Government recommendations to reduce teacher workload will not make “one jot of difference” unless they are given legal force, a union leader has warned.
Education secretary Damian Hinds has prioritised teacher recruitment and retention, and in recent years the DfE has launched a number of initiatives to advise schools on how to reduce teacher workload.
However, a motion to next month’s NASUWT annual conference, which expresses concerns about “unacceptable workload burdens” placed on teachers by data and assessment practices, has been voted the fourth most popular by its members.
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General secretary Chris Keates told Tes that the DfE’s three working groups on workload had come up with “quite good recommendations, actually, that if they were implemented could make a difference”.
However, she added: “They’re good recommendations but they are meaningless unless they have got some statutory force.
“To be honest, teachers get disillusioned by this.
“They hear Damian Hinds stand up and talk about workload and commitments, but that kind of hand-wringing by ministers doesn’t make any difference to the daily pressures and the impact they are having on their health and welfare, and it doesn’t have any impact in terms of stopping the haemorrhaging out of the profession and deterring other people from joining it.”
Ms Keates blamed the government’s approach of deregulating the school system, and delegating powers to schools.
“The problem is that none of this has any statutory force,” she added. “If the government was really committed to this, then that report’s recommendations would be made statutory provisions.
“My view is that if the government was really serious, we wouldn’t be having these discussions about, ‘well, we’ve given this out to schools’ and then wringing their hands and saying, ‘Why is teacher workload so excessive?’
“It’s still excessive because the government has failed to put the statutory provisions on schools to require them to address the issue.
“Until that happens, they can put out all the fancy booklets they want to on recruitment and retention, but it’s not going to make one jot of difference.”
The motion, to be debated at the NASUWT conference in Belfast over Easter, calls for the union’s national executive to “investigate the impact of the high-stakes accountability system on the health and wellbeing of teachers and children and young people”.
It adds that the conference supports the national executive’s work to protect members - “including through the use of industrial action where necessary” - from the ill effects of poor assessment practices.
A DfE spokesperson said: “The education secretary has been clear of his commitment to helping teachers and school leaders to reduce their workload. That is why we recently published the Workload Reduction Toolkit, which has been welcomed by teachers unions.
“We trust school leaders to make decisions about the workload of their staff, using the products and tools we have developed and published.”
