Published on Liberal Democrat Voice

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 23rd October 2014 – 4:24 pm

Yesterday, Nick Clegg gave a speech to public sector workers. His specific focus was on teacher workload. Everyone thinks that teachers work short hours and have long holidays. Yet everyone who has a child actually at school will know how much effort goes in to preparing lessons. And everyone who knows a teacher knows that they spend a lot of their supposed “off-duty” time thinking of interesting lessons or, more likely these days, filling in interminable paperwork. We know that children need to be kept safe and their progress checked, but I get the feeling that the bureaucracy is overbearing and unnecessary. Let’s just give you a small example from my own experience. Every time my child sets foot outside the school we have to fill in a consent form. It’s A4. It has all sorts of medical info on it. It even asks how far they can swim unaided, a skill which is unlikely to be needed when representing the school in a maths competition or reading stories to 6 year olds in the local primary school. We can be filling in one of these forms twice a month. If it’s a mild inconvenience for us as parents, what’s it like for teachers who have maybe 30 of them to collect for each class? Why can parents not fill in a standing consent with all the info which covers the whole year?

That’s the sort of example I suspect Nick will be getting from the survey consultation he launched yesterday. Teachers are invited to complete this survey which asks for their views about the “unproductive” tasks they are required to complete.  He said:

We’re talking about hours spent struggling to stay on top of piles of incident reports, over-detailed lesson plan templates, health and safety forms, departmental updates, training requests and so on that threaten to engulf them every week. Not to mention the reams of additional evidence which teachers pull together because of a long-held belief that Ofsted inspectors want to see everything written down.

Some of this work is unavoidable. Every school needs to ensure the safety of its pupils and staff and maintain the highest standards possible. But should you really have to fill in multiple risk assessment forms for every school trip when just one form would be better

Ask any teacher and they’ll give you at least two more examples like that: whether it’s having to highlight their lesson plans in five different colours or inputting every pupil’s marks into countless different spreadsheets in countless different ways at regular points in the year.

I believe it’s time for us to stop that runaway train of bureaucracy in its tracks, giving our teachers more time to do what they do best: creating and planning the best possible lessons and experiences for our children. In Government, we’ve already done this for businesses: freeing up money and resources for millions of companies.

It’s to be hoped this initiative will prevent clearly good teachers like Lucy Fay leaving the profession. It’s not just an issue in England, though. Teacher workload is a major focus for the Educational Institute for Scotland, the main teaching union north of the border, at the moment and that’s under a system where teachers are supposed to have more built-in time for lesson preparation.

In his speech yesterday, Nick paid tribute to public sector workers:

Your contribution is 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.

I have tos ay, though, that I was pretty upset last week when the NHS workers walked out for four hours. Their demand, for a sub-inflation 1% pay rise didn’t seem that unreasonable. Why can’t the lowest paid workers get that at least? When I mentioned this on Facebook last week, people suggested it might be better to give a sum of money rather than a percentage. That sum would mean much more to the lower paid but the unions aren’t interested, perhaps because they tend to do more for the higher paid members. The low paid public sector workers will certainly have benefitted from the raising of the tax threshold but I think more needs to be done to tackle in-work poverty.  A friend of mine talked about some NHS workers being referred to food banks because they couldn’t make ends meet. That should not be happening.

A lot of what Nick said yesterday was about making the job easier, though. Cutting the bureaucracy, letting teachers teach. He also talked about making sure emergency workers had the support in place to keep them mentally well:

In the emergency services, you’re given protective gloves, masks, stab vests, fire fighting kit etc, as well procedures to follow to keep you physically safe. I want to give you that same high standard of protection for your mental health.

All in all, it was a useful speech and it does sound like he does get a lot of the challenges facing workers in the public sector. Whether they will be in a mood to listen to him is yet to be seen.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron’s Musings