The Guardian view on a four-day week for teachers: a clever way to end the staffing crisis | Editorial

Can you guess which professionals in England work 26 hours of overtime a week without compensation, give up time with friends and family to deal with the workload and often find themselves on call in the holidays? Not CEOs, bankers or even doctors, but teachers. No wonder, then, that teaching vacancies are at the highest level ever. Workload is the top concern that teachers cite for leaving the profession, with almost as many quitting as those who joined last year. The consequences are stark: a quarter of English schools do not have a physics teacher, and many key subjects aren’t being offered at A-level in the poorest places.

The 4 Day Week Foundation believes that a shorter working week could alleviate these pressures if trialled in a way similar to the Scottish proposals of a four-day week, with a flexible fifth day that allows dedicated time for marking and lesson preparation. This means the work that teachers are currently forced to do at weekends and evenings would be integrated into the working week instead of being unpaid overtime.

The foundation is not proposing sending pupils home for a whole extra day, which should assuage parents’ concerns about having to pay for childcare. Instead, it suggests teachers get a four-day week in the classroom, while schools remain open five days. The argument should be compelling for a government that has pledged to hire 6,500 new teachers to deal with the ongoing crisis, but without any clear plans of how to do so.

There are understandable concerns from school leaders. Many say that they barely have the funds to meet current demands, let alone introduce new working patterns, and they warn that arranging reliable, high-quality cover for staff could be expensive. A shift to shorter weeks would inevitably mean reworking timetables as well. Ministers are backing flexible working in teaching, but progress has been too slow.

Schools that have experimented with new working patterns are already seeing results. The academy chain Dixons introduced a nine-day fortnight last year and boosted retention by 43%. The Education Endowment Foundation found that teachers value protected time for marking, smaller classes and basic healthcare as much as a 10% pay rise. With schools spending £1.25bn on supply teaching every year – mostly to agencies that often pay teachers around half of what they charge schools – reducing burnout would save money as well as staff.

Some worry that a shorter week might harm academic outcomes. But research by the Autonomy thinktank on the small number of schools that have innovated seems to suggest the opposite. The Community Schools Trust in Forest Gate, east London, which opted for a four-and-a-half-day week in 2022, saw its results improve the following year, and claims that staff are much happier too.

Teachers in England work some of the longest hours of all OECD countries, averaging 51 hours a week. No wonder many flee abroad for better working conditions. The government has tried – and largely failed – to lure overseas talent with £10,000 relocation bonuses. Teachers need to stop being forced into pathological overwork. The four-day working week campaign is not asking for a radical restructuring of schools, simply that teachers have a better work-life balance. Cash must be found. This isn’t a perk; it’s a necessary reform to stop a system collapsing.

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