Hi folks,
This is a request for School HR community views on a potential idea.
Those of us working in UK primary and secondary education are painfully aware of the EFSA 'flat funding' environment, set against rising school costs. Difficult choices and hard decisions are being made by schools across the land and we continue to face a 'perfect storm' set of changes.
Meanwhile, various surveys done highlight that rising teacher workload (more paperwork, more progress reporting, curriculum changes, mock assessments & associated marking) encourages some teachers to leave the profession prematurely. As well as depressing the remaining staff morale and increasing their tension levels, this also creates workload for HR professions (staff grievances, return to work interviews, exit interviews and recruitments). Without wishing to understate the impact of those teacher-burden things, is student bad behaviour also a significant factor in staff turnover - perhaps the elephant in the room? In the main, teachers deserve our eternal respect for their dedication, They also make a career choice to become teachers, not police or social workers. It must be disillusioning for them if and when their role as teacher gets swamped by having to become a first line police officer or social worker. No doubt for them, providing pastoral support is vital, but it is ancillary. There are also limits to what passionate teachers can do, especially if working at cross-purposes to the parents.
Perhaps there are at least two solutions. One is for schools to embrace educational software with clever built-in student progress assessment, as those products mature and become more widely available. That should help teachers avoid some work plan and assessment workload, in turn making the HR dept's lives a bit easier. There are some implications of this change for HR staff e.g, help in appointing 'digital learning champions' to ease thru the changes.
A second potential solution is a sector win-win 'deal' with the government funder (the DfE). Schools commit to tightening up on student behaviour (the elephant in the room, causing staff stress and contributing to teachers leaving the profession in droves?), in return for government support to increase school powers to take a more hard line approach on bad behaviour in schools that disrupts other student learning. In return for schools taking away the stress for teachers of bad student behaviour, teachers accept a continuation of modest salary rises for the next 2 years.
Since only some schools would agree to strike such a deal, it can't be negotiated by the unions at a national level. However if union members and non union members at a given school voted collectively in favour of such an approach, the national union view would have to respect this.
Because of ongoing cost of living rises, clearly such a deal could not continue indefinitely. However, with improved student behaviour, all parties at a given school would win something, including the students. And if student learning outcomes improve, the whole of society benefits too.
All very interesting you might say, but what's the HR staff's involvement in this? An idea to discuss with educationalist colleagues, the school finance dept and the SLT. The staff turnover workload reduces, staff length of service at the school increases, less training cost is wasted, less recruitment costs are incurred and staff tensions reduce. Food for thought?
