Dear Damian Hinds,

I listened with interest to your speech to the NAHT, and I welcome your efforts to provide clarity to the system, especially where this has the potential to reduce excessive workload.

It was clear that your audience welcomed changes to reduce the pressure that has spawned the anxiety infecting our working lives. However, it will take more than four rounds of applause to wipe out the consequences of the years of mistrust and denigration of teachers.

As is always the case in any profession when the dialogue happens at the top, there is no guarantee that it will percolate down to where hope is really needed. I am talking, of course, about the teachers still in the classroom who have weathered the changes so far but who have had enough of being the most over-scrutinised, over-directed and overworked professionals in the country.

You have shaken off the spectre of local schools commissioners dropping in on schools demanding to see extra data and evidence of schools fulfilling their myriad of duties. Removing one of the heads from the hydra of accountability is a step in the right direction. Now would be a good time to release hardworking teachers from the tasks that suffocate their best efforts.

In schools, it is rapidly becoming the case that unless an action is recorded, it hasn’t happened. Minutes of meetings take a lot of time to compile, are rarely read, but safely stored in case an inspector should come calling.

It is clear from your speech that you have an overview of the time-wasting intensity of aspects of teachers’ roles such as deep marking, and you have expressed a commitment to shrinking these. There is plenty to work on.

‘Teachers don’t mind working hard’

Your public utterances via video at Department for Education workload events and in person at heads’ conferences are a gesture of goodwill, but if “the olive branch” is to be more than a gesture, if improvements are to take root, then people other than those in high places need to hear it from you, too. Like, for example:

• The teachers who are still having to produce detailed lesson plans at the cost of their much-needed Sundays;
• The teachers who have gone part-time because they cannot keep pace with the demands of the full-time job and have taken the pay cut rather than leave the classroom completely. (A real sign of a breakthrough in workload reform would be for these dedicated professionals to be able to return to full-time posts because the job has become more manageable);
• The teachers who are still marking dialogically in many colours well into the night;
• The teachers wasting hours of time on documents when a meeting and a quick line in an email would have sufficed;
• And, most of all, teachers up and down the country who write endless pages of evidenced statements about their impact on student results in order to get the 1 per cent pay rise they should have received automatically (if the school can afford to pay it). 

As has been said so often before, teachers don’t mind working hard. 

Many will give up hours of their time at very poor rates of pay marking reams of examination papers to make the qualifications system work. Many will gather in subject association meetings to discuss and refine the curriculum. Many will take pupils on educational trips, in their holiday time, all around the world - after a trawl through bureaucracy more exhausting than the trips themselves. And many others will expend endless hours on pastoral care more intensive here than in any other country in the world.

All of these activities still go on in spite of the overload and the stress of constant surveillance. I am proud to be part of a group of professionals who give so much, work so creatively and believe so strongly in the contribution they make to society.

You pay lip service to the efforts of these people. Perhaps now might be a good time to meet with more of them and consult widely at classroom level. Their ideas could make your public promises bear fruit - before they too decide that there are other less demanding professions that will pay the mortgage and leave them time to see their families grow up.

Yours sincerely,

Yvonne Williams

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama at a school in the South of England, and a member of the NATE Post-16 committee.