In the latest in our series on staff workload in international schools, we chat with Matt Payne, head of lower school at Nord Anglia International School New York, to hear about life as a teacher in The Big Apple.
He explains why there are increased expectations around parental engagement - but that through clear planning and preparation, teachers are given opportunities to plan their workload accordingly.
1. What is workload like for teachers in your school?
Our core working hours for teachers are between 7.30am and 4.15pm, with the expectation that teachers work the hours needed to achieve what is required, including delivering high-quality lessons, marking books in line with our policy and formative and summative assessments.
Teachers are all asked to lead an extracurricular club once a week and attend staff meetings every week.
Generally, this means workload is similar to a school in the UK. However, there are some differences. As we are a fee-paying school, we have several events that we highly encourage the teaching staff to attend, such as mixer evenings, parent-teacher association auction nights and meet-and-greets for new families.
Part of the work, when taking a post internationally, is adjusting to the increased parent communication and relationships that you must focus on.
2. How do you engage with teachers to understand workload concerns?
Our school has a close staff cohort with strong relationships. This creates a culture where feedback can be given regarding workload and senior leaders can review if any changes are needed.
We also have phase meetings and staff meetings regularly, and SLT interact with most members of staff daily, meaning concerns can be raised.
We also use an employee engagement survey, completed yearly, where staff can share anonymous feedback so we can review any issues and act accordingly.
3. Have you implemented any specific policies or initiatives to reduce workload?
One thing we have done that I think has had a big impact was creating an event calendar that gives staff a really clear idea of what lies ahead for the academic year.
SLT produce this at the start of the year and populate it under a series of headings within an Excel sheet, such as “staff meetings”, “PTA events”, “key deadlines”, “educational visits” and “theme weeks”.
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During induction week, this is shared out with the whole team, so teachers can see the key events throughout the year. Of course, we cannot say what every single staff meeting will focus on over the school year before it starts, but it means there is a clarity for the year ahead.
A good example of how this can help is with reports. Although it hasn’t reduced report writing, teachers now have a signpost for when they need to think about writing their reports, with staff meeting time blocked out for teachers to write these and get some time back.
It then has all the key dates for proofreading, printing, enveloping and sending home.
This allows everyone to plan in advance and manage their time so they can balance their workload. It also gives teachers ownership of their workload by saying, “Here’s the deadline, you have months to think about this now to prepare accordingly.”
4. Do you look at teachers’ extracurricular workload, too?
We do expect our teachers to take the children on trips and to deliver high-quality clubs.
One way we look to manage this is by planning accordingly when trips may have educational value across different classes.
If Year 3 are focused on a topic on Ancient Egyptians and Year 7 on Ancient Greeks, they could both go to the museum to research their respective topics. This means several teachers are planning, making it a lighter workload.
5. Have you done anything to improve your own workload?
As I gain more leadership responsibilities and have less time in the classroom, I have been forced to do this more - and it has been challenging.
I have had to learn to plan my own time better. By creating to-do lists and calendaring my time, I am forcing myself to focus on one job at a time and not become overwhelmed. I have also got better at delegating to the team around me and using their support.
My principal also helped me with some very supportive feedback that led me to realise that I was often being too much of a perfectionist.
He then supported me in finding ways to not let this become a burden and to identify when I was wasting time on being a perfectionist for something that didn’t warrant it. This has helped me massively in managing my workload by giving me a fresh approach.
6. If you could introduce one major change to improve staff workload management, what would it be and why?
Harnessing the clear benefits of artificial intelligence would be great for time saving and efficiency - such as generating individual report comments based on the children’s assessments and progress or for rapid timetabling ideas.
However, while AI has a huge potential in reducing workload, it is clear that finding the appropriate way to introduce it, including necessary quality checks, will be essential.
Matt Payne was talking to Dan Worth
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