Teachers need - and deserve - more management.

Now, before you close the tab and exhale loudly, hear me out.

Like you, these words would have once prompted feelings of outrage, contempt and anger.

However, the current Covid-19 health crisis has challenged - and changed - my thinking.

Time to discuss

We talk about teaching being a team pursuit; however, once the door to your classroom is closed, it’s ultimately an individual sport.

Teaching must be one of the only professions where colleagues rarely have one-to-one meetings with their line managers.

Weekly department meetings are not a time when teachers can share personal challenges or ask for help or advice.

Appraisals, then, or workbook scrutiny discussions, are often the only chances classroom teachers get to sit down with their line managers in a structured and scheduled way.

This is not the case in many other sectors.

Career advice website The Muse notes that most professionals want and need face-to-face time with their line managers; allowing time for this leads to increases in “inspiration, engagement innovation and intrinsic motivation”.

Similarly, corporate firms have found meetings with direct reports twice a month is the sweet spot in terms of wellbeing for staff.

Weekly department meetings, while useful, are often taken up with administration matters. They are not the time or place to share personal challenges, or ask for help or advice.

Learn from others

So, when is the right time? Well, unless you’re an NQT or on a support plan, never. It’s expected that as your career progresses, you’ll seamlessly evolve into an expert teacher, with titbits of feedback sprinkled over you three to four times a year.

But in the UK, Ofsted has found that it is experienced teachers who report lower levels of wellbeing (page 19).

For me, this absence of support has been brought home in lockdown. Chatting to friends in other industries, from charity workers to civil servants to architects, many have daily team meetings as well as weekly calls with their managers.

Obviously, some of these meetings will have been to monitor levels of productivity, just like teachers’ department meetings.

Yet, it has been the weekly calls from line managers that interested me. Surely some of these calls have been to monitor staff wellbeing, as well as work rate. How many teachers could say they have received the same?

But teachers need and deserve this level of support. Ofsted’s report last year into teacher wellbeing shows that, overwhelmingly, teachers do not feel supported or valued by those above them.

Time management

So, why is it that teachers do not receive adequate support from managers?

As usual, it comes down to time. In a busy day, with upwards of five hours of teaching, there is little time to sit down and have a cuppa (or lunch) - and so many teachers do not have time to see, let alone gain support from, their line managers.

Equally, line managers are not given the time to support their direct reports.

We know that schools already ask too much of heads of department: managers are expected to do the world and more.

This is not an attack on the amazing work that so many managers already do - but imagine what they could do if they were given more time.

In her educational research book, Cleverlands, Lucy Crehan investigated a variety of high-achieving education systems around the world.

One finding was that teachers in some of these places - including Singapore, China and Japan - were actually teaching significantly less than in other lower-performing Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) countries such as the UK.

In these countries, teachers were given more planning and preparation time.

Making time

Might this idea be extended to management time here?

Could schools increase the standard 10 per cent extra time that heads of department currently receive?

For many, suggesting that teachers need more management will sound completely off-key. Teaching is a profession in which many adore the autonomy of closing the classroom door and just “getting on with it”.

If colleagues feel that their managers have low trust in them or are overbearing micromanagers, they will not feel extra meetings are worthwhile.

Indeed, in the UK, the Department for Education’s qualitative investigation into retention discussed teachers’ desires for mentors (page 39) but also brought up the fear from some that worries or challenges might be passed on to SLT.

Yet, from the nationwide issue of teacher retention, we know that teachers do not feel valued or supported enough either.

Managers need to be allowed the space and time to support those who need it. This would benefit everyone.

Georgia Murphy is a secondary school teacher in north-east London