Do lighter timetables lead to better teacher performance and retention?
A new study using data from England's School Workforce Census found connections between the number of hours teachers spend with students (contact hours), the intricacy of their timetable complexity, the performance of students in GCSE exams, and teacher turnover.
The paper starts off with a familiar scenario. It is late in the academic year and your timetable is about to be released.
Discussions between teacher and timetabler
Vaughan Connolly PhD makes the valid point that there is little empirical research to back up what we know anecdotally within the school culture. It is good that he has done some quantitative analysis that reinforces the notion that there is a good case for reducing both teacher load and student contact time and that it appears not to impact results. The opportunity is to see this gained time improving interactions and thus improving learning impact. It would be interesting to see this evaluation applied to some of the other international systems that have reduced student contact, relying on more independent learning pedagogies, to see if the data analysis stands up and reinforces the evidence he implies.
As a research question I would like to see contextual analysis of the impact of the types of schools the cohort field draws from given the very diverse system we have. Given the level of dependency of teacher contact it would be interesting to see how the character of the schools included reflect the nature of engagement. Single gender schools, grammar schools, academies, faith schools, etc. Each of these have inherent climates that would be interesting to explore in terms of the characteristic described. It may also have an impact in the mobility of staffing as this characteristic would impact on the transfer of staff. Although a measure of normalising this data has been included I would be interested to understand the impact of these characteristics.
Great study and really important for future planning. There is so much to say about workload, contact and retention, this is a good piece of research to keep us focussed on this important area. Chris
thank you Chris for your comment. I’ll pass this on to Vaughan directly and ask him to respond to you. He’s a good guy and his research work is top class. In fact, his data analysis of the governments data itself, informs the government directly!