‘We waste hours in meetings and it’s time they stopped’, says Sheffield secret teacher

Back in the day when union guidelines meant more in Sheffield schools than they do today, there was an agreement that teachers would attend one meeting a week and focus their time on planning and teaching.

Today, schools have become obsessed with meetings – just like other workplaces – and many teachers are expected to attend meetings most days, and in some cases more than once a day.

The blight of school meetings has now crept in to strangle the working week, so I almost choked on my break-time cup of tea this week when I saw a Swedish professor had released a report about the meetings culture and hit the nail right on the head.Experts from the University of Malmo wrote about an increase in management roles and the massive rise in the numbers of meetings, concluding that this often happens because managers don’t really know what they’re doing.

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Meetings, they say, are rarely about concrete issues, frequently don’t lead to decisions being taken and often become therapeutic sessions in which people offload about their troubles at work.

This will ring true with many teachers in our schools, just as it will with people working in other sectors.

In schools with six hours a day dedicated towards teaching, there is no time to waste on any meeting that isn’t of vital importance, and yet we waste hours and hours.

Here’s what might happen in a typical school week as we move into a crazy landscape of education obsessed with meetings.

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There’s the agreed once-a-week meeting that is the agreed limit, the one that gets put in the calendar and treated with high level importance – it’s a must-attend.

There’s the morning staff briefings – these are important, but becoming less essential to pass on last-minute information in a world with email.

There’s the informal lunchtime meetings, the ones that hover beneath the radar because they often involve chats with the people you eat lunch with anyway, but these chats are about work strategy.

There’s the emails you get late at night telling you to come to a meeting in your so called ‘free period’ because the working week is so busy (with other meetings) that this is the only time you can meet – teachers would have the right to say no to this, but they rarely do.

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There’s the extra meetings you’re expected to attend if you’re a middle-leader, often before lessons start or an extra time slot at the end of the day.

There’s the governing body meetings you’re occasionally asked to go to, justifying your area of expertise in the evening.

In my teaching career, I’ve been in some incredibly pointless meetings and I shudder to think how many hours and days have been wasted.

We were once called to an ‘emergency’ morning briefing in which over 100 staff dropped everything to attend in the hall, only to be told the meeting had been called by a mistake and the only news was that there was a further meeting next Monday.

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I’ve been at meetings with such a pointless agenda, run by middle managers without any clue how to manage, when the people attending just ignored the agenda and worked on their laptops whilst pretending to take important notes.

The obsession with meetings is akin to education’s obsession with data; it’s the thing to organise for those wanting to look busy and achieve fast, recordable changes they can feedback to their superiors.

Eventually, there will be a rebellion against the number of meetings being held in school.

Until then, teachers will just have to stomach the number of meetings they have to attend and learn which ones are important, which ones they can drift off in and which ones are only worth turning up to if they guarantee to have a good selection of high-quality chocolate biscuits.

Anyway, I need to get this finished and filed, I literally I have school meeting I need to get to.

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