Dear colleague
Thanks to your strike action and campaigning, last year the NEU secured a 6.5 per cent pay award for 2023-24 for all teachers in England, and an associated extra £900 million to properly fund it. Your commitment also led to new commitments from the Government to reduce workload. These include a target to reduce the average hours worked by teachers by five hours per week and a new workload reduction task force, with union representation, charged with identifying workload drivers and making recommendations to Government.
Teachers in the UK work more intensively and for longer hours than any other profession.
STOP PRESS: In January 2024 the Government accepted the first set of recommendations from the task force in full: reinstating into the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) an updated list of 23 clerical and admin tasks that teachers cannot be obliged to undertake with immediate effect; and ending the statutory obligation for schools to run performance-related pay (PRP) from September 2024. You can read detailed NEU guidance here.
There is no better time to act to reduce workload in your workplace.
These resources have been designed to support reps and their union groups to understand and identify what is causing additional workload in your school or college. It will help you work collectively and, where possible, jointly with other recognised unions to take action over unnecessary workload that is driven by in-school accountability.
It includes checklist guidance on some key accountability drivers of excessive workload – data, lesson planning, marking, cover, observations – with an audit tool for you to identify which of those issues are most prevalent in your workplace. We have added an addendum with supplementary checklist guidance regarding the first set of workload reduction task force recommendations published by the Government in January 2024. You can also download model slides to help you discuss these issues with members and model letters to help your union group to raise those issues with your leadership, bargain for improvements and escalate if necessary.
It is time to value educators, time for you to reclaim your professional lives.
Join us. Together, we can shape the future of education.
Daniel Kebede
General secretary, National Education Union
NEU bargaining calendar
Workplace bargaining and eradicating workload linked to accountability is a key focus for our Value Education, Value Educators campaign.
We expect that workplace bargaining on workload will be a year-round activity for many. It sits alongside our NEU bargaining calendar which focusses on pay implementation during the autumn term, flexible working in the winter/spring term and directed time in the summer.
Each term, school groups are encouraged to raise the same issues at the same time to give members a sense of collective strength within and across workplaces, so employers and heads/principals see a co-ordinated, national union.
You can access our digital resources on pay implementation, directed time and flexible working via the adjacent buttons.
We hope these digital resources will help you and other NEU members to have a voice and exercise professional agency in your workplace.
