As a full time cover supervisor my working day is filled with the usual cover which is more often than not illness. I've been in this job for three years now and over the last two years I've seen a steady rise in the amount of classes needed to be covered for a member of staff attending a meeting. Ours is a busy secondary school and as such my working day has no 'free' periods as there is always the usual absence to cover so I don't begrudge any additional workload brought about by this additional cover. My objection is more on the basis that the managerial aspect of the teaching role is taking priority over actual face-to-face teaching, and classes are being left with work that, by the nature of my job, cannot be delivered to a standard that could be achieved if a qualified teacher took the class. Having known teachers both working and retired I have found that the general consensus is that meetings were always scheduled after school hours in the past. I just wanted to see if others have found this new trend which I have experienced to be the case in other schools.

I have to agree that the vast majority of meeting cover comes from taking SMT classes, one member of the SMT has at least one class covered a week with a knock on effect of causing behavioural problems through inconsistant teaching.

Hi there,

Meetings after school were reduced for teachers to only one hour per week after school under the workload agreement. That is why there are few after school these days. In some ways this was a good thing as I knew one HOD who kept her staff until 6pm at least once a week.

But SMT are not under the same restriction because of their pay and conditions so they could still have meetings after school.

But to be honest schools have gone meeting mad. In my first school our department used to have one meeting ever half term and the school still managed to come very close to the top of the league tables and get good OFSTED reports.

I think its a case of more meetings means we are doing better? As for your SMT who has only seen his/her class 3 times he/she should be told what he/she is actually there for.

gauldness:

Having known teachers both working and retired I have found that the general consensus is that meetings were always scheduled after school hours in the past. I just wanted to see if others have found this new trend which I have experienced to be the case in other schools.

What used to happen if you found you had a mighty load of paperwork and meetings were the meeting took place after school, you would teach your class, introduce the topic, be on hand to help should it be needed, but you get on with some of the paperwork whilst doing all of this at the desk in the room.

I find single tasking is much more common these days. Unable to do multiple roles at once. Either/or seems to be how they are coming out of teaching school.