Managing workload at a time when there are ever-increasing demands and pressures is one of the toughest tasks for leaders. Have you seen an increase in your workload or that of your colleagues? If so, what has been the impact? What can be done to help reduce workload, or to help staff cope with additional pressures? Here ASCL members share their thoughts.

Managing workload

Structure is key

As a senior leader in a supported academy, with one of the lowest per-pupil funding allocations in the country, I have seen my workload and that of my colleagues increase dramatically as our senior leadership team (SLT) is reduced and teaching loads increased because of budget constrictions.

Managing workload for the rest of the teaching staff is a priority, as is ensuring staff well-being, yet the pressure on an already over-burdened SLT means that there can be a very real threat of burnout, with longer-term impact on students and outcomes.

Although there is certainly no magic bullet, school leaders would benefit from structured opportunities to discuss workload with peers in order to (re)gain perspective and share a range of strategies, including prioritising tasks, self-management and how to control your inbox.

Sarah Safraz

Assistant Principal, Sir Bernard Lovell Academy, Bristol, South Gloucestershire

Every little helps

‘Work–life balance’, ‘managing workload’ and ‘workload impact assessment’ are all phrases that are used weekly, daily, if not hourly within our schools and at every level of teaching or managerial position.

As an industry we are very good at writing ‘to do’ lists, but we are absolutely useless at writing ‘not to do lists’. Workload is cited as one of the biggest reasons for teacher/leader exodus from our profession and recent DfE attempts at addressing this have seriously fallen short of achieving any tangible impact. Within my own school, I have asked staff three simple questions:

1. What aspects of your job do you feel could be done more efficiently…and how?
2. What aspects of your job do you feel are simply not needed? In other words, what can we stop doing?
3. Do you have any hints or tips for colleagues about making things efficient from your own personal experiences? In other words, what has worked for you that you would be willing to share?

In getting answers to these questions, I hope to establish practical and tangible strategies to reduce workload for all staff. I have attempted to introduce to our leadership teams what I refer to as the ‘Tesco Model of Leadership’, that is, if you want to put a new product line into a supermarket, an old product line has to go…the shelves do not grow, the stores do not get bigger, so if something new is coming in, something old must be removed. We must adopt the same approach in education. Instead of asking ourselves, “Is this strategy a good strategy?” we should ask ourselves, “Is this strategy better than an already existing strategy?”

If the answer is yes, then we adopt the new strategy but we must then also stop the old strategy. Education is not an ever-expanding universe; it is a finite-size ‘supermarket’. We have to identify the best strategies and take the hard decision to stop the ones that are not so good. If we don’t, we won’t have any staff left!

David Waugh

Headteacher, Poynton High School and Performing Arts College, Stockport

External forces

I believe that the workload on school staff has increased steadily over not just the past 12 months but for a number of years.

One of the biggest factors in this is the scale and pace of external changes to, for example, assessment and exam specifications. These have caused huge upheaval for staff and students and this has been exasperated by the uncoordinated approach to implementing them.

To reduce the impact of these changes there needs to be a greater understanding of the impact they have on schools and staff and more thought needs to be put into how to introduce reform in a planned and structured way.

As a school we try to reduce the impact on school staff by setting aside planned CPD time for developing these systems and increasing collaboration with other, local, schools to try to spread the burden.

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