By Miss Management | The FAIL Files
Fallowmere Academy is delighted to welcome proposals for a four-day working week for teachers.
We have always been committed to flexible working, staff wellbeing and finding innovative ways to do more with less.
All existing lessons, meetings, duties and responsibilities will, of course, remain unchanged.
Our timetable coordinator has requested compassionate leave.
I’ve spent a fair proportion of my teaching career working four days a week.
Well, being paid to work four days a week. There’s a difference.
For years, Friday was my non-working day. I taught 80% of a timetable, which, in a secondary school, is perfectly manageable. Geography doesn’t have to happen on a Tuesday. French can run from Monday to Thursday. With a reasonably cooperative timetable coordinator and some suitably complex software, there’s no particular reason a teacher can’t have a day off.
The problem wasn’t the teaching.
Alongside my teaching timetable, I held responsibilities for SEND and safeguarding. My teaching allocation was reduced to 80% of that of someone in a comparable role. My responsibilities, however, were not.
The pupils didn’t become 20% less needy. The EHCP paperwork didn’t reduce itself accordingly. Parents still expected someone to answer the phone, and nobody had thought to tell safeguarding concerns that Fridays were off-limits.
There were, of course, colleagues who could deal with urgent matters in my absence. But the ongoing casework, decisions and paperwork were still waiting when I returned.
At one school, I received the full responsibility allowance. At another, I initially received 80% of it, despite doing the whole job, with 80% of the release time.
That was quite an arrangement.
And because parents’ evenings, meetings and detentions were almost never scheduled on a Friday, I attended virtually everything my full-time colleagues did anyway.
This was before anyone paid quite so much attention to directed-time calendars. Nobody was especially interested in whether part-time colleagues were doing a disproportionate amount of directed activity.
Friday became the day I caught up.
Eventually, I negotiated a full-time contract with a day working from home.
I wasn’t suddenly doing more hours. I was already doing considerably more than five days’ worth.
I just started getting paid for five of them.
And, as it turns out, it’s astonishing what you can achieve when nobody interrupts you every eleven minutes.
Some interruptions are essential: a distressed pupil, a worried parent, a safeguarding concern. They are part of the job, and rightly so.
Others are rather less essential but nevertheless seem to require the immediate attention of whoever happens to be responsible.
I can spend an entire school day sorting things out for other people, then get home and realise I haven’t actually started the work I was supposed to be doing.
The day at home gives me a fighting chance.
So when I read that the government was considering allowing teachers to work four-day weeks, I was interested.
Genuinely.
I think flexible working could be brilliant for teaching.
I’m just not sure anyone has tried putting it on a timetable yet.
Four days. Same hours. Same children.
The proposal announced on 22 October would allow full-time teachers to complete their directed hours over fewer than 195 days a year.
The 1,265-hour annual limit would remain, and children would still attend school five days a week.
It isn’t a proposal to reduce teachers’ working hours. It’s about allowing those hours to be arranged differently.
Fair enough.
In secondary schools, I can see how some of this might work. We’ve accommodated part-time staff for years. Schools routinely arrange timetables around colleagues who don’t work particular days.
But there’s a difference between a teacher working 0.8 of a timetable for 0.8 of the salary and a teacher working full-time hours in fewer days.
And that difference gets rather interesting when you look at the numbers.
Has anyone asked the timetabler?
Take a fairly typical secondary timetable.
Five lessons a day. Ten days in the fortnight.
For the sake of argument, let’s give our classroom teacher 45 teaching periods and five periods of PPA.
Now let’s give them one day off per fortnight, on full pay.
Wonderful.
They have nine working days, giving them 45 available periods.
And 45 lessons to teach.
Which leaves precisely no time for PPA.
Teachers are entitled to protected planning, preparation and assessment time amounting to at least 10% of their timetabled teaching time.
So where does that go?
We could reduce the teaching allocation, but somebody else would need to teach those lessons.
We could ask another teacher to cover them, although that teacher would presumably like their day off too.
We could recruit additional staff.
I assume somebody has mentioned this to the Treasury.
Or perhaps we could extend the school day, squeeze a few more lessons into the remaining nine days and hope the buses, pupils, support staff and parents don’t mind.
There may well be workable models. Different timetables, staggered non-working days and creative staffing arrangements could make some of this possible.
But none of them is quite as simple as taking Friday off the calendar.
And that’s only one day off a fortnight.
An actual four-day week is another matter entirely.
And then there’s primary.
I’ve been thinking about this from a secondary perspective because that’s where I’ve spent my career.
Primary colleagues have a rather different problem.
In secondary, we can shift geography to Thursday or move French around a fortnightly timetable. The children are already taught by different teachers throughout the day.
A primary teacher might have the same class all week.
You can’t just move Wednesday’s Year 4 to Tuesday and hope nobody notices.
Of course, primary job shares have worked successfully for years. But they’re planned arrangements, with teachers sharing responsibilities, communicating about the children and working out who does what.
A full-time class teacher having Wednesday off still leaves a class needing to be taught on Wednesday.
Perhaps we could bring back the YTS lad.
Those of a certain age will remember him. PE, computing, drama, music. Occasionally a football, a BBC Micro or a lesson that didn’t go quite according to plan.
I may be showing my age.
Fallowmere Academy is already investigating whether the Youth Training Scheme can be reinstated.
We anticipate minimal additional staffing costs.
Not all working hours are equal.
There’s another difficulty, of course.
Directed time isn’t the same as actual working time.
Those 1,265 hours cover the time teachers can be directed to undertake particular duties. They don’t represent a ceiling on all the professional work a teacher does.
The planning, marking, reports, resources, preparation and assorted things that need finishing don’t conveniently stop when directed time runs out.
Which is how I ended up working on my day off in the first place.
And that’s before we consider the practical business of being absent for a day.
Who deals with the parent who needs a call back? Who picks up the pastoral issue? Who attends the meeting that can’t be rearranged? Who sorts the problem that absolutely cannot wait until Thursday?
Sometimes those things can wait.
Sometimes another colleague can deal with them.
Sometimes they can’t, or shouldn’t.
I’ve been the person doing the work on my day off. I’ve also been the person in school picking things up because somebody else isn’t there.
Neither arrangement is particularly sustainable if nobody has allowed for it.
There has, at least, been some progress on responsibility allowances. From September 2026, TLR1 and TLR2 payments must reflect the proportion of responsibility undertaken, rather than automatically being reduced in line with part-time hours.
Long overdue.
But being paid properly for a responsibility doesn’t necessarily mean being given enough time to do it.
And classroom teachers without TLRs don’t have management release time that can be rearranged to create a little breathing room.
Their timetables are already pretty full.
I’d quite like this to work.
I really would.
I know a teacher who is not remotely a morning person. Their school found a way to timetable a 0.6 contract across five afternoons, rather than insisting on three conventional full days.
Three lessons a day, no early starts and a teacher who gets to work at a time that actually suits them.
I think that’s brilliant.
It also makes the point that flexible working doesn’t have to mean taking Friday off. Sometimes it’s about arranging work around the person doing it.
Somebody at that school looked at an unusual request and found a way to make it work. The pupils still get taught. The teacher has a manageable working pattern.
I’d love to see more of that.
Teaching needs to be a profession in which people can have families, caring responsibilities, interests and occasionally a life outside school without feeling that they’re letting everyone down.
We lose experienced, capable teachers because the job doesn’t always fit around the rest of their lives.
More flexibility could make a real difference.
But making an individual timetable work is not quite the same as offering an entire workforce the opportunity to compress full-time hours into fewer days.
One requires creative timetabling.
The other may require rather more teachers.
And we’ve become rather too accustomed to assuming that teachers will absorb whatever extra work happens to arrive.
If we want people to work their full-time hours across fewer days, we need to work out how those hours fit around the teaching that still needs to happen.
That might mean different timetabling models.
It might mean job shares, more specialist teachers or genuinely different approaches to staffing.
It might mean funding.
I appreciate that last suggestion is unlikely to be universally popular.
Meanwhile, Fallowmere Academy has launched its flexible working consultation.
Staff are invited to indicate their preferred non-working day.
Requests will be considered subject to curriculum requirements, staffing availability, departmental responsibilities, PPA entitlements and the operational needs of the school.
The timetable will be finalised once staff availability has been confirmed.
Staff availability will be confirmed once the timetable has been finalised.
We are confident a solution will emerge.
Personally, I’d love to see more teachers able to work flexibly without taking a pay cut, sacrificing their PPA or spending their day off catching up.
But before we celebrate the four-day working week, there’s one fairly basic question worth answering.
Who’s teaching the children on day five?
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