Clegg: liberating teacher's "burdensome workloads"

The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has given a speech this morning to an audience of public sector workers including teachers, social workers, local government and NHS staff, Civil Service apprentices & Fast Streamers.

This major speech about the public sector as a whole and in it, he heaped praise on public sector workers (something he thinks has been lacking). He turned his attention to helping liberate teachers from burdensome workloads that prevent them from focusing on what they do best - helping children do better at school.

Earlier this year the Deputy Prime Minister said that teachers in particular had been left feeling "browbeaten and that they are not properly valued". He said that we now need to "reset that relationship" and instead engage in a "spirit and tone of mutual respect...and that we seek out every opportunity to celebrate, and not always seek to denigrate, the fantastic work that teachers do."

The Deputy Prime Minister also said he was "increasingly concerned" by the rising workloads faced by teachers: "I've met too many teachers now who feel somewhat beleaguered by the amount of administrative form filling, some of which they don't feel makes much sense, or is repetitive or is somehow seeking to second-guess their professional judgement."

So to tackle this, The Deputy Prime Minister is today launching The Workload Challenge, inviting teachers across the country to have their say on the causes of unnecessary workload and giving them the opportunity to tell the Government exactly what should be done about it.

In the New Year, a panel led by teachers and other experts from the education sector - will scrutinise the best ideas, then work with teachers, Ofsted, unions and other leading education stakeholders to put them into action, leading to a programme of action starting early in the year.

Some people imagine a teacher's day being from the moment the gates open to the moment the bell rings in the afternoon.

• In fact, teachers in England work on average 48 hours a week (with one in 10 reporting working weeks of 65 hours or more) (source: OECD).
• Only 20 of those hours are spent in the classroom (source: OECD).
• The remainder of their time is spent on other tasks like administration, lesson preparation and marking work. The OECD figures showed that teachers in England spent more time on those tasks than their colleagues in countries with high-performing education systems.
• They work longer hours than the rest of world but spend less time in the classroom than in other countries (source: OECD).
• Every action has a process - health and safety forms, inputting results from exams and marking, and filling in forms for a school trip in triplicate for no apparent reason.

Common problems sited by teachers:

• Excessive expectations on marking work, with teachers being expected to mark up to 100 books per day.
• Preparing and providing excessive amounts evidence for performance management purposes.
• Repeated data entry of the same information.
• Being told to write comments in different colours.
• Overly-burdensome lesson planning and health & safety forms.

Nick Clegg also wants to free teachers up to spend the time outside the classroom doing what they know will help their class do better. Earlier this week he announced that the Government will bring in new ways of supporting parts of the public sector:

• A new commitment to help blue light workers stay mentally well and stop them from burning out. The DPM launched a pilot with the charity Mind, to start in spring 2015; and
• That dads employed in the civil service who choose to share parental leave with their partner will get the same entitlements to full paternity pay just like mums currently get to full maternity pay.

About public sector workers Nick Clegg said: "Your contribution is even more remarkable given that - over the last four years, in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, with our public services having to absorb significant spending cuts - every public service has had to do more with less. In Coalition, we've had to take difficult decisions on pay and pensions as we deal with the deficit - because there is nothing remotely fair or public spirited about saddling our children and grandchildren with those debts.

"You've had to make personal sacrifices - to keep more of your colleagues in work and protect essential services for those who need them most. As a result of those decisions, those sacrifices, our country is back on track. Our country is growing again. More people are in work than ever before. And while a lot of families are still feeling the squeeze, we are finally through the fire. Up and down the country, people can once again look to their future with hope."

"The question is: what next? The job's not done. We've still got a way to go to pay down the deficit and, if the last five years were about securing Britain's recovery, the next five years must be about moving from a period of rescue to a period of renewal. How do we learn to live within our means while providing people with the innovative and world class public services they deserve? That is one of the central questions all political parties must answer at the next General Election, and each one of the UK's main political parties has a different response."

"On the Right, you have the Chancellor pledging to carry on cutting, asking the working poor to bear the brunt of those final years of deficit reduction by squeezing unprotected public services - such as social care, welfare, education and policing - even harder. On the Left, you have more reckless borrowing from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, even though it will jeopardise the recovery your sacrifices have secured, even though it will threaten the future investment in the services you represent."

"In the centre, you have us - the Liberal Democrats. We believe in sound public finances supporting strong public services. We recognise that to build a stable, more balanced economy and a fairer society in Britain, we need both our public sector and private sector to thrive together, and we see you - Britain's public servants - as our partners in this."