The case for 20%

Source: The Telegraph

Given the recent talk of cutting teacher workloads and the repeated suggestion of more PPA by many, I thought I would try to tackle some of the practicalities of a jump to 20% PPA. I am going to be basing this on my experience of timetabling secondary schools with a 50 hour teaching fortnight, so apologies to primary colleagues where PPA cover is often dealt with very differently. 

First of all, let’s be clear about what PPA is. PPA is time allocated for planning, preparation and assessments. It should be timetabled in blocks of at least 30 minutes and it should be sacrosanct. Teachers cannot be directed in this time – it is theirs and they should definitely not be taken for cover. 

The 10% allowance in a school with 50 x 1 hour teaching periods a fortnight gives 5 hours to support the delivery of 45 lessons – approximately 6 minutes 40 seconds per lesson. Even with an amazing centrally planned curriculum and non-written marking policy, that is a woefully inadequate amount of time, so it is necessary for teachers to spend significant time outside of school time on PPA activities. If this were doubled to 20% a teacher would get over 13 minutes a lesson to put towards preparation. It isn’t going to stop teachers working evenings and weekends, but it is 5 hours they get back out of their own time that they could be spending with their families, doing DIY or just relaxing and living life. 

However, an extra 10% isn’t just the extra time a teacher gets. It also means a teacher has fewer lessons to plan, prepare and assess. A full-time maths teacher might see one less class while a music teacher might have 2 or 3 less. As well as the lessons, it also means fewer reports to write, less data to enter and potentially even fewer parents’ evenings to attend. It was a long time ago, but I remember the step up from an NQT to Year 2 teacher being a big shock because of the combined hit of less time and more lessons. 

Another benefit of having more PPA time on teacher timetables is more opportunities for teachers and departments to collaborate. Having 10% non-teaching time compared to 5% significantly increases the likelihood of staff being free at the same time and makes it much easier for timetablers to schedule department meetings in the school day (we do this for our PE department to avoid fixtures). In fact, having more gaps on teacher timetables makes timetabling easier as there is more ‘wiggle room’ to move lessons around. 

If we want teaching to be a more sustainable profession, improving retention and recruitment, I can’t help but think that a move to 20% PPA would have a significant positive impact.  

So far, so good. But what would I do if it was suddenly announced… probably cry! 

The problem with such a change is that education is a system with slack that is bound by historical patterns. Whether we like it or not, our curriculums and systems are constructed around our staffing with most normal turnover replaced with near like-for-like replacements. Often the most difficult situation is losing a small number of hours in a department since finding a specialist willing and available to work part-time hours (often spread across the week) is near impossible. It means schools resort to non-specialists from the existing workforce, cutting back on hours elsewhere or (if they can afford it) employing and leaving themselves overstaffed in that area. A sudden doubling of PPA would risk causing this across the school which, in the current recruitment conditions, would be a scary prospect. A cursory glance over my staffing for this year would give me just 3 departments who could absorb such a change – Business, History and Music. The problem with the marginal cost of staffing lessons is that it is free until suddenly you need to recruit and it then becomes very expensive. 

So, what would it cost to do, as schools clearly do not have the budgets to fund the extra recruitment required. For simplicity, let’s assume a typical MPS teacher is on £36k per year and with on-costs (employer NI, pension, etc.) they cost the school approximately £45k a year to employ. In our 50 lesson a fortnight cycle that the teacher currently teaches 45 of with 10% that is £1k per lesson. Therefore, an extra 5 lessons a fortnight PPA to take them to 20% gives a notional cost to the school of approximately £5k for a full-time teacher. To put that cost into perspective, if we kept PPA at 10% and gave that £5k to the teacher it would be a 13.8% pay rise! So, this is clearly not a cheap option for the government.  

However, in reality the school wouldn’t bear the cost of all the additional PPA hours. As previously mentioned, some departments may be able to absorb the impact and some roles in a school are defined more by their contact hours, as opposed to their non-contact. For example, as an assistant headteacher my teaching load would not change as a result of an increase in PPA because, while I have it scheduled, it does not determine by allocation. We recently made the minor move to give all teachers 12%, from 10%, and managed to achieve this without recruiting additional teachers. Although, we did recruit an additional cover supervisor to make up the shortfall in our cover capacity.  

I cannot see how schools would cope with a sudden change from 10% to 20%, especially given the current recruitment crisis, but the sector appears to be trapped in a chicken and egg scenario. The pressure on teachers is immense and we cannot give them more time as we cannot recruit, yet we cannot recruit because the pressure on teachers is immense. Fundamental change is needed and a significant change to PPA is one way to achieve that, so we may need to accept short term pain for long term gain as the profession becomes a more attractive and sustainable proposition. One option worth considering would be to give a commitment to reach 20% PPA by 2028, increasing the minimum by a funded 2% each academic year (alongside acceptable pay rises) to allow schools to adjust and adapt.