Why Are Schools So Busy
Teaching is deeply rewarding.
It’s also a job that never ends. You can always do more, and there is always more to be done. There is always the next class to teach. There is always another meeting to attend. There is always more marking — so, so much marking.
The school day is relentless.
Unlike the corporate world, schools march to the beats of a bell, a buzzer or, for a lucky few, to the soft chimes of a campus clocktower. Distinct from many other professionals, teachers have little control over what they do and when. Every hour is a timetabled rush from one thing to the next. Ever more demands and ever more activities are squeezed into ever shorter breaktimes, lunchtimes, and ever longer after school slots.
Every minute is lived at breakneck speed. There is always something else to squeeze in before the next bell, buzzer or chime.
In a typical day a teacher might prepare materials, assess student work and provide feedback, contact parents, plan lessons, make photocopies, attend meetings, provide extra support to students, troubleshoot technology issues, prepare displays of student work, maintain an interesting and tidy classroom, enter grades into a school management system, write student reports, supervise a detention, attend to a scrapped knee/nose bleed, and complete multitudes of ‘essential’ paperwork. Oh, and amongst all of that, teach a full day of back-to-back classes, perhaps with an after-school parents evening for good measure.
If reading that list made you breathless, it was meant to. That’s how (we) teachers feel all day, every day.
Schools are busy places; very busy places.
But why?
Sure, the rhythms and routines of a school are not those of a 9–5 office, and nor do we expect or necessarily want them to be, but what is it about schools that makes them so busy?
Context matters, of course.
In some settings there will be particular pressures: governmental, economic, geographic, or simply incompetent/overzealous leadership. All of which might increase busyness.
As important as those factors are though, they are not the focus of this piece. Of interest here are the common themes which, regardless of context, might contribute (and combine) to make schools so busy. What is it about schools as organisations which seems to make them inherently busy? And does teacher psychology contribute to busyness?
What I offer below are my own initial thoughts and musings. The beginnings of an answer. Not the whole answer, nor even perhaps the right answer, but hopefully the genesis of something which may get us closer to understanding what it is within the DNA of schools which makes them so busy.
In no particular order:
It’s a difficult (and intense) job
The daily task of teaching, supporting, controlling, nurturing, mentoring, coaching, guiding, and educating diverse groups of children, each with their own unique needs, is intense. It is also highly emotive. Mistakes matter. We hold their future (the future) in our hands. With that weight on our shoulders, no wonder we are busy. Other jobs may be forgiving of ‘off days’ but, as teachers, we rarely forgive ourselves for anything other than our very best.
Add to that the constant chatter, the constant questioning, the constant need for reassurance, the constant requests to go to the toilet, the constant noise, and it is easy to see why the demands of the job are immediate and incessant. Unlike an e-mail from a client, or a sales call to be returned, the needs of children can’t be ignored — at least not for very long.
We also talk, think, stand, act, sing, and dance sometimes solidly, and sometimes all at once, for five or six hours per day. Rest, when it comes, is sporadic and often interrupted. There are breaktime duties, meetings, parents to see and call, and fights in the corridor to separate.
Teaching is difficult and intense. Every day is busy.
And, it’s not just a job
As trite as the saying is: Teaching is a vocation, not ‘just’ a job.
But, as a result, we are slaves to our calling. We pay a busyness ‘tax’ for our passion.
All of the extras teaching involves are done without extra pay, in the evenings, and at weekends because it’s ‘for the students’, because ‘it’s the right thing to do’, because we love what we do.
We are guilty then of creating busyness.
For some teachers the claim to busyness is code for: “I care more than you…I am willing to sacrifice more”. Being busy is a humble brag. It is also an identity anchor. A full diary is validating. To paraphrase Descartes:
“I’m busy, therefore I am.”
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be passionate — teaching is the best job in the world because its ‘for the students’ — it’s simply to point out that a cause of busyness is our own tendency to fully and wholeheartedly commit to the job and to subsume our lives to it.
In turn, as a profession (encouraged on by school leaders, governing bodies, and governments), we legitimise and glorify busyness.
Doing the job creates more jobs
It is an oddity of teaching (and, admittedly, a few other professions — medicine, for example) that work begets more work. Every class taught generates more assessment, more marking and more planning. A never-ending cycle of teach-mark-plan-teach.
Teachers also get very little time without students present — maybe an hour a day at most, and in some cases, much much less.
So, all of the tasks that teaching generates must be done outside of the time spent teaching.
The result is busyness.
Idle hands…
Schools are busy because children need to be kept busy. Left on their own, children have a tendency to get up to mischief. Keeping children busy and out of trouble keeps teachers busy.
Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork
And then there’s the paperwork. Oh, the endless paperwork. Whether you work in a government school, a private school, or an international school there will be paperwork — and lots of it.
Much of this is created because schools are ‘tall’ organisations, there are multiple levels of management and layers and layers of checks, controls and balances. Sure, there are some tall corporate sector organisations too, but the more progressive ones tend to be flatter — Spotify, for example, is organised into autonomous ‘tribes’, with high levels of empowerment and trust. In some educational settings teachers aren’t even trusted to use stationery appropriately, requiring management signatures just to get a new whiteboard pen.
Time spent chasing signatures and ticking boxes adds up to busyness.
The bells, the bells
Schools survive on routine and order. Days, weeks and months are timetabled into distinct divisions. Lessons are a given length. Breaks a defined period. Lunch must be eaten at a set time and within a set duration. The metronomic routine of a career lived to schedule means there is always somewhere to be, a class of students soon on their way, or a breaktime coffee gone cold as the bell sounds all too soon.
This perpetual sense of imminence compresses time. There is work to be done and it HAS to be done before the bell goes. The effect is a compounding of busyness — too much work and too little time.
School rules
We are teachers, we like rules.
We like rules about uniform, we like rules about hands up, we like rules about punctuality, we like rules about lining up, in some schools there are even rules about underlining.
What do all these rules have to do with busyness? Well, the more rules there are, the more policing those rules need. And, policing takes time and energy. There also have to be consequences for breaking the rules. And, managing those consequences, takes yet more time and yet more energy.
I am not saying schools shouldn’t have rules. Just that rules add to busyness, especially compared to corporate settings where people don’t get detention for not having their shirts tucked in.
It’s just not fair
As well as liking rules, teachers like things to be fair. The rules have to apply to everyone, equally. In the corporate world the hours kept by one department have little bearing on those kept by another; discrepancies in workload are accounted for in pay. Not so in teaching.
As teachers we like things to be equal. For example, often department or year group meetings are scheduled at the same time for everyone. No matter if one department could meet at another time and leave ‘early’, that’s ‘not fair’. So, everyone meets at the same time — and everyone ends up being busier.
During the various Covid-19 lockdowns, many schools insisted that teachers attend school to deliver their virtual lessons. While the corporate world worked from home, teachers worked virtually from school. Why? A desire for control and a lack of trust. And because both control and trust hide behind a veil of ‘fairness’.
That’s just two examples. There are others, and they all result in reducing the autonomy of people to work when and how it suits them, increasing busyness.
Delegation
Teachers can’t delegate or outsource many tasks. Much as some might love to, outsourcing marking isn’t very professional! And not much can be automated; roll on the day when Artificial Intelligence can write end-of-term reports for us, but we are not there yet.
ANYWAY, YOU’RE BUSY
Of course, we’re far from the only profession that’s busy. The police, the armed forces, doctors and nurses, the fire service, they are all required to maintain insane levels of busyness too. Indeed, in many respects, public service professions all function at similar levels of intensity — though, for teaching, hopefully with a little less blood, fewer tasers and no guns involved.
Comparisons aside, as the musings above suggest, the very nature of teaching lengthens to-do lists. In the blink of an eye a typical days teaching is over; leaving evenings and weekends spent marking, report-writing, doing paperwork and, these days, managing emails.
Anyway, you’re busy. I need to let you go.
The list above is an initial attempt at pondering some of the reasons why you are so busy. When you have the time, we’d welcome your own suggestions and thoughts.