Workload Charter
We are here to make great schools and happier, stronger communities so that people have better lives.
A happy and healthy workforce is vital for the success of our students so we have worked closely with our trade union colleagues to develop the workload charter. The charter underpins our determination to ensure that our schools are great places to work.
To bring together some of our fundamental, guiding principals, we have developed our Workload Charter. The Charter clearly sets out our collective approach day to day delivery and how we work together, providing a framework that covers the key challenges we face as a profession.
Culture
The culture of the trust and our schools is critical in ensuring we have an enjoyable, rewarding working environment in which all colleagues believe the demands of their job are reasonable and manageable.
We start from an assumption of professional trust and the belief that everyone seeks to do a good job. We ask all leaders to set a good example in how they behave and that they try to reduce levels of stress and anxiety in the organisation.
Workload
The trust supports the principle of 1265 hours for teaching staff, and where a colleague is not required to attend a particular directed event, for a reason such as not teaching a particular year group, they should not be given directed work.
Lesson Planning
Staff are not expected to submit daily or weekly plans. IT systems will be aligned to establish systems and processes that minimise the replication of effort across different schools.
Marking and Feedback
- There will be no central trust-wide or school-wide approach.
- There will be no centrally prescribed frequency of written feedback.
- Each subject may have a different approach developed by subject experts.
- We may mark less in terms of number of pieces of work but greater impact.
- There will be no acknowledgement marking.
Data Collection
Schools collect student performance data three times a year to ensure they can monitor progress without over-burdening staff. Teachers are only asked to input data that requires their professional judgement.
Emails
There is no expectation that staff respond to emails outside normal working hours. We want all staff to be able to achieve a healthy work-home balance and we trust the professional judgement of our staff to make decisions about when they work outside school hours.
Inspection
The trust does not conduct ‘mocksteds’ that require teachers to provide lesson plans or that involve processes outside the normal monitoring and evaluation and performance management policies.
Working Practices
Where new initiatives are introduced, they should be based on evidence that they are likely to improve student outcomes and serious consideration must be given to what we are going to stop doing to ‘make space’ for what is new.
