems that's developed over the last number of years has been the inordinate increase in the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy teachers are being faced with and the caller is actually making precisely that point. It is true that the STRB report today also recognised that there were at least 30 different tasks, mainly administrative tasks, teachers are currently undertaking that they should be given over to support staff and teachers shouldn't be required to do that - to undertake those tasks. Now that at least will be a helpful move but at the end of the day we still believe that it's necessary to put limits on the hours that teachers are required to do and it's only if you go down that particular path are we likely to put a stop to the endless bureaucracy that teachers are now currently asked to undertake.

Newshost:
Well also the criticism of these working hours is endless, we've got a text message in from Helen Stagg in Portishead: "At our school our A Levels teachers are working up to 92 hours a week." And another text message here from H. Radford, the head of PE at a particular school: "What about the work we do in the holidays, the weekends, parents evenings, report writing, trips, sports fixtures etc?" Obviously there's a great deal being done outside the working hours during the holidays, where do you draw the line?

Eamonn O'Kane:
Well that's an extremely good point because one of the criticisms that's sometimes levied against teachers is because they have longer holidays than other professionals, therefore their lot is a lot easier and yet as that caller points out in fact the holiday time for teachers has been more and more eaten into and greater and greater pressure has been placed upon them to do increased amounts of work in so-called holiday time. And equally they have been asked at weekends to do - and they have to - undertake work at weekends if only to prepare themselves for their classes. And that is why - and I must emphasise this - that is why the proposed allocation of a set amount of time within the teaching day for teachers to mark, prepare and record and assess the work of their pupils is extremely important and we intend to build upon that recommendation by the review body in the discussions with government. That at least, as I said before, is a recognition, not a very strong recognition but at least a recognition, that unless we move down that route we'll not be able to put a stop to this flow of paperwork and so on that teachers are required to do.

Newshost:
Now let's get on to the subject of teachers actually leaving the profession - given the amount of paperwork and the kind of hours that they're working. Michael in Northumberland in the UK writes in: "Are you seeing teachers leaving in large numbers due to the pressures of non-teaching activities?"

Eamonn O'Kane:
Well there certainly is, I mean there are two problems facing teaching at the moment in terms of the recruitment, first of all, of teachers and getting young graduates into the profession and equally retaining serving teachers in the profession. I constantly get correspondence from teachers who are leaving, often on ill health grounds, broken by stress frankly, in today's conditions. Because one of the things that I think people don't often appreciate about the pressures of modern teaching is that the situation of pupil behaviour is something that's a constant stress and pressure for teachers. Many pupils in today's schools often expect to be entertained rather than taught and that clearly puts a tremendous stress upon teachers and if they're faced, for example, with a number of disruptive pupils it's incredible the stress that that can place upon teachers and that can add to the pressure. So it underlines yet again the need for government to recognise that unless we can build in some safeguards against this incessant pressure upon teachers we will not be able to stop the flow of teachers from the profession and we won't be able to recruit the requisite numbers of teachers in the future.

Newshost:
But in this battle that the unions are having at the moment there is perhaps a changing tide of perception among the general public looking at the teaching profession and I'm just going to give you an example of it now. We've had a couple of e-mails in on the subject. Robert in the UK has written in: "The hours that teachers work currently are similar if not less to those worked by many people in other professions. However, teachers get massive holidays and most people have to make do with four weeks, teachers certainly have many more. I suspect most teachers have never left the school system and so wouldn't realise how hard everyone else is working." That's one to deal with. Another one from Nicole Shepherd in the UK: "I'm an asylum lawyer working for a charity and I have a contracted 37-hour week but as a professional I'm expected and often do work far more hours than this to ensure court preparation etc." So there are some who are saying well actually you shouldn't be complaining.

Eamonn O'Kane:
Yes well I think people who make those comments know little or nothing about the pressures of modern day teaching and with the greatest of respect I don't think you can compare the work, for example, in offices. I, as a full-time union official, might work relatively long hours but frankly that is nothing compared to the pressure which my colleagues, who are teachers, face in the class. If you're facing and teaching youngsters all day long, often with very large classes, with the pressures to assess their work, often on an individual basis, quite bluntly that cannot be compared in any reasonable way to the sort of pressures that people, and I understand they are pressures, in other occupations. I mean teaching in many ways could be compared to acting in the sense of the stress and pressures placed upon them, no one expects actors to work 42-45 hours a week. So I really do think it's important to compare like with like when people make these observations.

Newshost:
Well let's get on to - obviously we've looked at the problems - let's get on to the solutions and what one might propose. Stephen Jones writes in: "If, as the Teachers' Review Body suggested, their holidays are too long, then perhaps we need to look at lengthening the academic year and reducing holidays." And meanwhile Barry in England writes in: "How about a 48 week school year with a shorter day for pupils? The staff could then clock in and clock out just like an office or factory and they could do their preparation and marking in school before going home." Now it sounds very regimental but are there solutions in those particular suggestions?

Eamonn O'Kane:
I don't there are particular solutions in those suggestions with respect to them. I mean there are solutions which are suggested in this review body report. For example, if we can move towards a situation where the contract of teachers is changed so that they are guaranteed an amount of preparation time within the teaching day, if we can then control the amount of meetings that teachers are then asked to do, if we can also eliminate the amount of cover that teachers have to do - that is when they're asked to cover the classes of absent colleagues - if we can bring in increasing numbers of support staff to undertake much of the administrative, clerical work that teachers are again asked to undertake and indeed many of the pastoral work in which teachers are dealing with individual pupils who are absent, for one reason or another, if we can bring in a series of measures like this, and this is what we intend to discuss with the Government in the coming months, then that will go, I think, quite a considerable way to meeting these pressures. But I think some of these more fanciful solutions, with respect, I don't think really meet the cause. There are solutions, they will be expensive, they won't be cheap, but unless these solutions are implemented along the general lines that I've suggested, as I said, the crisis that we presently have in teaching in terms of recruitment and retention of teachers that will continue.

Newshost:
Mr O'Kane I don't know what your teaching vocation actually is but let's go to a maths class just for a second. Dr Chris Strugnell in Northern Ireland's written in and this is about the problem with averages and the hours - the working weeks - and how we're calculating them: "The problem with averages is that teachers are going to work some weeks over 80 hours and other weeks will be less obviously and there should be a maximum of 40 hours in any one week and not an average as such." What do you think?

Eamonn O'Kane:
Well I certainly defer to his mathematical skill and he's absolutely right to identify the problem with averages and people can draw all sorts of conclusions from statistics and I have to say sometimes the way in which statistics are quoted they're often more for support, as I said, rather than illumination. I think what he's suggesting is exactly what we've been talking about and which, incidentally, does exist in Scotland and people tend to forget this - that the sort of solutions that teacher organisation have been calling for already exist in Scotland where there is an overall limit of 35-hours a week and one was not suggesting that that's the only limit - that's the only number of hours that teachers would work, many teachers will want to make their own choices and as professionals they should be allowed to do so but at least we should build in some safeguard for teachers along the lines that your caller has suggested.

Newshost:
Now since we just did maths, let's look at money to finish off with. John Stenner in the UK has written in: "My head wants to implement workload initiatives but says that he can't fund them." That's the classic problem in the teaching profession. "What is the answer?"

Eamonn O'Kane:
Well, at the moment the Government have established 30 schools throughout the country which are called pathfinder schools in which they've provided, I think, something like ?4 million to try out various schemes such as, I think that head teacher's been suggesting, ways in which workload can be reduced and some of them along the lines that I've just been suggesting a few moments ago. Now we're looking with great interest at these models, we want to see them conducted fairly quickly, we don't want a prolonged period of experimentation. In our view the solutions are relatively straightforward. But at the end of the day yes, there's no doubt about it, that significant sums of money will be needed and that's why the comprehensive spending review, which the Government will be announcing sometime in June and July, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer will then set out the spending plans for the great departments such as health and education, that's why they're so important because unless we get a favourable result in that the sort of innovations that we all wish to see introduced into teaching and into controlling workload won't be introduced with the deleterious effects that I've already suggested in terms of recruitment and retention. So, yes, money and investment is extremely important.

Newshost:
Well we shall see how the delivery comes through. Eamonn O'Kane of the NASUWT thank you so much.

Eamonn O'Kane:
Thank you very much.

Newshost:
Well it's all an education on the forum, I'm Manisha Tank, thanks for watching and goodbye.