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Workload

Take control of planning

Excessive and unreasonable planning demands are the biggest workload burden most teachers face. As part of our ongoing workload campaign, the NUT is offering practical guidance and support to help make lesson planning efficient and genuinely helpful, as Sarah Lyons, NUT Officer for Employment Conditions and Rights, explains.

NUT members told us, in our 2010 online workload survey, that the way they are expected to plan their lessons is their biggest workload burden, seriously affecting their quality of life.

Here are some of the comments you made about excessive planning demands.

"The planning procedure is much more complex than it needs to be - you are required to use the National Curriculum, the Primary Strategy and Every Child Matters."

"We need an end to teachers being asked for A4 detailed lesson plans to be produced for each lesson and submitted to the senior leadership team!"

"We have to hand in planning for every lesson on a weekly basis."

Ofsted and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) agree that spending excessive amounts of time on long, detailed plans does not necessarily lead to better teaching and learning. Joint guidance published by the two organisations and the old Department for Education and Skills clarified that "there is no prescribed format or length" for lesson plans.

They clarified: "Teachers' time should be used for aspects of planning that are going to be useful for their own purposes, and which have a direct impact upon the quality of teaching and learning."

The guidance also suggests working collaboratively, making use of ICT resources and adapting existing planning materials.

Practical solutions at local authority level

Warwickshire NUT has negotiated an agreed position on planning, endorsed by the local authority and all the teacher unions. It says:

• The function of preparation is to facilitate the teacher's fluent delivery... not to provide evidence for scrutiny.

• Teachers at different stages in their career will require different levels of visible preparation.

• Schools in 'difficulty' might require greater emphasis on visible preparation.

• If a lesson is good, then the preparation self-evidently must have been good... we would not then need to see evidence of that preparation.

• There is an abundance of good lesson plans and preparation materials available online, which only need adapting and suitably annotating.

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