I don’t envy the individuals tasked with writing next year’s school timetables. Last week’s Teacher Recruitment and Retention in 2023 report from Teacher Tapp reveals that just over one in 10 secondary teachers had unfilled vacancies in their department. Meanwhile, just under one in 10 primary teachers reported an unfilled post in their school.
Timetabling is a complex and undervalued responsibility at the best of times, and it involves even tougher decisions in these dire circumstances. Unfortunately, decisions about the timetable have consequences that disproportionately impact on certain pupils.
In a new paper for the London Review of Education, I review reams of studies from around the world, and show how timetabling decisions can doubly disadvantage lower-achieving and poorer pupils.
Firstly, disadvantaged pupils tend to need “continuity of care” even more than their peers. Where pupils are experiencing upheaval in other parts of their lives, relationships with teachers can provide valuable anchoring points. And teacher “churn” undermines these anchoring points.
School timetables: the question of teacher choice
Secondly, there is a tendency for newer, less experienced teachers to be allocated to classes that are perceived as “undesirable” because they are more challenging or lower attaining. Teachers who remain in a school have a degree of influence over the timetable that new arrivals lack - and are therefore able to snap up the more “desirable” classes for themselves.
This can potentially have negative repercussions, with lower-achieving and poorer students being taught by teachers unfamiliar with the community and the way the school works, or who have fewer pre-existing relationships with pupils and their siblings, parents and guardians.
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Does this mean that schools should keep teachers’ preferences out of timetabling decisions? Encouragingly, my research reveals two reasons for optimism, even when teachers are involved in choosing classes.
In some US states, long-serving teachers’ influence is enshrined in labour regulations, and this has been shown to exacerbate the flight away from challenging classes. In England, meanwhile, even if it’s not a formal right, more senior teachers have greater influence over the timetable, with 59 per cent either advocating for a particular group or writing the timetable, compared with only 37 per cent of classroom teachers.
Yet, anecdotally, senior teachers often report that they consider it their responsibility to take on some of the classes in most need of expert teaching.
As timetablers grapple with next year’s allocations, my research serves as a reminder to put senior teachers’ sense of responsibility to good use as a bulwark against the damaging effects of churn.
Clearly, longer-serving teachers shouldn’t be “punished” by being paired with all the toughest classes, but in countries like Singapore teaching the most challenging classes is the specialist domain of the most experienced and effective teachers, who are rewarded with fewer classes and higher pay.
My research also shows that teachers want the timetable to serve their pupils’ interests. In a unique experiment, I presented teachers with two slightly different questions: half of the 8,000 teachers who answered questions via Teacher Tapp were asked whether they would like to be timetabled to teach the same class next year (a strategy known as “looping”). The other half were asked the same question, but with the prompt “imagine if research showed that there were benefits to pupils keeping the same teacher for more than one year”.
There was a chunky difference between the two groups’ responses, showing that teachers are hungry for a research-informed timetable that allocates teachers in pupils’ best interests. This is reassuring because there is no point designing a timetable around pupils’ needs only to find that teachers resent it and leave in response.
‘Grade-specific’ allocation
Looping is not the only approach to timetabling to have been researched, and, in fact, studies tend to show that its effects are quite small. So another approach that timetablers might want to consider is “grade-specific allocation” - a practice in which teachers are assigned to teach a particular year group for multiple years.
This approach means that teachers can cover the same material several years in a row, cutting workload and giving them a chance to refine their delivery. It may be particularly appropriate for newer teachers. One study in North Carolina showed that teachers who taught the same age group during their first two years in the profession were 20 percent more likely to stay.
Solving the timetabling puzzle is going to be harder than ever next year, but the pupils who will be worse affected by turnover and churn have got to be a key consideration.
Luckily, there is a growing evidence base that decision-makers can draw on here - and, as teachers seem happy for pupils’ best interests to be taken into consideration, there is certainly space to consider teacher preferences, too.
Loic Menzies is a visiting fellow at the Sheffield Institute of Education and a senior research associate in Jesus College Cambridge’s Intellectual Forum. He tweets @LoicMnzs
