Edge Hill University ITE teams are actively working to support trainee workload and we ask our mentors to support us in this endeavour whilst trainees are on professional practice, in line with DFE Addressing Workload in ITE.
We ask mentors and schools
- Induct trainees in their school policies, procedures, timetables and facilitate meeting with key staff, including subject specific leads
- Mentors and trainees to discuss openly workload and well-being strategies each week in the mentor meeting and record the discussion on the WDS
- Mentors to signpost and trainees to utilise school schemes of work, planning and engage in joint planning in the early stages of professional practice
- Mentors to support the use school formats, model how to adapt schemes of work and utilise support from experts in school
- Facilitate use of whole school approaches to marking, feedback and assessment to ensure meaningful, manageable and motivating approaches for pupils
- Mentors to model a healthy work-life balance including appropriate timings of emails, communications, planning and work requests
- Mentors and key staff to model, discuss and analyse with trainees how to manage the workload of a teacher
- If there are any concerns, we ask mentors to discuss this in the first instance with the trainee, link tutor and signpost University support via the Edge Hill Well-being team
In University we have put in place the following strategies to support trainees
- Reviewed programmes to ensure the ITE workload documents have been integrated
- Developed trainee wellbeing by engaging trainees in discussion, feedback, sharing strategies and developing resilience in University based sessions
- PATs support for trainees wellbeing through the WDS system in sessions, discussing explicitly workload and wellbeing
- Student voice feedback and acting on feedback in a timely manner (ie PGCE breakfasts, wellbeing drop in)
- Sharing clear expectations for mentors in mentor training using the weekly mentoring cycle
- Worked with mentors to review and reduce professional practice paperwork with mentors and trainees
- Introduced QA checkpoints to support and feedback to mentors
References
Addressing workload in initial teacher education (ITE) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
(2016) Independent Teacher Workload Review Group
DfE (2018a) Supporting teachers in the early stages of their career
DfE (2018b) Addressing teacher workload in Initial Teacher Education
Gu, Q., Heesom, S., Williamson, R. and Crowther, K. (2018). Reducing teachers’
unnecessary workload: the promise of collaborative planning Transform Teaching School
Alliance.