Fair Workload Charter
The GFMAT aims to recruit and retain staff by:
Ensuring they have a fair and reasonable workload
Providing high quality training and professional development opportunities that meet the needs of individual members of staff
Staff working in a GFMAT school can expect the following
A fair and reasonable workload which will be ensured by
- Remembering that all marking and feedback be meaningful, manageable and motivating, and should serve a single purpose – to advance pupil progress and outcomes.
- Give lesson plans the proportionate status they merit, and no more, to lessen teacher workload.
- Look to identify blocks of time to allow for proper collaborative planning.
- Remember planning together needs to be accompanied and professional discussion which focuses on the outcomes for pupils.
- Have high quality resources and schemes or work already in place and easily accessible.
- Be clear on the purpose. Why is this data being collected, and how will it improve the quality of provision?
- Be aware of workload issues: consider not just how long it will take, but whether that time could be better spent on other tasks.
- Policies governing assessment and data entry, being reviewed during the GFMAT’s usual cycle of workload impact assessment.
- Providing a time budget in June each year setting out how the principles above will be implemented in the following year.
- Employees having recourse to external adjudication process managed by the GFMAT Fair Workload Charter sub-group where they believe their school has not delivered on the principles it has signed up to.
High-quality training and professional development opportunities that meet the needs of individual members of staff by,
- Enabling staff to access the GFMAT training programmes.
- Enabling staff to access the GFMAT ‘ladder’ of generic training programmes linked to different stages of career progression.
- Ensuring staff are well-trained and appropriately qualified.
- Supporting teaching assistants in progressing to Qualified Teacher Status where they choose to do so.
Points 1-4 have been endorsed by the following:
DfE, Ofsted, ASCL, ATL, NAHT, NASUWT, NUT & Voice.
