Do the Maths

Here's a reason why teachers give up being teachers:

My school has decided, in what can only be described as a scared-of-Ofsted frenzy, that from September, every teacher has to write a lesson plan for EVERY lesson they teach. They have even developed a new lesson planning sheet for the use thereof, which succeeds the one developed last September which itself succeeds the one developed the September before that.

The new lesson plan is full of little boxes to be written in and ticked and cross-referenced in order to accommodate all the initiatives that have gathered momentum in the last 2 academic years : High order questioning, low order questioning, driving questions, key questions, personal learning and thinking skills, Kagan, learning objectives, learning checks, assessment criteria linked to progress, social, cultural, spiritual and personal development, extension activities for bright students, scaffolding for not so bright students, how many have free school meals, who has special needs and what are they, who has English as a second/ third language, what happened last lesson regarding absences, where the lesson comes in the medium term plan, who is a foster child, who is gay/bi/ lesbian(I kid you not - and what makes them think I'm going to ask?? Way too much information) and, oh yes, what you actually want the blighters to learn in the space of an hour and how you are going to go about establishing that they've learned it and not sat there on their mobile phones updating their Facebook/ Twitter status with 'I am bord. I hate skool. Skool is boring. Ryan is a nobhead.'

Oh, and how many in the class, are they boys or girls, what's the date, what's your name, which class are you teaching and what time is it? And what's your literacy focus, your numeracy focus, and your IT focus?

Luckily, there is no box to insert my bra size, which is surprising as this form was constructed by a man with too much time on his hands. Give it time - he'll realise his omission soon, I have no doubt.

Anyway, I have started filling out these lesson plans for my Sixth Form lessons because they are the only scheme of work that isn't being tampered with at the moment because I did it properly last year and no-one else in the department knows what its about.

And it has taken me 15 minutes to complete each plan.

Now, I am going to be teaching 22 lessons out of a possible 25 a week from September. Which means I am going to be spending five and a half hours a week writing lesson plans. Which is 214 and a half hours over a year. Which is the equivalent of working ten hours a day solidly for three weeks, give or take a panic attack or two just to write lesson plans. And that doesn't include putting together all the fun and games activities and resources needed to run these lessons.

Nor the marking of the exercise books. A set of books takes me 2 hours to mark if I mark once a week. I will have six sets of books to mark. That's another 12 hours a week. Or 468 hours over a year.
This does not count mock exam marking.

And here is the number crunch. My school allows me three hours a week to do planning and marking. Which is 117 hours over the year.

214 + 468 =682 - 117 = 565 extra hours above and beyond what is called in the trade 'directed time.' Or, as us lesser mortals call it 'my time.' Or an extra hour and half on my day every single day of the year.

You do the Maths!