The National Agreement - Making a Difference?

Last week, a comprehensive (500 plus pages!) review of the national workforce agreement covering English schools was published.

Aspects of School Workforce Remodelling; Strategies used and Impact on Workload and Standards - to give it's full title - attracted some headlines because of the conclusion that any gains in teachers' workloads made by the agreement have been wiped out by new initiatives.

There were other interesting points made, however, that have not been publicised so heavily, such as:

• Heads are consistently more positive about what is happening in their schools than teachers - for example 97% of heads say their teachers have PPA time, considerably fewer teachers agree.
• While teacher workload may go down, support staff's goes up. 75% of administrative staff feel their workload is excessive.
• At the same time, there is still reluctance, especially in primary school, to involve non-teachers in the senior leadership of schools.
• Between a fifth and a third of all teachers claim to have been consulted on changes made in schools. Only 40% of support staff are consulted about changes in their role.
• Several aspects of the agreement are being ignored in practice, particularly in special schools.

There is lots more in the report but perhaps the most worrying conclusion is this: there is no relationship between the re-modelling strategies that heads reported and the actual change in attainment in each school.

We know from the Birkbeck report that the Worklife Support Well-Being Programme can have an effect on attainment - it would be interesting to know where the discontinuities between remodelling and Well-Being are...