Teachers in the UK work an average of 54 hours a week, with an even higher figure for those with school leadership responsibilities. For many teachers, there are roughly as many hours spent on admin, planning, marking and management tasks as there are actually in the classroom with the children, which makes for a very challenging situation.
Schools and teachers want to ensure that every child gets the best possible education and experience, to help them reach their full potential, learn essential skills and prepare for adult life. However, large workloads can limit the effectiveness of teachers in these goals and can make the role unsustainable long-term, so it’s important to find solutions that can help make a tangible difference to teachers and their workload. Ultimately, this results in better outcomes for students and helps keep great teachers in the profession, whilst also helping to attract and retain new teaching talent.
Technology in education, often called EdTech, has a significant role to play in helping to reduce some of the admin, planning and assessment-related tasks that teachers currently have to do as part of their job. We look at just two ways, of many, that EdTech can make a real difference to teacher workloads.
Lesson planning
A key to successful learning is for the teacher to be able to plan lessons that not only fulfil curriculum requirements, but are also a good fit for the individual children in their class. There are EdTech solutions that offer teachers lesson planning tools to cut down on the time it takes, without compromising on the content of the lessons, the ease of adapting things for individual pupils and the outcomes achieved.
For example, iPEP is a tool that enables PE teachers to easily and quickly create lesson plans to target short, medium and long-term goals for KS1 and KS2 pupils. This enables them to spend more time on delivering the lessons and spending time with each child to help them progress and get the most possible from their lessons.
Assessment of pupils
Another area which adds a significant demand on teachers is in regular assessments of their pupils. It’s essential to make sure that every child’s progress is tracked, so that the right help and support can be given to every individual, but managing this is very time-consuming for teachers. With EdTech, tracking development, progress and achievements can be made straightforward and fast, which can make a big difference to teacher workloads.
For example, iPEP not only helps with tailored lesson plans, it can also track and report on progress for every pupil, keeping all of the data in one handy place and providing reports and insights that help ensure everyone makes progress, with the evidence to prove it. With everything stored securely online, there is no paperwork to keep track of and store for teachers, and meaningful reports can be generated anytime in just seconds.
These are just two of the ways in which technology can be used to help teachers spend their time on helping their pupils reach and exceed their individual milestones, rather being tied up in endless admin and back office tasks. To find out more about our EdTech solutions, get in touch with the team at CES.
