By Teo Eve

The teaching of lessons has become inconvenient for teachers trying to do their true work: to fill in data sheets, to prove they have been teaching and to attend meetings on the exaltation of new teaching methods.

This revelation came to me when, at the end of a full day of teaching, I announced to my colleague that I had done no work that day. Five hours of delivering content, managing behaviour and marking books, coupled with the duties I undertake during my breaks, had left me with no time to be productive. The day’s distractions had prevented me from designing future learning resources, replying to emails about students’ uniforms and writing my weekly newsletter entry on what I had taught that week. My colleague, horrified that I had fallen behind, astutely remarked I would have had a more productive work day if I had taken it off sick. My absence would, at least, have freed up time to upload PowerPoints to our online learning platform, analyse data and write reports justifying why underperforming pupils received the grades they did, and design new displays for my classroom, which my headteacher had recently pulled me up on for neglecting.

How right my colleague was – but, recognising that the pressure of our workload was not unique to the two of us (for my colleague had also found that teaching often interfered with her more vital work) but was universal to all teachers, we came up with a natural solution. Anticipating the inevitability of its implementation at some point, we made haste to bring our proposal to our headteacher as soon as we were able.

Our solution?

Teachers should stop teaching altogether.

Removing the inconvenience of delivering lessons from our timetables would free up time to plan them. Not having to invigilate exams would give us the freedom to mark them. And any energy we’d save on not managing misbehaviour would naturally be spent instead on writing behavioural reports.

Our headteacher was thrilled. This was the solution she had been looking for! By liberating teachers from the constraints teaching imposed on them, they could spend all of their time on the tasks they had been increasingly completing outside of contracted hours: gathering and tracking data, writing reports and demonstrating evidence of teaching.

This was, after all, what the stakeholders cared about – tangible data. For had anyone really learnt anything if you could not provide proof they had?

Upon announcing our proposed changes in a morning meeting, the headteacher, my colleague and I were unsurprised to see them met with unanimous applause! Now, teachers could actually do their jobs without having to worry about the pesky inconvenience of teaching. The workload issue had been solved: the 7am–4pm day that had previously consisted of lessons, meetings (planned and unplanned), lesson creation, marking, organising clubs and updating spreadsheets would be cleared up to focus exclusively on what mattered most. Our profession, which was an office job at heart, would finally be purged of the unnecessary intrusion of teaching.

There was only one problem, a lone voice said at the back of the hall, after the initial applause had died down.

What? the headteacher asked, evidently surprised someone had found a chink in the water-tight plan.

The small problem is, the teacher at the back of the hall said, what is to be done about the students?

About the Author

Teo Eve is a half-British, half-Italian writer and secondary school English teacher with experience teaching abroad. A poet who plays with language, Teo is the author of the experimental poetry collections The Ox House and I Imagine An Image, both published by Penteract Press. Contrasting their abstract poems, Teo’s stories explore and critique contemporary social realities.