When does time theft begin?
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 128 No 2, 31 March 2023, page no. 9
Every year the QTU is challenged by members asking about workload, and every year the same myths about hours of work and what is to be done during that time emerge.
These myths include suggestions that there is no need to work beyond the 25 hours of rostered duty time and that any work performed outside of school time is time theft.
It is not true that educators only get paid for 25 hours a week. They are paid an annual salary, not an hourly wage, and as a consequence, a teacher’s remuneration is not limited to rostered duty time. We all know that teaching is a profession that requires work outside of rostered duty time – the question is how much work?
The QTU’s Queensland Teacher Workload (2018) survey showed that teachers work an average of 44 hours per week and school leaders work an average of 62 hours during a typical week. The findings are consistent with other education and industrial research and are excessive.
If these hours are excessive, how do we calculate what is reasonable? And what measures can we put in place to demonstrate that for teacher and school leader workload is being reduced? The calculation that the QTU has adopted uses the weekly hours of a public servant and the number of weeks per year they are required to attend work and applied it to the school setting. Using this method (see https://www.qtu.asn.au/less-42 for details), the average weekly hours of work for a teacher or school leader is 41.7 hours or <42.
There is a clause in the TAFE award that requires teachers to attend college or be engaged in college related activities for a certain number of hours a week. When I apply this to schools, and if we accept the premise of the 42 hours per week, then teachers and school leaders are required to attend school for at least 25 hours a week and be engaged in school related activities for 17 hours a week (and not do any work during the school holidays).
An Organiser recently described this as non-discretionary and discretionary time. It is the time necessary for a teacher to do the work of teaching, i.e. to plan, teach, assess, report and develop; the same time that school leaders have to ensure that teachers can do the work of teaching and to attend to other functions of leadership; and the same time that heads of programs and teaching principals have to do the work of teaching and to ensure the work of teaching is done.
What can this look like in a weekly context? There are potentially four kinds of non-discretionary time within a week:
- rostered duty time (RDT) (25 hours per week)
- flexible student free hours (SFD) (if being taken as a twilight/added to a meeting/used for APR etc)
- meeting times
- bus and playground duties (PGD).
How these are applied to a school week is subject to consultation and agreement at the LCC. Consequently, given the provisions of the Award, Agreement and Regulation 7 of the Education General Provisions Act, a member’s non-discretionary time, or the time they are required to attend school on a given week could be between 27 or 28 hours per week (25 hours RDT + 90 minutes meetings + 30 minutes SFD + 45 mins PGD). The remaining time, in this instance 13.7 hours, is discretionary – teachers and school leaders determine when and where this work (i.e. school related activities) will be performed.
The core requirement of our profession is to know the students we teach and how they learn and to be prepared to teach them each day they are at school. If this requires more than 42 hours per week, then this is when time theft, and workload issues begin.
Over the past two years, the QTU has partnered in an Australian Research Council linkage project researching how teachers use their time. As part of this research, a time use app has been developed that asks members to register the work they are performing in a 30 minute time slot on a given day in a three week period. These three entries are then reviewed by the researchers, who identify what teachers and school leaders are doing during different parts of the school day (from 8-3.30) and how much work members believe they will need to do in their own time to be prepared for their next day of work. The app has been through two pilots and we are currently working with QUT to roll the app out to the whole membership in Term 2 or 3 this year.
It is anticipated that the information from this app will help identify the work beyond the role descriptions that our members do, and will consequently inform measures that might be taken as part of the Comprehensive Review of School Resourcing to address member workload. It will also inform some of the strategies the QTU has in place to support members in addressing workload issues. These strategies can be found on the QTU website and lend themselves to the six contributors to workload – ourselves, our workplace, the region in which we work, the system, the government (state and federal) and our communities.
What can be done in the meantime? Review the website (www.qtu.asn.au/workload-reduction) and look at the strategies that have been put in place. Is there something adding to your workload that you can address at the local level? If so, raise the issue with your school leader, understand why the school adopts the practice causing workload issues, and work together to find a way in which this can be addressed. School leaders should also look to reduce the factors impacting upon their workload.
The true meaning of the words in agreements can only have effect if they are known and then operationalised. Remember the strength of the QTU comes when we work together to win.