Giving teachers a day off every fortnight

I was asked by our CEO Luke in October 2023 to consider reimagining the timetable in our college to allow all teachers one day off per fortnight to support work life harmony and also help address challenges with teacher retention and recruitment. I started to think about the grid of our current timetable, and over the next couple of day drew a couple of pretty rough sketches (generally while sitting in other meetings). Our context is as a college of 1,250 students with a curriculum of 25 A level subjects and three single, double and triple AGQ courses, a six-block timetable with 70-minute lessons, and an intense 96% room utilisation. I reckoned that the best I could imagine was delivering a 4 ½-day week for staff, and that’s where I left it.

Then during the Christmas break something happened, and I experienced a paradigm shift – I realised I was not pushing myself hard enough to imagine the “art of the possible”. I now know that phrase is attributed to Otto Bismarck – but at the time, that line was only in my head because we’d done some work with some (not educationally-minded, so hard to relate to) process and business transformation consultants, and that sort of phrase is a stock in trade for such folks.

Our solution, which goes live in September 2024, revolves around having six one-hour lessons on a Friday so teachers can have one Friday off every fortnight with an acceptable compression of PPA time / free periods. I could write at length on all the considerations and permutations behind our solution – but that’s not the point of this blog. If you are interested in the tedious detail of our plan, feel free to contact me. The point is that explaining ‘why not’ comes more readily to most of us than working out how. An increasing number of schools and colleges across the country are giving staff one day in ten off, and I’m pretty sure their managers and MIS planning staff are no more talented than others. So perhaps the way to propagate change here, and in other areas, might be to check ourselves when we say there are good reasons why something can’t be done and instead be more open to the potential for change*.

Just for interest, our timetable solution to delivering a day off every fortnight for teachers is below.

We’re hoping that giving teachers a long weekend every other week is going to really support their work-life harmony – and also do us no harm in terms of retention and recruitment! Alongside this we are, of course, rolling out comparable initiatives for our support staff.

*This is the real world, and Garrett Hardin’s 1968 landmark paper still holds: there are some problems which simply have no technical solution. It just may be that there are a few less of these types of problems than we realise.

Mark Rothery is an executive principal with Dixons Academies Trust. Dixons is a cross-phase trust which has academies in Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds, including Dixons Free Sixth Form in Bradford. The trust follows a clear mission to challenge educational and social disadvantage in the North.