Secondary Teachers at Work

Jim Campbell, S. R. St. J. Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134879588
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The first part of this book charts and analyses 2,688 working days of 384 teachers in 91 LEAs in 1991. It shows how they spent their working lives, how well matched their teaching was to their academic background, and the balance between teaching and other aspects of their work. The analysis uses five major categories: Teaching, Preparation, Administration, Professional Development and Other Activities. The authors argue that there is an occupational split between `the managers' and `the teachers'. The second part comments on the findings by relating them to issues of school management, and teacher professionalism, arguing that `conscientiousness' poses a professional dilemma for secondary teachers.

Part I
THE EVIDENCE

1
TEACHERS AT WORK
Images and reality

Our ideas of what teachers do when they are at work may be conditioned to a large extent by the memories of our own experiences of teachers when we were pupils. We think of teachers as having fairly short hours of work, roughly coterminous with the pupils' day, and rather long holidays by comparison with other workers in service industries. Moreover, teachers are thought to have it easy in another sense; the nature of the job itself is considered undemanding, and only semi-professional in status (Etzioni 1969). The image of teaching as a 9 to 4 job, and the adage that Those who can, do; those who can't, teach', are deeply imprinted on the national, and perhaps the international, consciousness.

In England and Wales, the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act 1987 did little to dispel this image. It specified that teachers might be required to work on not more than 195 days a year, of which 190 are days on which they can be required to teach pupils. They may be required to work at the direction of their head teacher for a maximum of 1,265 hours a year. Colloquially known as directed time, this is equivalent to about thirty-three hours per week, in an assumed thirty-nine week working year. Any other time spent on work—‘non-directed time’—was discretionary in the sense that it was not directed by an employer or superior. It was specified loosely—‘such additional hours as may be needed to enable them to discharge effectively their professional duties’ (para. 36(1)(f)), with the consequence that the amount of time teachers spent on work beyond the directed 1,265 hours would depend upon the strength of either their conscience or their fear of facing classes unprepared.

Whether this image has ever been a true reflection of the work of the generality of teachers is uncertain. It has been challenged by the only two sustained observational studies of teachers at work in England. One (Hilsum and Strong 1978) concerned 201 secondary teachers and the other (Hilsum and Cane 1971) concerned 129 junior teachers. Both were conducted in the same English LEA (Local Education Authority), Surrey, with a meticulous methodology that involved an unrecorded dry run day for familiarisation and detailed observation of each teacher on one or two working days, randomly allocated by the researchers and spread across a whole year. The observational data were supplemented by self-report records covering evenings, weekends and holidays.

The data were analysed by the use of two classification systems. First, the overall time spent on work was divided three ways, into teaching sessions, breaks and out-of-school. These were referred to as ‘C’-time, ‘S’-time and ‘O’-time respectively. Second, within each of these time frames, the teachers' work was broken down into seventy-seven (secondary teachers) and fifty-five (primary teachers) different activities, which were then grouped into nine main categories: teaching, preparation, consultation, school administration, control/supervision, mechanical/clerical tasks, pastoral, private and unrecorded.

An important objective of this categorisation, given the value-laden nature of education, was its attempt to establish and maintain neutrality in description. It described what a teacher was doing at a given time, not why or how effectively he or she was doing it.

Further reference to the work of Hilsum and his colleagues is provided at relevant points throughout this book. There are two main points to notice at this stage. First, the belief that teaching was a 9 to 4 job was shown to be false for the teachers concerned. For the secondary teachers in 1974 the term-time working week was 46.75 hours, 38 per cent of which was in their ‘own’ time. Second, Hilsum and his colleagues made the point that, if all that is involved in the true nature of teachers' work was to be understood, focusing exclusively or principally on classrooms was inappropriate, because much of the work was conducted away from classrooms:

On average only 50 per cent of the school day was spent by the teacher in contact with classes, and this fact ought to form the context for any study—by researchers, students, tutors or administrators—of the teacher's professional role …the average time spent on pure teaching is… under 30 per cent of the total working day. If those who train teachers or undertake research isolate the teacher-pupil learning situation from the wider role played by the teacher, they will undoubtedly convey a false image of the teacher's work. The sociology of the school cannot be defined solely in terms of teacher/pupil interactions during the teaching part of lessons.

(Hilsum and Strong 1978, p. 58)

In secondary schools there is considerable variati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE TEACHING AS WORK PROJECT
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The evidence
• Part II Teacher professionalism and change
• Appendix: Methods of data analysis
• Bibliography
• Index