Tis the season to be jolly, unless you’re a teacher, in which case you are most likely a zombified wreck tenuously held together by caffeine and chocolate bars that aren’t even made of chocolate any more.
In the popular imagination, teachers finish at 4pm and have “all those holidays”. Yet at this point in the year, most I know are barely functioning. Colds are battled for weeks on end as we stumble through brief lulls in the day as though dazed, unable to string thoughts together. The half terms are, yes, a perk, but they are also a necessary buffer against complete burnout.
I am all too aware that teachers are taken as supreme moaners, forever griping about workloads while enjoying the sort of work-life balance other people envy. So I can only imagine the eye rolls and ocular strain brought on by recent pleas from the 4 Day Week Foundation that teachers in England and Wales trial a four-day week.
It is true that when the holidays arrive, I am not engaged in the same desperate scramble to find childcare for my children, but the reality isn’t that we get to sit and twiddle our thumbs. According to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), two in five teachers work an extra 26 hours a week for free. It is the highest unpaid overtime of any UK profession. To make the numbers add up, that’s a pay packet £15,000 a year lighter than it should be. Or what Patrick Roach, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, calls “daylight robbery”.
I have worked as a teacher for nearly 20 years and, for the past few, I have worked a four-day week. My non-teaching day has given me space to think, plan, reset – the very activities we shunt to the margins despite knowing that focus and recovery are essential to productivity. The reduced teaching hours didn’t make an immediate difference, but over time working like this has become the only sustainable way for me to also be a mother, daughter, partner and functioning human being.
It makes sense that a small shift like this would allow teaching to be more compatible with how we live today. The traditional teaching week remains tethered to a bygone era. Teachers no longer simply impart knowledge. We are “managers” of behaviour, provide pastoral support and safeguarding, and deal with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) administration. That is before mentioning the emotional labour of working with 30, often hormonal, young people all at once for hours a day. All this in the context of stripped services for young people and their families.
No wonder, then, that in a 2023 study only 59% of teachers expected to remain in the profession over the following three years, down sharply from 74-77% before the pandemic. A pervading sense of regret permeates staffrooms.
Longstanding problems with the state of teaching are reflected in poor levels of retention and rising rates of staff sickness. Schools in England spent £1.25bn on supply teachers in 2022-23. If we continue to organise teachers’ working weeks the way we do, we’ll get the same results. It’s why the call for a four-day week in the profession isn’t acquiescing to needless complaining – it’s a necessary innovation.
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Parents can rest assured this wouldn’t introduce another childcare headache. Schools would open for five days, with teachers allocated one day each week as protected time to plan, mark and deal with the pastoral issues that each working day inevitably throws up. These tasks, impossible to complete adequately between 8am and 4pm, take chunks out of evenings and weekends. It is not about working less but working smarter, so teachers aren’t run ragged by endless tasks.
At some point, the adults in the room must acknowledge the greater, and more expensive, risk is business as usual. Each year, thousands of teachers leave: 41,200 in England last year alone. The system is losing experience faster than it can replace it. We can’t continue to talk as though the status quo is the only and therefore best option. It is already failing and costing young people the stability they, their parents and teachers need.
A four-day week is no magic bullet. It will not fix squeezed budgets or crumbling infrastructure. Young people will still be overwhelmed by an intensely packed, exams-driven curriculum. What it would do, however, is give exhausted staff room to breathe and plan so they can be better teachers. It is a bold idea that may just match the scale of the crisis.
The real question is this: can we afford to continue as before?
