Breaking News 📰
At the time of writing this blog, we have a question that’s still open asking you which events you have on in your school on the days of the newly-announced strikes. We’ve had a sneak peek to report on what events might be disrupted by the latest strike action. For the purposes of this, we’ve removed the “I don’t know”s and “Not relevant / cannot answer” answers, which is why numbers will look a little different to those on the app!
Just one-in-three teachers consider the planned strike days to be “normal” working days, with the rest saying they have at least one special activity planned for that time. Schools are yet to finalise decisions on how these events will be affected, but here is a preview of the plans for these days:
- 39% of Year 6 students have a planned secondary transition day. This could affect younger primary students too, as many will see their new teacher at the same time
- 17% of teachers indicated some students will be on day trips, and 7% said a residential is taking place
- 14% of teachers said their has a planned sports day
- 12% of primary teachers said their school has a scheduled concert or other performance
Of course, strike action on these days will make any disruption more noticeable, but it may place many of you in difficult positions, with these one-off experiences difficult to reschedule.
As you’d expect from us, we’ll continue to investigate the strike action and its impact over the coming weeks 🔎
Anyone for a cleaner?
One question suggestion from a Tapper this week was whether any of you employed household services! We’d never asked this question before and really, we couldn’t even predict what the results would look like!
Almost a third of teachers (31%) said they use the services of a window cleaner and 17% said that they use a cleaner.
This was understandably higher among those of you with children, 22% of those with children at home said they employed a cleaner compared to 13% without children living at home.
- Gardeners were most popular with North West teachers, 9% of whom said they had one compared to an average of 6% in other regions.
- Teachers in London were the most likely to have a cleaner (25%), but least likely to have a window cleaner (19%)
- Languages and Maths teachers were the most likely across all subjects to have a cleaner (22% and 21%, respectively)
There was a good group of people who said they employed another household service that we missed out – which ones? Be sure to let us know via @TeacherTapp
Inspections
Amidst the heat of last week, Ofsted announced some changes to their inspections following criticism. A full summary can be found in one of our daily reads this week, also here. The headlines of the changes are:
- An overhauled complaints procedure
- Earlier re-visits for schools failed on safeguarding
- Greater clarity on when inspections will happen
However, almost half of you (47%) feel as if these changes don’t address your concerns with Ofsted and less than 1% say that they fully address your concerns. Almost a third of you hadn’t heard about the changes at all!
Headteachers, who were the most likely to have heard about the changes, were also the least convinced, with almost two-thirds of heads saying the changes don’t address their concerns with Ofsted at all.
Ups and Downs
On the rise
📈 76% of teachers are confident supporting students with LGBT+ matters in their school, up three percentage points compared to last year
📈 53% of primary teachers would opt to scrap Year 6 SATs if they could – up from 42% last year
📈 40% of secondary teachers say there are no bespoke sentences in students reports – up from 36% in 2019
Heading down
📉 63% of male secondary teachers say they are required to wear a tie at work – down from 75% in 2019
📉 46% of senior leaders say they give feedback to all applicants as part of their recruitment process – down from 53% in 2019
📉 15% of primary and 64% of secondary teachers relaxed uniform rules this week to deal with the hot weather (it was 73% and 72%, respectively, in July last year, although it was even hotter back then!).
And finally…
The most read tip this week was: Proposed Ofsted changes
And here are the rest for your reference:
