The excessive workloads and working hours facing teachers in the UK have been clearly established in figures published by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to mark its annual Work Your Proper Hours Day.
Educators’ unions have denounced the fact that these ‘untenable’ work conditions have led to teacher shortages and exploitation.
NUT: Detrimental government policies
“Yet again, teachers are at the top of the list for unpaid hours worked”, said Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), affiliated to Education International (EI), and President of EI’s European region, the European Trade union Committee for Education (ETUCE).
Denouncing the situation as “untenable”, Blower said that “Much of teachers’ excessive workload is as a result of Government education policies and initiatives including the totally out-of-control accountability systems”.
She highlighted the following “sobering statistics”: 90 per cent of teachers considered leaving the profession within the past two years and 87 per cent of teachers know one or more teachers who have already left. This has led to “a shortage of teachers in many subjects”, she said.
Teaching is a brilliant job but it needs to be reclaimed, she added. “Working weekends and long into the evenings under such intense scrutiny and pressure is detrimental to the health, family and social life of teachers and is clearly bad for education.”
The NUT’s eight-step programme to reduce workload, with practical, cost-effective, and easy to implement solutions is available here.
NASUWT: Exploitation of teachers
“The news that teachers do the most unpaid overtime of any sector and have the highest proportion of their workforce undertaking regular unpaid overtime comes as no surprise to the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT),” NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates said.
She added that the TUC’s findings confirm the evidence on teachers’ excessive workloads and working hours that the NASUWT has repeatedly presented to the Coalition Government, an issue the Government has failed to take seriously.
Keates further stressed that the survey’s figures show that teachers are being “scandalously exploited and their lives blighted by excessive workloads, leaving them exhausted and stressed”.
She also called for an “urgent action” to put an end to “this unacceptable situation which is contributing to the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention”.