Issues around excessive workloads are often at the forefront of staffroom conversations, and for good reason. Trying to complete the termly to-do list during our contracted hours puts pressure on us professionally.
Subsequently, we try to make up the hours in our free time, adding to our domestic stress and reducing the amount of time we have to spend with loved ones or on our hobbies.
International workload comparison charts offer greener grass. “Come over here,” they say. “We’ll show you a work-life balance that’ll help you fall in love with the profession again.”
But beware dear traveller; greener grass comes at a price.
Take New Zealand, for example. In 2021, I moved from Scotland to New Zealand to spend a couple of years teaching at a school in Wellington. I was excited to try out a new education system, to experience teaching in a truly bicultural society and to broaden my skill set. Teachers work hard everywhere, right? But I had heard that New Zealand encouraged the notion of a healthy work-life balance, and so I thought nothing more about that side of things.
Two years later, and boy, do I miss that little document we all liked to laugh at in our bantering-in-the-staffroom days - the Working Time Agreement (WTA).
Let’s look at some statistics for a second.
According to a recent survey by the EIS teaching union, published in April after around 16,500 responses, 41 per cent of members said that they work more than a full extra day each week (although this was 57.5 per cent in 2018) - an extra eight hours or more - with only 2 per cent saying that they very rarely work extra hours. With teachers in Scotland contracted to work 35 hours, eight extra hours or more amounts to 43-plus hours a week.
In New Zealand, according to a 2020 Primary Teacher Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, almost half of primary teachers reported working over 50 hours a week; 16 per cent worked between 55 and 60 hours a week; and a shocking 11 per cent said they worked over 60 hours a week.
New Zealand primary teachers also reported working incredibly long hours during school holidays, too. According to the report, around 35 per cent of primary school teachers reported working somewhere between 10 and 24 hours a week, and 24 per cent reported working between 25 and 30 hours.
My experience in New Zealand would align with the group working 10-24 hours. My holiday time was often spent writing up assessment notes for individual pupil folders or updating electronic assessment records, with this task usually being completed within the first few days of a holiday, whereas towards the end of the break, I would be asked to attend collegiate planning meetings outside the in-service days on the calendar.
But why does New Zealand differ so radically from Scotland in this respect? The job is still the same. Our curriculums are very similar in nature and design. Pupils are the same everywhere - TikTok dances are international, and Lionel Messi is God no matter what language you speak.
I suggest to you that Scotland’s WTA, along with the agreed calendar, is the key difference in protecting teaching staff from rising work hours. New Zealand does not have a WTA.
What this means is that collegiate planning begins to take over personal planning and preparation time during the week. Collegiate hours go unchecked, weekly workload balances vary massively, and, owing to the lack of an agreed calendar, unannounced meetings or training days often pop up unexpectedly. The personal planning and preparation tasks haven’t disappeared; they’ve just been shifted to a much less convenient time for teachers - our free time.
The WTA, while still a topic of conflict in some schools, proves its value most when it’s no longer there.
Jamie Baptie is a teacher at a primary school in New Zealand but previously taught in Scotland for 10 years and is planning to move back to Scotland next year
