Directed Time: is there a more effective way for school staff?

What is Directed Time?

Directed Time is a topic which can cause confusion for teachers as well as school leaders in terms of how it is allocated and its limits. We all know that teaching is not your typical 9-5 job and the profession often runs on the goodwill of staff who work many unpaid hours.

It’s a profession that demands not only in-person classroom teaching but also a significant amount of work outside the classroom. Planning lessons, marking assignments, and attending meetings are just some of the many additional tasks teachers juggle.

In England and Wales, full-time teachers’ Directed Time is capped at 1,265 hours over the course of a school year. This works out to around 32.5 hours per week during term time. It’s important to note that this is not all the time teachers spend working; it specifically refers to time when they are directed by their school to undertake duties.

We have lots more information about the technicalities of Directed Time in our Knowledge Base and if you are one of subscribers, you can call us to discuss.

Should Directed Time be reformed?

This week it was interesting to see the issue of Directed Time raised by the Chief Executive of one of the country’s largest academy trusts. Becks Boomer-Clark, chief executive of Lift Schools, said instead of “counting hours”, Gen Z teachers want “flexibility, fluidity, a sense of purpose”. She said the directed hours model was a “really archaic way to look at professions as we move into this next phase”.

Boomer-Clark, speaking at a Labour conference fringe event, said: “I’m not sure there are as many professions that count hours, and that’s one of the really challenging things, I think, in terms of breaking us free.” “Recognising actually what learning looks like, seeing time as an absolutely finite resource, but actually also acting as professionals if we want to be seen as a profession.”

On the question of 1,265 hours, Chris Weavers, national official (campaigns and communications) at the NASUWT teaching union, clarified that “for many teachers, it is only half the time they’re working in a given week. We absolutely need to look at the working time of teachers, but I’m not sure 1,265 is the problem.”

Instead, Mr Weavers said: “Flexibility is what we hear constantly about from members – particularly from various underrepresented groups including women, ethnic minority teachers, those with caring responsibilities – who are forced out of full-time employment in schools and into the supply sector or out of the profession completely because they can’t access any meaningful flexibility.”

Do teachers even know their Directed Time calendars/budgets?

Most schools will publish a “Directed Time calendar” at the start of the academic year. This calendar details how the school intends to use the 1,265 hours of Directed Time, including key dates for staff meetings, CPD, and parents’ evenings. It provides transparency and helps teachers understand the full scope of their responsibilities.

For example, a Directed Time budget might break down as follows for a typical full-time teacher:

• Teaching Hours: 900 hours
• Meetings and CPD: 80 hours
• Parent-Teacher Conferences: 30 hours
• Duties (Supervision, Registration): 100 hours
• Inset Days: 55 hours
• Other School Activities: 100 hours

In a recent Teacher Tapp poll one in five secondary school teachers (20%) don’t know what a directed time budget is, and more than a quarter of primary school teachers are also in the dark (27%).

Flexibility and autonomy: bringing teaching up-to-date

We already know that many teachers are seeking great flexibility and autonomy with their working hours and this is driving some of the issues we are seeing with teacher recruitment and retention. Equally there are some frustrations from employers with the rigid framework of Directed Hours and the employment disputes and limitations these bring. 

Many in the profession would trust teachers to direct their own working hours protecting themselves from excessive work demands and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. However, many school staff would see that if Directed Hours were ever removed, there would be no limits on what would be expected of them. For example, completing interventions after school most days of the week. I think a balance needs to be struck between the two as teaching needs to be more flexible and attractive as a career with multitudes of more attractive career options available for highly-educated professionals without some of the rigid frameworks we see in teaching.