The world of education technology gathered at the ExCel in London (where else?) for the Bett Show 2019, last week. The hot topic, at least as far as Damian Hinds was concerned, was how technology can reduce our workload.

Just a fortnight ago, Mr Hinds told us that he’d looked high and low for the “golden lever” to reduce it, but to no avail. Now he is rallying the forces of software engineers, innovators, disruptors and “Big Data” to come to our aid. His particular concern seems to be the number of emails we get.

Dear reader, this is why we can’t have nice things.

This kind of thinking is everything that’s wrong with the world of educational policy and leadership, and the very source of our workload issue. Consider this quote: “To those who haven’t already, I encourage them to look at what they can do to shift away from an email culture in, and into, school to free teachers up to spend more time in the classroom.”

No teacher does emails when they could be teaching. Because they’re teaching.

At best, if a teacher spent all their PPA doing nothing but, they’d have four hours a week to do it. If they weren’t doing that, they wouldn’t be in the classroom. That is the point of PPA!

Granted, they might be doing something more conducive to good classroom practice, like planning, preparing or assessing. More likely, they are accounting for the work they have done - churning out data to justify their continued employment.

Emails aren’t teachers’ big problem

We work more than 50 hours a week in term time, and can only teach between 20 and 25 of those by law. It seems obvious to us, but Mr Hinds: we’re not spending 30 hours on email.

And anyway, the quantity of emails has nothing do with it. You can innovate that away by creating team chat boards or the like, but it’ll have absolutely no effect, except perhaps to increase workload. Another password to remember, app to go to, interface to navigate. You can reduce the total, but gains will be marginal.

As leader of parental engagement a few years back, if I’d been swamped with emails from parents, I wouldn’t have complained about it. Hinds’ speech suggests it is something to be resented or resisted somehow. Quite the contrary. It is a sign of openness and shared purpose, something to be grateful for and harness. Sure, we’ve all encountered the odd “pushy parent”, but even then communication is always an opportunity to build a working relationship.

The problem isn’t one of quantity, but of quality. What is in those emails?

The quality of school emails

It’s something like this:

“Many thanks to those who have completed their Year 7 marksheets. Your line manager will speak to you today if you haven’t completed yours. Marksheets are open for the half-termly Year 9 data drop. You have two weeks to complete them. Year 8 marksheets will open from next week. Year 10 reports have been reviewed and you will shortly receive a list of those pending corrections. We’ve noticed some uniform slippage. Please ensure you pick up all students whose shirts are untucked skirts rolled up/trousers hanging down. Sign their uniform cards and issue behaviour points. Year 7 have received 8,731 achievement points so far, but Year 8 only 3,141. Don’t forget to reward all your classes for positive behaviour.”

And that’s only Tuesday.

Wednesday, someone will have been observed without a lesson plan and everyone will get an email reminding them of the non-negotiables.

Thursday, everyone will be reminded to sign up for a twilight CPD session from a menu that offers nothing they’d choose for themselves.

Friday, everyone will be wished a good weekend, and reminded separately of the need to have their books marked for scrutiny by Monday.

What was last Monday? I’ve forgotten.

Ofsted adds to teacher workload

To speak of a culture of emails is to have so comprehensively missed the target as to have shot the princess whose kiss you were trying to win. Damian Hinds is Robin Hood in reverse - an awful archer, stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

We know from research by the Education Policy Institute that teachers in so-called “outstanding” schools work the same number of hours as those in so-called “inadequate” ones. Yet those at the top of the rankings are less likely to report their workload as unmanageable.

Why? In an ideal world, it would be because the identification of poor workload practices determined the “inadequacy” judgment. In fact, it is the judgement of inadequacy that causes workload to mushroom. Ofsted has itself acknowledged the link between its judgments and the level of deprivation a school finds itself in.

And to think, this is the DfE of “evidence-based policy”.

It’s not like there isn’t a workload problem in “outstanding” schools, too. By and large, special measures is simply the shock treatment to the talk therapy of “outstanding”.

But what is the treatment for?

Let’s call it Accountability Syndrome. Key symptoms include under-performance, untrustworthiness, flights of pedagogical fancy, curricular wastefulness, ideological inertia, misplaced empathy for the most vulnerable and a propensity to fall asleep on the job.

Together, the DfE and Ofsted’s diagnosis and prescriptions are killing the patient.

A culture of accountability and blame

As comedian Tim Minchin quips: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”

At some point, we will need to accept that performance-related managerialism hasn’t worked, and won’t. Instead of a culture of accountability and blame, which even the UN decries, we need a culture of responsibility and support. That starts with rebalancing the qualitative and the quantitative dimensions of policy. Getting that balance right requires us to consider who the information we generate is for.

Failure to do this is why Ofsted’s new inspection framework can’t work while it still grades schools, and it is also the reason technology will never solve our workload crisis. If an Ofsted category is blood-letting, cutting the number of emails we receive is basically homeopathy.

Back at Bett, the one company that could have hoped to make some sort of dent in workload - the one entity that truly benefits from all this data input - is notable by its absence. Capita has very publicly chosen not to go, and to ”bring SIMs to you” instead.

Don’t miss your chance to tell them what you think. Hopefully you’ll get the email.

JL Dutaut is the co-editor of Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto (Routledge). He is currently on a career break from teaching to research school accountability systems around the world. He hasn’t found one he likes yet, and he doesn’t think you would either