FEATURE

Directed time: securing your entitlements

During this term discussions should be taking place on the allocation of directed and working time. The school’s directed time calendar should be being finalised for the next academic year. Teachers and school leaders should ensure that they are receiving their contractual entitlements as set down in the teacher’s contract.

Working time

The teachers’ contracts across the UK all require a full-time teacher to be available for work on 195 days in any school year: 190 for teaching pupils and performing other duties and five in which the teacher may only be required to perform other duties. In Scotland there is also a contractual 35-hour working week.

In addition, a teacher is required to work ‘such reasonable additional hours as may be needed to enable the effective discharge of their professional duties’. This work should be focused on planning and preparation and assessing, recording and reporting. The time and place are determined by the teacher. However, the requirement to work additional hours is in the context of the entitlement to enjoy a reasonable work/life balance.

Parental consultation

The NASUWT recommends that teachers should only attend one parental consultation per year for each year group. These meetings should be counted as directed time and identified in the calendar of meetings. In a week where there is a parental consultation meeting scheduled, no other meeting outside school sessions should be calendared to take place.

Open evenings

There is no requirement for teachers to attend open evenings. However, where they agree to attend, these should count against directed time and against the weekly total of meetings.

Pupil reports

Reports to parents, including comments from teachers, need only be made once per year. Time should be identified in the directed time calendar for producing reports. Some schools use one of the non-pupil days for this.

Directed time calendar

Staff should be consulted on an annual calendar of staff meetings, parental consultations and other activities and the creation of a reasonable annual calendar is critical in bringing downward pressure on workload and working hours. The days of the week on which meetings will be held at the end of school sessions should be identified and once published, these should not be changed unless there are exceptional circumstances and then only in consultation with the teacher.

An effective calendar is also particularly important for part-time teachers as both their pay and working time is benchmarked against the pay and working time of a full-time teacher occupying a comparable post. In England and Wales the calendar also forms a crucial part of the planning for rarely cover.

Meetings

The NASUWT maintains that teachers not on the leadership spine should attend only one meeting per week outside pupil session times.

Those on the leadership spine should seek to agree a limit on the number of meetings they should attend per week outside school session times.

Meetings should normally be no more than one hour in length and should have published agendas, be effectively chaired and have clear outcomes. Teachers should not provide ‘secretarial support’ at meetings by taking formal minutes or verbatim notes. Teachers cannot be directed to attend meetings during the lunch break.

Planning, preparation and assessment

All teachers in England and Wales should have a guaranteed minimum of 10% timetabled planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time. This counts towards the directed time total. PPA time is to be used as the individual teacher chooses and cannot be used for any other activity. In addition to PPA, teachers who have leadership responsibilities are entitled to leadership and management time in school sessions.

For further information, go to the NASUWT’s website at www.nasuwt.org.uk.

www.nasuwt.org.uk May 2010 Teaching Today 13