It was like the first cuckoo of (a very chilly) spring: the education secretary was addressing a headteachers’ conference and saying he believed that reducing teacher workload was the key to helping to solve recruitment and retention problems in the teaching profession.
As I awoke in my garret in Hertford, it told me that a peculiar time of year was about to hit us - teacher conference season was upon us, the season where despite working their socks off during term time, many teachers will be heading for the seaside armed not with a bucket and spade but a megaphone. (Brighton is the venue of the NUT section of the New Education Union, and the ATL rump is heading to Liverpool).
But back to Damian Hinds’ critical first major speech to the profession: gosh - what an amazing conclusion!
I’ve lost count of all the initiatives over the years to reduce teachers’ workload. It all dates back to David Blunkett’s reign as education secretary in the first Blair administration.
Sadly, the first initiative to emanate from the Department for Education (or whatever it was called) during this period was not quite the earth-shattering solution the profession needed. It came in the form of a document running to more than 100 pages telling schools how they could cut down on workload. The trouble was that reading the missive merely added to it.
A deal on teachers’ workload
However, Mr Blunkett and his pals must take credit for the most cohesive strategy for reducing the burden on teachers. It came in the form of a negotiated agreement on jobs that teachers should not have to waste their time on - they ranged from collecting dinner money to photocopying and decorating classroom walls with their pupils’ work.
To ensure this, that period saw the biggest expansion in the recruitment of teaching assistants ever witnessed in state schools - giving teachers the help they needed to offload administrative and mundane tasks,
Sadly, though, years of austerity ate away at the effectiveness of that agreement and, as support staff jobs dwindled, so teachers have found their burden increasing again.
Nicky Morgan became the next education secretary to put reducing workload as a key item on her schedule but attempts during her reign to stem the time of administrative overload proved fruitless - despite a pledge to not announce changes to the content of exam syllabuses in the middle of pupils’ study time for GCSEs and A levels.
Mr Hinds could probably not do much better than resurrecting that agreement over what constitutes a teacher’s job - and do his best to ensure it is adhered to in schools.
There are signs, though, that other organisations are taking the workload issue seriously. Ofsted, for instance, is taking steps to publicise the work it doesn’t want teachers to have to do in advance of any inspection - like showing inspectors endless examples of lesson planning.
To my mind, that is a laudable and sensible step as there is no doubt that fear of Ofsted inspections had led to teachers spending hours on unnecessary preparations for them.
However, according to one teachers’ union official, the Ofsted initiative has not gone down a bundle with some headteachers, who use the threat of Ofsted inspections to ensure their staff’s noses are kept firmly to the grindstone by urging them to produce precisely the kind of material that Ofsted is now saying it doesn’t want.
So I suppose we have to raise two cheers for the fact the new education secretary realises this is a problem that needs to be tackled. (Michael Gove, for one, never indulged in any initiatives in that direction.) The jury is out, though, on whether he will be effective in trying to curtail workload.
Richard Garner was education editor of The Independent for 12 years, and previously news editor of Tes. He has been writing about education for more than three decades
To read more columns by Richard, view his back catalogue
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