Ep 138: The Biggest Waste Of Time Teacher Jobs & Why They Can Be Binned!

0:00 Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Teach Seat Repeat. My name is Dylan and my name and this week we're going to be talking about those annoying jobs that completely waste teachers time and why we think you can get rid of them completely with 0 impact on the children. Let's take a look at what they are I can already hear them the the the whispers of the TikTok comments oh teach sleep, repeat you're always boding nothing positive to say about the profession Well, we're doubling down all right we're back again biggest waste of time things they're. Going to make you whinge even more. Whinge even more because I am fed up of explaining to people why we point these things out or talk about them. If you are that incapable of understanding the reasons around it, or if you extrapolate it to a saying, well, you're saying all schools and ladies, I like this and stuff. No, I'm, I'm not.

0:44 Yeah, but there are lots of schools out there who do lots of things that are just a bit of a waste. Of time and a bit very. Much so we've got our our list here. We're going to go through them. But just as just as people landing may literally have never heard of this podcast before, if you're, if you're an avid listener, welcome back. Why are we talking about this? Why? Why do we think let's do an hour long episode then or however long we will talk about this, about the biggest waste of time in schools? Are we just moaning? We're not just moaning, we like to have a little moan, but we're moaning on behalf of all teachers everywhere because teaching is a profession where people are expected to just give up unholy amounts of extra time outside of the bizarre contract that we have.

1:24 And one thing we could do to maybe tackle teachers leaving is reduce that workload a little bit, because then they might stay and they might want to do the jobs. Exactly that, yeah. And that's the aim at the end of the day, it's like the only reason we're talking about this, and I think this is a really good caveat we can just set up right now. The whole point of this episode is we're going to be talking about things that we don't think schools or teachers have to do that are a waste of time because the actual comparison between time spent doing this job and impact on the children is just, it's just way out of whack. Yeah, it's just not even comparable. So if you were to stop doing these things we're talking about, or at least just draw them back a bit, the impact on the children will be negligible, if any. But in fact, on the profession, as teachers and schools, you can save a lot of time and your well-being could be improved massively. And we're aware by the way, on the way through this, we're aware that some of these things, if you're a teacher listening, it might not be something that you can walk into school tomorrow and say, I'm not doing this anymore. And now the whole school's not doing it because you're maybe not in that position of power.

2:21 So we are very much talking to to the profession. We are in that position of power. We are me and you. And that's why we're talking. We're talking about it. We're trying to start discussion. You're. Exactly that. You're exactly that, you know, provoke thought. Whether you're an SLT, whether you're from Ofsted, the DfE, maybe you're listening, I don't know. Yeah. Or a teacher or. Wonder if Rishi Sunak still listens? I've been listeners from start the project. I think. I think, yeah, you're right. Something else to do this time? He's in a WhatsApp community, isn't? He I think they might be and and you can too. By going down to the episode description, you can join our WhatsApp community. You get all the good stuff and preference when it comes to submitting your question and answers. In fact, this week's question and answer episode is exclusively from people who've joined our WhatsApp group because the questions were.

3:01 Just so good, Hayden. So bloody good. So bloody good. Well, without further ado, let's dive in. First thing we've got on our list is the absolute staple, the thing that many people think we have to do in schools because it's just what we've always done and it's just the best thing in the world. Discos. Defines our job, doesn't it? Defines our job. You can't be a good teacher, Aiden. Yeah. If you have not ran a school disco, sold those Space Invaders, and got that little, you know, little tubs of juice you have at the store that goes through them, unless you sold 54 of them, you're not actually meeting the standards of the teacher. Exactly that you want to go up a pay scale point how many discos you done. We make this joke all the time and make mostly a joke, but also because it was grounded in a bit of reality as well that that actually happened in schools. OK, I want you to get serious for a second there and really talk about now this.

3:45 This can be quite controversial. I think a lot of people listen, listen to us and think, guys, come on, it's a really nice thing to do. Discos love kids love discos, Yeah. Yeah, it'd be nice to take the kids to go ape as well. There's there's a lot of nice things you can do, honestly. Like there's, that's not wrong. Discos are really nice. You're providing a a lovely safe space outside of the hours where they're just working and learning and everyone's in that professional mode. You're giving them a space where they can all still be together and do something nice. It's absolutely lovely. So should I be doing that as a teacher? Is that what you think? Probably not and you can do it. This is the thing we're talking about. We're talking about things you could get rid of to reduce workload and that have an impact on the kids. If there are parents out there who listen to this, and there will be some because we've had it in the past, who go, you knew what you were getting into and you were becoming a bloody teacher. You should be loving the discos and doing all these things for my children.

4:36 Why don't you do it for them? Why don't you join the PTFA and set up this kind of lovely scheme of discos every week and you run them because it's your child. And if the answer to that is, well, I don't have time for that, guess what? Neither do I. Yeah, it's, it's a challenging 1, isn't it? I think, honestly, I think people will be triggered by what we've said so far because they'd be like, oh, just just so ungrateful. You're so miserable, teacher, so miserable. Why don't you just do this nice thing to the kids? Have you done a school disco, Mr Yeah. Who's saying that? Probably not. No, no. Well, it's not my job. Don't care. Not my job. Yeah, it is not. My job, it isn't. It's not ultimately like it. Look, there are lots of schools that have school discos that are genuinely just run by the PTFA. That's probably the best system for it. If you want to have IF school discos for whatever reason is like the absolute pinnacle of what children can do outside of school hours.

5:21 And it seems to be that way, as if there's like nothing else. There's not 500 other ideas the way children can get together and do something nice. If it has to be school discos, there is genuinely no reason like why it should be the teaching staff coming back at 7:00 PM to to run it or Co run it. Sometimes it's PTFA and they just like we just want a couple of representatives from the school. OK, whatever. There's loads of middle grounds all the way up to like it's just teachers running a disco at 7:00 PM. Yeah, I don't see why I don't. I I've not heard a good argument to say, well, yeah, they should be doing that. Exactly that. What what What does the T stand for in PTFA? Teacher. It's a volunteer group. If a teacher wants to volunteer to do that, fantastic. I might volunteer to do something completely different and separate to school, separate to my job, and I have a volunteering role somewhere else. Brilliant.

6:04 That's my choice. I also might do no volunteering whatsoever because I'm in the point in my life where I don't have that time to give. I'd rather go home to my family and spend time with them. It is a choice. And the whole point of this is what we're saying here is not to get rid of discos altogether. Quite, quite provocative at the start to say, yeah, discos waste time. Don't do them. No, discos are not necessarily a waste of time. It's a lovely experience for the children. OK. What I'm saying is a waste of time is telling your staff they must do this. Oh, it's guys. It's part of directed time. Let's put you. I'm going to put it directed time calendar. I'm going to get you back at 7:00 PM on a Friday. No, no, you simply don't have to. And the ultimate example I can come up with to explain to someone why it's not the end of the world if we stop doing discos, even if, even if we say no, and therefore the PTFA don't run it. And oh, gosh, the disco doesn't happen now. Yeah, no.

6:49 What we're going to do, we're going to not have a disco because I worked in a school for seven years that did not do school discos. The kids must be miserable. The. Kids were happy, they were. They were absolutely fine. They got on well in school, they enjoyed themselves and they had lots for opportunities to do other stuff as well. It's not the Beal and end all and if we're talking about things that we can just strip back and have fewer expectations on teachers, do you know what I'd rather my staff concentrate on than thinking, oh I've got to order in those Space Invaders for later when the Top Shop opens. I'd rather than be thinking about OK, I'm going to get my marking done, sort my planning for next week and then go home and have a rest. I think what I want to clarify right now is that we're not saying the disco should not exist, full stop, completely.

7:31 Like we should eradicate and we should do all and make all the effort to get rid of them. Absolutely. But you said there are, it's a volunteer thing. It is. It's more about the pressure, isn't it? It's the pressure. I've been a teacher and I've definitely done a disco before when I absolutely did not want to be spending my evening doing that disco because I felt like I had to show up so to look good to the head teacher so that I could justify my pay rise the year after. I've I I've absolutely done that in my career. So take whatever that is. Yeah, take whatever we've just said. Just put that those two things together and be like, yeah, that's what we're talking about. They're trying to get rid of that. That pressure shouldn't exist because that is a complete waste of time for a teacher who doesn't want to volunteer to be doing it. It's not a waste of time for the volunteer who wants to do it for the kids who want to be there. Like just let's just make sure those things are separate. That's really good point.

8:13 What would you say? Because the, the pushback I've had to this before and from very reasonable staff who are lovely, lovely people because they're the people who want to do this kind of thing who've said, yeah, but you know what? It does just get really annoying when the same three teachers do the disco every time. And it's the only way it's going to happen is those three teachers are the only ones doing it every single time it comes around 3 * a year. Oh gosh, it's those same, but it's me again doing it because you just too selfish to turn up and do your bit. What would you say to those people? I'm. Always like looking at you with disgusted if you're saying that to me right now. OK, that's role play, Hayden. I I listen, I did the disco. I did the disco at Christmas. Marking. Yeah, I know you're marking, but just can I? Just have your attention for one minute. Fine, yeah. OK, because we're going to come on to market later. Come on mate, I did the disco at Christmas, I did a disco at Easter.

9:02 It's the end of year disco. I just don't want to do, Serena wrote. You've not done any. Like I understand you're busy and stuff, but mate, it won't happen if you just don't do it. You're like, come on, don't be selfish. Yeah, that's a shame. Is it selfish? Well, is it? Yeah, kind of, because I've done 2. And you've done none. That's selfish of you, isn't it? To be taking hog in the mall, isn't it? I've done around that gas line and it's so bad that you've done that. God's sake. No, I'd just be saying, OK, that's lovely for you, but thank you for volunteering. I think it's really nice that you've done that for the kids. I'm not in a position where I can do that. And let's just remind ourselves it's a voluntary role. And if it's not going to happen because you can't do it and I can't do it, then that's not really up to us. It's not our. Fault. I just think it's selfish to be honest with you, OK? Whatever. All right. I want to crack on with my workload now. I'm going to do the work I need to do. I'm sorry, I can't commit to this. It's free.

9:46 What you're talking about. Get someone else. Ask somebody else. Literally any other human being. There's no different. It's between me and the guy down the street who works at that shop running this. Neither. Of us. He's not. He's not gotten past CBS. CBS and then and then say to it and ask him to do it and then you'll feel mad because that's how insane this is right now. You're you're just because there's kids involved, it doesn't mean it's part of my job. And if you really want to check the contract, we can because it's not in there. Imagine going to a doctor, just finishing up there like 12 hour shift and be like, oh mate, it's a bit selfish, isn't it? You're not, you're not just volunteering down the road to be paramedic for the, for the event down the road at the concert. Come on mate. I've done two of them. Yeah, mate, you're a volunteer for the Red Cross. Like great. But it's not the doctor's job to go and then, well, it's to do with your job in general, isn't it?

10:30 You're a doctor and you help people. So do you want to continue to help people? Not really. It's the end of like bye, see you later. It's just, it's just mental. It's just not part of it. And yeah, we're talking about stripping things back. I'd say that's the first thing I'd do I'd, I'd go back to it being clearly a volunteer role if you want that thing to happen. And then if as a leader of a school or parents of, of children in a school and you're really that upset that it's not happening because you can no longer exploit the free labour of your staff. If you're that upset that it's happening, you can either offer to pay them right. And if you're like, oh, I can't afford that, but it's not that important then, or you can simply set up your own PTFA. And those people who are so annoyed that it's not happening because those bloody lazy teachers are going home after that 12 hour day? Run it yourself.

11:10 They can run it. Yeah. That's probably the best argument, isn't it? Yeah. All the people that are annoyed about it not happening can run it, Yeah. It can happen. It can happen. Do you want to make it happen? No, not me. Because by definition, if there's if there's less than five people out of the entire cohort of teachers and parents that are annoyed about it, then it probably doesn't need to exist. Yeah, it's fine. And it's whatever. If there's more than five people, let's say there's 20 people really annoyed that I'm so guided that this is not, this is not happening. OK, Run it then. Yeah, Go on. There's enough of you. And there you are. There's your party. I don't want to do it. Yeah, I want to benefit from it. I want to benefit from you giving me help, your unpaid time for my own child. Come on. If I went to a school with Rory when I grew up and went to a school and there were no school discos, firstly I probably were like, all right. And then if I was that like thinking, oh, well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? I'd would you send some messages in the parent chat, see if we can get to organise something?

11:55 Should we do something for the kids? It would come from me because I'm the child parent. Yeah, yeah. And then it's 7:00 PM. And the teacher's giving me everything that they're meant to give me already, just from delivering the curriculum. I'm in school anyway, let's move on. It's just the first one by the way, should go on to the next one. Let's do it. I want you to talk to me about written marking. We've talked, we've spoken about written marking a lot. And I'd like you just to outline the difference here between feedback, Yep, to children, which is clearly important and part of our job, and specifically written marking and why we can reduce or get rid of this without getting rid of. Yeah, sure. So. So feedback is a, is a much broader term. Feeding back to the children is, is almost an essential, is an essential part of education because that basically means you're having some sort of dialogue, some back and forth between the kids when they complete a task or do some work or even have a discussion with their partners or you.

12:48 You wouldn't just then like go OK and say nothing. Feedback is absolutely essential because you're kind of moulding how they think and you're asking them questions. Critical feedback is a huge part of life. Written marking is just a prong of feedback. It's a way of providing feedback. It's one of a few different ways and it very specifically involves not having a conversation. Written marking is writing down your words either on that book, on a bit of paper, on a post it note, whatever it is you do and giving it to the child to read and interpret themselves. So that is a form of a form of feedback. And there's a huge argument to say, and there's a lot of research and evidence that also kind of backs this up and opens this idea to that not being one, the most effective form of feedback. 2, the most efficient form of feedback because it's very time consuming. And three, not even needed at all. Like there's argument to say that you can, you can deliver feedback to the same efficacy without even doing anything, anything written down.

13:40 So that's kind of the point summarised, I suppose that we're going to talk, you know, dive into a little bit more now. Yeah, I think that you've signed up perfectly because this is the point here, which is what can we reduce what is a waste of time, But the children still get almost the same output. And, and I think written marking fits that bell so perfectly. The idea of after school when the children have gone home, specifically younger children sometimes can't even read what you're writing. We're talking about very young children, but let's just say children in general. Is is clearly, and I think quite obviously, if you just apply common sense, far less effective than immediate verbal feedback, immediate oral feedback, like in the moment, even whether that is live marking on their sheet of paper in front of them to tell them what they did wrong. That is clearly, clearly, clearly, and it's backed up by evidence, much more effective than written marking. It doesn't mean written marking has zero impact and it's just bad.

14:31 What we're not saying here is that written marking is bad and can't possibly have a positive impact on the child. Yeah, we're speaking here about, OK, well, if we want to balance this out a little bit and really think about teacher workload as a result, very stringent marking policies about exactly what to write in books and how much to write and how often. To write WWW. What went well, what went well, even better is. I have to do it every single piece of writing. You just, you just. Well, I can't read it. I'm teaching how to read. Yeah, you've got to. But even even if they can read it, my point is even when they can read that and that can have a positive impact. Yeah, very, very stringent ways of saying you must see this in every lesson. There must be this long and have three points. It's it's pointless. And as a professional, that bit of autonomy, I suppose to choose as and when you're giving what feedback and why it might be more effective, but also less time consuming. I think it's vital and and that comes down. I think if I were to summarise this, throwing it back to you, the change I'd make is having far less of a stringent policy on written feedback and not expecting as much. Yeah, I think it's marketing policies, isn't it? It's something, you know, teachers you can look at right now.

15:39 What does your marketing policy actually say? Because first is, well, I'll sort of dive into your point, but we've we've noticed this before. There's sometimes even a discrepancy in schools where teachers have taken it upon themselves to like over examine the marketing policy and actually added in things they don't even need to be doing based on what their school says. But that's almost like a different point of like maybe just go and check out your marketing policy first. That's. A good point, though, because teachers tend to get into that trap of thinking, well, I've got to, it's nice to write this, It's lovely to write that, yeah. Now, you don't have to. The huge thing is, I mean, it's a massive thing is genuinely just like how you're going to be perceived. A lot of people, Mark, and I've just been my career and having conversations. The reason they're doing the marking is actually more in their head weighted towards, yeah, because this is how it will look, which I find mad. And look to who?

16:24 Yeah. So they might be thinking about parents, they might be thinking about Ofsted, they might be thinking about just SLT or the line manager, whoever it is. But they're thinking about that, that like there's no teacher ever who's who's marking, who's not actually thinking about it, actually helping the kids. Yeah, of course that is true. But what I'm saying is I've met teachers where almost the bigger bit of waiting in their mind is more about. Yeah. But what does it look like to people looking through my books? Oh, I haven't done. I'll tell you what I haven't done in a couple of lessons now. I haven't done a WWWW for everyone. Yeah, OK, I'm just going to do it in this one. I'll do it for I'm going to take the books home tonight and do AWWW for everyone. Not because, Oh yeah, this was a really like critical lesson. It has like such thought provoking lesson. I really want to give them this feedback because of that. And the kids, I think the kids will need it for this lesson. I'm justifying it that way. It's because I haven't done it in a couple of lessons and I forget my my books get looked at and they flick through a few pages and they're not seeing this extended written feedback.

17:10 They might, they might pull me up on. That they might think that I've not given feedback actually and therefore I need to go through and I'm going to go back from my book and put verbal feedback stamp in every lesson just to show them verbal feedback. Biggest waste of time I've ever seen a verbal feedback stamp. Have you ever taught a lesson where you've not given verbal feedback to a child? Honestly, no, I don't think it's possible. How can you? It's like, like you said, it's like the most critical part of teaching itself. Otherwise, I'd just be reading a script. Part of teaching is reacting, giving feedback. Try this out. Like it. Like it. By definition, it is teaching. And I find it crazy. It's like having a stamp saying I taught today. Just gonna make sure you do. I taught today. By the way, we've got to stamp on every lesson Mr. Price taught today. Of course I did. What do you think I was doing? It makes no sense to me. What whatsoever to have these arbitrary tick box exercises and that's where it comes from.

17:55 Policy, if policy, I've seen policies before that say at least three of these a week, at least five of these a week, one of these every single day. You've got to do purple pen for this and you've got to do red pen for that and green pen for these things. It's I think we've moved a lot. I think a lot of schools have moved towards a marking policy which is a lot more rooted in maybe whole class feedback, verbal feedback, far less written, but but we still get a lot of messages. So when people say why are you talking about it, this clearly doesn't exist. See my inbox, I promise you that this exists and there are people out there burnt out because their school is in their own little cave, still thinking this is what we do. It's not. It's not what you have to do. At all. Yeah.

18:35 And I know that's true because there are things that I'd say are much worse and more toxic that we talked about in our previous episode. And I still cannot fathom the amount of people who before and after that episode last week on toxic, you know, red flags and red roundabouts in schools. How many people then afterwards got in touch with being like, oh, my God, just listen to this. This is what happens in my school. And I'm sat there like dumbfounded every time. This is like, what? This is still happening. So if those things are happening, I can promise you right now marking policies that are just old school and not really rooted in in a modern research where teachers are wasting lots of hours a week writing things down, They absolutely still exist. And it's if anything is more common than not. So yeah, we should, we should be talking about.

19:16 It, I had a colleague once who was really worried when it came to the end of the year because obviously books get sent home and, and we all send books home on the same day. And there's me like, OK, we'll just send, send them. I thought we'd just send them back today. We'll get them all ready, call ready to go. And, and my colleague was like, no, no, no, God, no, we can't send them home today. Not why, which got like 2 days left. We're not going to do any book work at the last two. I, I just, I need to, I need to just make sure my books are up to date and just make sure they look good. Because if the parents get the books at home, yeah, yeah. They might think I've not marked their books properly and they might think that, Oh yeah, it might look bad on me. And I just thought that, Oh my God, what a world we're living in where I don't, I don't really blame that teacher for thinking. No, of course. But it's like embedded in that culture of what like you've just explained, unless it seems obvious that there have been lots of takes and lots of written feedback, you're worried about what people might think about you.

20:05 And I think if we just need to like kind of collectively step out of that. And be able to say, yeah, do you think that I didn't help your kid? Do you think that me writing that in the book automatically means I I did help them because I tell you what, there are some people who, like you said, Mark books to make them look good, who haven't necessarily given the best feedback in the world. And there are some people that give fantastic feedback live, live feedback, helping them in the moment, going around the class, helicoptering, helping you help in that group when we're going to really help as many people as I can in this lesson. And then the books may look a bit sparse, but actually I've probably done better feedback. So this idea of just like like what a book look like equals how much feedback I've given is old school and a bit nonsense. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a really poor assumption, isn't it? To make based on how much writing you see in the book. The quantity of writing is the quality of feedback. It's almost like that, isn't it?

20:50 Do you think there's a line somewhere? Because like, let's, let's say that teacher, right? And we're saying, oh, they're unnecessarily worrying because I presume they have been marking all year. Yeah. And they're now just worried that it's not good enough and they want to go back through and top it up. That's or they've missed a couple or something you. Know maybe even. Yeah, yeah, maybe even that. It was also like, oh, I've not marked today. Yeah, like, like I need to make sure that's marked before we send them. Yeah, sure. Let's assume though that in this situation, I'm going to go sort of right down the spectrum that they have marked everything in the year and they were and they had marked today as well. They just genuinely wanted to go back through and check that the market was of good enough quality and there wasn't too many gaps between like really long bits of written feedback and stuff like that. But we would say this is such a waste of time, it's really pointless. How much lower can we go on this scale before you think like from an optics perspective that it actually matters? For example, the other end of this scale is the complete opposite, which is you have never written in the book at all.

21:39 Like there was absolutely 0 written feedback in the book. Would you feel as a teacher? Would you then still would you feel like that teacher feels in terms of you wouldn't want to, you'd be a bit embarrassed to give that back to a parent? Even though, even though, and I will preface this with you have been given feedback, though this is not, we're not making up this teacher who doesn't give feedback at all. This feedback has exclusively done verbal feedback and they're giving the book back and there's no writing it. You need to have good communication if that's if that's the point that I think like teachers taking it upon themselves to do that in a school where every other teacher is still doing written that will stand out and it makes sense. You might feel embarrassed, but if you are as a collective front a whole school saying this is what we do explaining it to parents. Oh, why is once my kid got no marking in the book at all? Oh, it's because of this.

22:20 And we all do that. I think it has to come from that. But if it was like I'd taken on myself to do it, I would then feel a bit embarrassed, I think because I'd be like, oh, I'd have to explain myself. I'd have to say why. And yeah, I think like you said it, it doesn't necessarily. We mentioned this earlier, to be fair, which is we're not saying written feedback has a negative impact. We're not saying written feedback has a neutral impact. Written feedback does have a positive impact on the children like it does have a role to play in the feedback model. I think in a whole picture of what you do is your entire year of learning in the school. So I would say actually there should be some written feedback at points when you feel it necessary. They've done maybe a big right. You've said this before, you've done a big right, a big independent right.

23:02 And actually for that child, me just jotting down 123 things that they need to work on, I've done really well, very quick, actionable bit of bit of praise. I think that can be really effective, but I, I, it's just to me that the quantity clearly doesn't have to be every lesson really prescriptive. So I, I, in that respect, I would say, do you know what? If there is absolutely nothing in the book ever, I think I'd be like, oh, well, there is a place for some, OK, I don't want to ruin your, your life with your well-being in terms of making you write everything every day for three lessons a day. That's ridiculous. But there is room for some. And the research does show it's positive, but the research also shows that verbal feedback, live feedback in the moment is more effective. So I'd like to think that we'd seen. And more of that. And, and if that means that there's less writing in the book, that's fine. I mean, the way I'd summarise it then, because I do, I agree and I want to make sure people get what like the right opinion from us.

23:50 If we're not saying the different thing is that the majority of written feedback can be replaced with a more efficient feedback. I think that's the point we're trying to make. You can save teachers time without actually changing the outcome for children. Like why wouldn't you do that by by introducing things like live feedback, verbal feedback. I want to ask you one more question because I want to get into your brain a little bit because you know, you taught for nine years. Give me a like a, just a, just an idea of how your marking changed or maybe it didn't over the years. Like do you feel like you fell into the trap of that some of the things we've been saying? Or do you feel like you've always been on it with marking? Do you think that changed? Did your marking get better, worse? Like how? Like what's your journey being with marking? When I started marking, it was very much, I felt like as the teacher, I was the voice of authority, therefore I was the person that had to mark everything in every situation. I had to mark it.

24:39 And I also felt like I had to write a comment. I had to do something for every lesson. For every lesson. Yeah, 100%. I'd be writing a sentence being like, and it could be, we could have maybe done an RE lesson on Sikhism and I'd write a sentence saying brilliant work on Sikhism. Honestly, complete waste of time. So what if I'm thinking about how it changed over time? I guess it's 2 prongs, 1. I became much more meaningful in what I wrote in the book, whether that's more efficient or whether that is simply just. I thought to myself, me writing this will mean that. So the kid reading this, they will go back and fix something. The kid reading that, they'll feel good about the effort they put in that lesson, whatever it is. Yeah. And it was more weighted to next steps, fixing stuff.

25:19 And there was the odd bit of praise and stuff in there because I still think that's important. But I think a lot of my praise, the way I taught the children were getting praise all the time. I was very, very good. That's a really important thing to clarify because when you said a minute ago a complete waste of time writing in the kids book about Sikhism, oh, great work on Sikhism. I can imagine people going what, you don't think it's good to, it's worth your time. But of course you do. You're doing it verbally all the time. That's the point. Exactly that. And it comes to marking. The kids know well, what can I fix? Mr. Price has already praised me 15 times. It's less and I feel comfortable and it's less and I'm happy I'm here. Oh, he's given me this to fix. I'll go and do that. Like it's a whole picture. And that's when, if you just judge written feedback, that's when it's problematic because you miss stuff. And it's like, and if you assume because it's not in the written feedback that it doesn't exist, that's poor, I think.

26:02 And that's bad. Like if you're a leader doing that assumption on like, mate, just come and watch me. Come and watch me for half a lesson, you'll realise these kids aren't missing out on praise. Like, come on, it's not an issue. But I became, yeah, I became more effective in terms of that. But I also realised I think more the power of live marking, the power of doing stuff in the lesson and you know, things like self marking. I did a lot more self marking in lessons with the children, especially in maths, for example, right, the thing about maths where it's like it's right or wrong. We did an arithmetic test call got here are the answers. Off we go, let's mark it together. And I could go around and see what the children are getting right or wrong. I could then change my lessons for the future in that moment. And I know I could just do it off paced or I could actually in that very second go, OK, these these four kids all got this group of questions wrong. You're going to sit with the teaching assistant today and you're going to get a bit of extra support. Or it might be I'm going to run a group later on in in assembly time.

26:49 I'm going to keep you guys back. It became more effective. So I guess what I'm saying is in terms of my feedback, as I went through my career, it moved towards efficacy. I moved away from performance and towards efficacy. And it was like every single choice I made in my feedback. Yeah, obviously sometimes I thought to myself, I saw on the mark for two hours and, and I'll be honest with you, there'll be some, there'll be some lessons where I just did not mark it. And the reason I did not mark it is not because I'm just lazy. I'm going to get away with it. It's because I genuinely thought in that moment, this is not worth my time to do right now. It's going to have minimal impact because this is just a one off lesson. There's no kind of, there might not be a progression there where tomorrow you need to know this because tomorrow you won't be able to carry on with your work.

27:33 I always marked maths, for example, I always met that in English work where we had a progression of learning. If there was a lesson in DT where they needed feedback for tomorrow, I would mark it. But there were obviously sometimes where I was just like, this isn't worth me sat down marking these books while these kids aren't here. So I didn't do it. And I could always back it up by saying, yeah, because of this, this and this. And and I think that that's the word efficacy. I became way more effective, way more pragmatic and just realised that marking is one part of my job as a teacher. I've got 15 parts, I've got planning to think about. I've got delivery to think about. I've got, you know, I might have that day three EHC PS: to review. OK, I've got 3 HCPS to review. If I can say it. If I've got 3 Ehcps to review and a part of geography and history marking, I'm not gonna do the marking that day. Yeah, because in my head, clearly it was something more important there that needs doing. So that goes in the back burner and that's what I learned. I have to think about the whole picture. Marking is 1 chunk of the picture and as soon as you realise that and think it's give and take, instead of trying to spin 15 plates at once, you just have 15 plates but you know you can only spin 6.

28:40 I'm gonna stop spinning that plate. I need to spin this one now. I don't have to keep them all going at once. One thing can leave. And marking became when I knew what was more effective, I was able to drop that plate because I thought that's less effective. Now I'm going to focus on something else. Oh wait, no. Tomorrow though, the markings really important comes back on. I won't do this. Instead, an easy analogy is like, imagine this, there's always 12 hours of things that you could do that could have some impact to children, some more than others, but you've only got 6 hours. Just imagine that as a, as a, as a silly anecdote, you've only got 6 hours and you're constantly as a teacher, you're having to choose, you're constantly choosing. I can't do everything all the time. So which ones have the most impact? And sometimes marking is at the bottom of that pile, which is kind of what is, that's how I'm imagining what you're saying because I agree.

29:22 There were times in my career where I, I had, you know, 12 hours stuff to do. Three of those hours was marking but I just couldn't fit them into my 3 hours of time. I actually had stuff to do and it just think it was like OK these. Otherwise you only Mark. Yeah. And it's like, OK, well, I do have to prepare my lessons for tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I do have to do other stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Yeah, I think it's a good one. And there's one other thing you said that made me think, that made me remember. So I want to get your opinions on this. You know how you said there might have been a situation where there was history and geography lesson and you just didn't mark it because it wasn't in that there was more impactful things you could have done with your time, a good decision to make. I've seen so many teachers in my career have a like their own little internal like cheeky policies that they're like, Oh, I'll find a way around this where they're like, I just leave all my lessons to Friday and then I just mark them all on Friday.

30:06 And I've, I've my gut reactions. At first, I was always asked quite clever because you can just my bulk market. And then my immediate next one was, what's the point though, right? Because I was like, Eva, Eva, you're doing the marking because you're going to give them basically instant feedback. And by instant, I mean the next time they see you in that lesson and they can action it straight away or there's no point. Yeah. So when they were saying, yeah, I used to do did it or I just marked all three lessons, you know, at the end of my fortnight or something after teaching as a unit, I do a whole unit and then I mark all their geography. I'm like, there's no point now. Yeah, you might as well not at that point. To me, that's just assessment, not feedback. That's not feedback anymore in my opinion, because I think feedback is should be a loop. I think feedback is OK. Yeah, well done. You did that. Keep doing it. Oh, no, you didn't quite do this. Try again like that. To me, feedback's a loop, whereas assessment is just yeah, I'm going to judge. You and the quicker they get it, the better. Yeah, I think that's quite a tangible thing you can say. It's like the quicker they get the feedback after you do it, the better, which is why there's such a positive move towards verbal feedback because it's so instant. Yeah, there's like so much weight in the fact that it's instant that it kind of outweighs even the written version of that feedback because they get that a day later. And that's still useful, but not as useful. Yeah.

31:05 And yeah, I think that person, when you've missed the boat of marking sometimes as well you could. OK, so there could be like a hierarchy here, right. So the optimal outcome is actually you did the written feedback for that lesson and they got it the next day before they did their next lesson because it helps them with what they're doing next. And that's optimal. But then if you miss that, if you miss that window of of marking, right, it kind of becomes pointless. Yeah. Like, so, so like, OK, the next thing is, OK, just don't mark it. Just don't mark it. And at the start of the next lesson, give them just generic feedback that might hit most of the children in the. Class tackle the feedback a different way. Exactly. That's the next thing where it's like, I'm still going to give you feedback. I didn't get time to mark it properly, but in general, what I noticed yesterday was this, this and this. So let's work on those things.

31:45 It's going to hit most kids. That's not necessarily optimal, but it's still a good thing to do. The worst thing to do is then wait until the whole unit is finished and then go back to maybe the first lesson and say all well done, try capital letters. So well, yeah, wait, no, they needed that before they did the next 5 lessons. So that becomes performative then. And it goes back to what I said before. When I'm thinking about feedback and marking to me, I'm thinking of a scale which goes from performative to efficacy, right? And I'm thinking, okay, I want to be towards more efficacy. If I can't be 100% effective, I at least want to be 80%. I at least want to be 70%. And there might be a choice I make which seems bad, but actually I'd just be doing it for the sake of doing it.

32:25 And it's like, OK, it's lost its importance now. I'm just going to reset and try again tomorrow because I'm a teacher. I'm not trying to get out of stuff. I'm just trying to do what's more effective for my time and the kids. Absolutely. And if you like this discussion, I feel like what you can do then, no matter who you are, is just start this conversation in your school, genuinely have this conversation. Maybe you're maybe you're a leader and you're listening and thinking, do you know what? Let's review this. Let's think about this. Like how efficient is our marketing policy? How many teachers are wasting their time performing for me? Yeah. And the parents so that when actually they could be doing something more useful. And that's, that's all we want. We try and do this podcast. Hopefully it sparks conversation in your school. Well, one other thing they can do is leave us a review wherever they're still a podcast. That'll help, that helps with the changes wherever you're listening, guys, leave us a review down below. OK, right. Number #3 I don't know how far we're into this.

33:08 Number one, I want to throw this over to you because I feel this is a passion for you, OK? When things we can get rid of, waste of time is aesthetic changes to lesson planning. How notebooks and PowerPoints literally look because oh, we've got to get this to be trust wide consistent now it needs to have the same colour background and the font needs to be the same. Over to you. Look, it's something we've mentioned many times because we are passionate about it and it still happens literally all the time. The content of your lesson is important. Honest honestly that there is there is a small scale I think where like the way your PowerPoint looks, it has it's slightly important if I just gave the kids like aerial font all size 12 and everything. I'm going to push back immediately. There's nothing wrong with aerial font. OK, All right, that's fine.

34:03 I'm trying. I was just trying to think of like a really like a small like Times. I don't know why I said font, but just like a small like on the screen, it's just all there. It's all bullet points, all the points you're going to say like kids can't really read it. There is a thing to say that maybe if it was just chunked up a bit better and over a / a couple of slides. But that becomes pedagogy. That's fine. Yeah. That becomes pedagogy. And we're talking about aesthetic. Yeah. We're talking about literal choices on how things look. What you're saying is cognitive load. I think we all agree that's important and that that's. You're kind of. Yeah, you. This is where we're conflating this argument straight away. This is why I get wound up so quickly is because people will listen to us say this and say the kind of things you're saying now, which is like, yeah, well, we don't want it all on one side, do we? Too small and the kids get loads of text.

34:44 Obviously not. That's not what I'm talking. About South presentational stuff, then it's stuff like what I used to do early in my career. I always spent hours right pulling like little like coloured boxes around my texts and like making, making something bold and, and underlining that one because I thought it looked nice. And maybe putting a little icon in the corner to be like, oh, this is like the kids were like this because it refers to the, the thing they're doing right now. And then I'd make the background of that one green, but I might make the next one pink. So on the next background to be pink because I think that looks like that sort of stuff. I stopped doing that over time and it made and I realised it made absolutely no difference whatsoever because the content, my delivery far outweighed yeah, how pretty the screen was. Yeah, so the thing that is a massive waste of time, there's two prongs to this really isn't there?

35:27 Number one is just doing it in the first place. Not honestly, if you spent three hours planning a lesson instead of two hours planning a lesson and the only difference is literally you just dragging like colour. The trust logos, the. Trust logos and yeah just little things where like just like tiny aesthetic things that don't actually make any difference that's one thing you can just stop doing straight away The worst one the one that really gets us riled up is when a less. You've already done the planning for a lesson and it's completely fine and the content's great and the cognitive load is all that stuff has already been thought about that the font is the right size, they can actually read it from the back of the classroom. You've did nicely. You've got you whatever pictures that go with your font, You've got all the stuff on there. It's full. Of coding, which we think is still good. All the evidence says your coding is great. That's fantastic. We're not talking about that and. Then someone comes along in your school and goes, do you know what I think we need to do?

36:11 I think it would be better if not only the backgrounds matched our school colour because I just think that'd be really, really nice. I think we should start using this font instead because actually I've seen that dyslexic people struggle with reading non cursive font and they they start saying something that's not even true and they're saying we now, we now need to. Someone told me, my mate told me that it's better to show them cursive writing because then then children struggle with the handwriting. Yeah. It's, it's yeah, yeah, again, it's again, you're saying stuff where I'm like, actually I would be triggered by that. If someone said it's better for dyslexic people for this, fine, but but it but it's not. And and this the issue, people don't necessarily come along and say cursive font is better for dyslexic children to read.

36:52 They don't even say that like, because it's not, it's, it's like for a fact. It's a really. Clarify, my point here was people saying stuff that's not true. Yeah, yeah. But obviously doing stuff for dyslexic kids is good. But they they more come up, come along and we'll say, Oh well, it'll be nice, won't it, for the kids to see cursive because we want them to do cursive. It'll be nice, won't it, for them to see it. And it's like, that's a great decision for you but like it's grounded in 0 research and also you are now choosing to make me completely waste my time because the lessons are already there. So your choice here is just adding workload to me. Not only does it not affect the children, it potentially effects them negatively. And you're wasting my time. So like, I think it's really important to be thinking about what helps dyslexic children read. If a font came along and actually it was better for dyslexic readers, I think there's an argument to have that you actually, you know what you should. Just do it.

37:39 There is that distillation font, isn't there? Exactly. And but there's there's various research for that that says maybe it's not as effective. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen, I've seen pros and cons. My point is when something is a preference rather than actually embedded at anything whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. And then someone comes along and said, well, it's my preference. I kind of like, I'd kind of like all the smarts to be the same, actually. I mean, that's fantastic. Well done. Yeah. What's it grounded in? Ah, not much, Just I like my. I Scroll down the road to this font and that it's. It's good. It looks nice. OK, cool. And I think your biggest gripe, I'd like to talk about cursive fonts. If anyone listening. Cursive fonts are fonts that look like it's joined up handwriting. Yeah. And the usual arguments are not that it helps individual, but it's that it's modelling to the kids what cursive handwriting looks like. So they do it themselves Maybe.

38:27 But what's the what's the point? Do we go into the library as I send all these books back? They're not written in cursive. It's funny. How on earth can we? Can we possibly do? It I need to rant for a second, I'm going into rant mode. That is my biggest thing. When someone first said to me, and I had no previous knowledge of this, someone first said to me years and years and years ago, oh, we should write in cursive. We should have all our displays and all of our smart notebooks and all of our presentations. Everything around the school that was showing kids should be in cursive. Fun place. Yeah, just. I was like. Oh, there's. No font on my displays at all. How do I change the font for blank call? What's that? Yeah. Scratching my head, but in fact, someone first said that my instant gut reaction was why are no books ever written in this? If this is better for kids And, and you know what? There's two prongs for this because I, I, I appreciate this. So I might just be going down the line of we want kids to write in cursive, so we should model it to them with all the stuff they look at.

39:18 If that's that only line of thought, OK, I can see why they thought that. But the next prong to me is if it's better for kids or even just the same, then we'd at least see some books written in cursive writing. It doesn't. It doesn't happen. There's a reason for it. It's because it's not better. It's harder to read. And I'll tell you what you said that maybe that you were being kind earlier about the research. I have read research that says it's literally worse. It is harder to read on average. The average person finds it harder to read cursive font than they do non cursive. Just to be clear, I meant the dyslexic font specifically, Yes, but that I've seen mixed stuff about that. But I absolutely agree. The everything I've read about cursive font is it's harder to read. And I'm like, we are in, you know, we're in a primary school for children where our main aim is to teach children to read.

39:59 Yeah, like it's just crazy to me. Do you know what we can do when it comes to modelling handwriting? We should do, We should model the handwriting. You know, like actually model it. Model handwriting isn't printing off a display that has. That's not modelling handwriting as if kids are looking at that to. Get that? So true. Like when when we're if we're teaching handwriting, I want them to do the best handwriting they can. They should be watching the teacher forming the F, forming the G. What do we do? We go up and down instead of just looking. If I was a kid looking at that, I'd be thinking, how do I do I write that G? Do I start here? Yeah. Do I go backward? No. Look, if I'm teaching handwriting, I'm going to model it to you. And then you pick up your book and it's not written in cursive font. Then you sit your key stage 2 SAT papers and then not written in cursive font. Nothing is. It's nothing is because it's not a thing to read. It's a thing to write and it's the way of writing. And fine being able to read it fine. Honestly, if some stuff was in that font, fine. But you know what is insane is when you have planned a curriculum out, you've got all your notebook slides, you've got everything you can possibly need on PowerPoint. It's all there.

40:55 It's ready to go and rub my hands like I'm so ready to teach this week. By the way, new directive. Everything needs to be in this font please. Yeah, no. What? Do you mean? Yeah, everything's been this font. I've already planned it. Yeah, everything's been this font. Thank you. Gotta change it all over. Why? Just because we thought it might be good. Did you think about it more than 5 seconds? No, but do. It, yeah, but do it. Though that's going to, that's going to cost me hours and hours and hours of my time on top of the I'm already maxed out and you're asking me to do something on top that you haven't thought about, isn't grounded in research. Yeah. And it's going to cost me so much extra time. Like, just have some decency to think about that. It's actually rude. Do you remember back when it was so this, this kind of thing was introduced in our school, Like it's been introduced in every school I've been in, by the way. It's like very common. So I'm not digging anyone out because we've talked about why we think it might be useful.

41:35 But it was introduced in our school. And as maths leads, we were asked, oh, what about for math slides? Do you think we need it? And I should be like no? Yeah, yeah. No, we don't. We don't need it like, oh, but for consistency, I was like, no. I'm pretty sure I'm not sarcastic. That didn't, didn't, didn't I reply to the e-mail to everyone and say something like no, don't use it, please don't use it because we want kids to be able to read it or something like that. Something really. Horrible, but but idiot. No, no, but like the point. Yeah, maybe you went too far, probably, but but my point is just like, yeah, I just. I just think that aesthetic level, we can have discussions about everything. Dual coding is not what I'm talking about. That's not aesthetics to me.

42:18 That is putting a simple picture next to a vocabulary word. You want the kiss to remember. That helps them. It's embedded in research. There's a place for it. It makes sense, OK, But very purely aesthetic stuff, which also in the research has no or negative impact. Just because we think it's nice. I was like, we should never be doing anything like that, especially and we have to not forget this when it impacts workload. If it's going to impact workload, boy oh boy, you better be showing me evidence that this is massively impacting the children, because if it's equal or negative, it's the worst of both worlds. I don't have time to do this and it's not helping. A complete waste of time, which is the theme of this episode. I think linked into this is our next one, which is about replanning everything. And then we talking about now how you can have initiatives and maybe we can move more into this idea of, well, actually embedded in researches. We should do this in English now, but also embedded in researches.

43:09 The way we teach math isn't quite right. So maybe we should change this now. And also based on this research I saw and all of this is embedded in research, which is really positive. But it turns out that actually that means we need to replan everything all at once. Why is that a bad idea? Because could not someone say, well it's all positive, just get on with it mate. Yeah, I so bearing in mind the stuff we've just said, because to me, if you were talking about replanning everything, I'd normally think of the stuff we just said like that's a big waste of time. I find this one harder to to argue because I think it, I think someone saying what you just said is completely reasonable to say this would all be better now and it's all based in research. So we should, yeah, we should, we should replan it. My problem is when it all comes at once, I almost don't have, I don't have the problem with the idea that stuff needs to be replanned.

43:52 I have a problem with two things. One, when it's rushed and actually hilariously they're not very efficient because it has to be planned again the next year and then replanned again the next year because no one actually just had the foresight to stop and think about it properly first. And two is the, is the workload burden that comes with generally replanning anything and then not as leaders not assessing that and being like, oh, we're going to replay maths and English at the same time. Like obviously that is an absolutely dreadful thing to do. And I'll tell you why it's a dreadful thing to do because even with the best teachers in the world, that planning is not going to be good enough to, to your standards. It's not because you've given them too much workload to do. There are, there are finite hours in the day. And if you asked someone to do 26 hours of work in 24 hours, by definition, it's not going to be as good because they've had to cream off 2 hours somewhere. Now, it's not as optimal as it would have been. There's just no, there's, there's so many drawbacks and downsides with any teacher ever to asking them to replan too much stuff at once.

44:47 So yeah, kind of about four things at once there, but you know. No, I think I, I find this really interesting because this is where I think it, it's like, you see a lot of this like edges space online, these people who are like massively into their research and all they care about is outcomes. And, and it's like that's the end of the conversation. Like if the conversation says there's new, there's a new body of research that says, actually this way of, you know, planning a mass essence is better. Therefore we need to do it today. We need to do it yesterday and get it done. But also at the same time, so is English and their life is almost around academia. I'm like that. That is, do you know what? I'm glad people like you exist because we need people to read and interpret this research because not every teacher has time to do that.

45:27 It's fantastic what you're doing, but you have to just stop. You have to just stop and think for a minute. But but I can't do all this at once because you are very much living in an idealistic world. And I've seen too many times people whose life is academia and their life is their teaching job, who then projects that onto the rest of the staff in a school who are maybe in a leadership role because they they work for it, they live for it. It's what they want. And and they don't genuinely just don't have that foresight to think, oh, but it's not the life of everyone here that the people in this room aren't defined by academia and their love of research and their love of teaching. They like teaching, They're good at teaching their professionals. But goodness me, they've got a life.

46:08 So you coming along and just saying, well, it's embedded in the research, guys, crack on. It's not good enough. And there's one more argument to this as well that people really don't like to hear, which is sometimes it's still not worth it there. There is actually a space for this argument that, yeah, this research comes along and says this is now the optimal way of doing it and the way you're doing it is ever so slightly suboptimal. And it's it goes back to that thing you said, right the start of this episode. Some things you can measure that you can say, yeah, this will be a bit better, but it's just not worth the time, so just don't do it. There is a there is an argument to say there's that replanning the entire geography curriculum if it only has a 1% positive impact on the outcomes of those children, but it requires on average four extra hours a week of all your teachers doing replanning for the whole year. It's not worth it.

46:54 Don't do it. Yeah, it's lovely that research says that, but fortunately for us, we've already got a really, really positive, great way of doing it and we, and it's just not worth that little bump up for us. Another school it might be they might look at that and go, that is a marked improvement that is going to have an enormous impact on our kids because the current geography curriculum is just dreadful. We we've really out of date. We've really left this too long, guys. We should have looked at this a decade ago. You know, we're so outdated. This is worth our time doing now you know and. They're up to date with their English and maths. They're not making six changes at once. Yes. There's certainly layers to it and like, you just got to just adjust, look at everything, you know, and don't just make decisions on a whim like that. They're the leaders that have annoyed me the most, not just in our career, but like from hearing from other people. Yeah, rushing through stuff, just rush through stuff. And they just don't think about the impact we're having the kids versus the time it takes.

47:37 So there's one quick thing on lesson plans, just whilst talking about replanning everything. Ofsted does not require lesson plans and the DfE workload review group literally said planning should be a thinking process and not a written product. So even that replanning everything, part of it is, you know, you're asking teachers to write written plans for absolutely everything, even when they've already done their slides and they've already got their medium term plan. Complete waste of time, guys. Just don't do it. It's not something that is needed. It's not something that's necessary. It's not for anyone other than you make that choice to just strip it back. Let's move on to another one. This should be a nice quick one because we've kind of talked about this previously, but why we're saying book looks? Why are we saying book looks? Why are we saying that they are a waste of time? Well, it's kind of linked with that marking thing we talked about earlier and the pressure to make books look a certain way rather than actually be effective for the children. So book looks in general.

48:27 Do you think we should get rid of them completely or do you just think maybe not every week like some schools are having to do? I don't think you should get rid of them the completely at all. I, I, I'd very much, if a school was trying to say we'll never look at books again, I'd be, I'd be an advocate for saying no, we shouldn't, we shouldn't be doing that. Well, just context, we, we LED maths for years and absolutely my, my line was, I'm not looking at books. I think we we did, though, like at least once a year we looked at books. We didn't. Yeah, we did. We didn't. I can. I remember. Last year we didn't. Look for books. OK, maybe. Maybe we didn't in one year, maybe not. I think, I think ever. I've done three book scrutinies and I was led maths there for seven years. Okay, fair enough, but we still look to books a couple of times, right? Yeah. And but did I did it because I was told to do it and I finished the book script and I thought I've not gotten much out of this. Do you think part of it was doing it because other people were also SLT were already looking at books though, so we didn't feel like we needed to?

49:12 Like I'm imagining in this situation, absolutely no one in any context is looking at books, which I, I don't think that's necessarily good because then I, because then I think there's a genuine argument to say to SLT when they're challenged on like, you know, what's the standard of work in your school? They don't even know. They've never looked at a book. Yeah, that to me is like that. That's all I'm, I'm going down to the extreme of. Like, I don't think it should have no place whatsoever. But I absolutely do not think weekly book looks or even necessarily termly book looks are needed because I think it becomes about tick boxing and it starts encouraging that culture of their teacher going home to take that book and make sure it looks good. To me that sounds like it's nothing to do with the amount of times you do it. That's to do with the culture of how you get feedback around it. For the separate things.

49:52 You could, you could, you could like you could have leaders and people look at books every single week. But if they don't give you a report, that's like a three-step thing about why your books are crap and what you need to do to be better and what's their good. If they're doing that every time, then I think it's overbearing. But if they're just flicking through books and seeing the what, what the kids are doing, I think it doesn't matter how often you do that. I'm talking very specifically about like book scrutiny. Like like you, you take your book in, you write some feedback, you send it off to the staff. I've, I've never done a book scrutiny and thought, Oh, I, I, I, I I can't wait to give this into bludge fees feedback. What I'd do is I'd flick through books and I maybe be like, oh, in general, this is working really well. Why don't we try that out? But I'm, I'm not going to fall into that trap now of me spending an hour talking about how you can't judge a book.

50:36 You can't open a book and judge what a teacher has or hasn't done. Like I said earlier, Oh, there looks like there's less marking in this book. Have they done this? I can't then be like, well, actually no, but I do want to look at a mass book and then make a judgement. This is just a part of the picture. Like I think it's kind of useless just to pick up a book and look at it. What you should be doing more than anything is building a culture where I can just drop into your lesson. I can just see what's going on. Sure. A book scrutiny itself. I'm like, it's just a tick box to try and paper over a gap where you assume things about a teacher. You put pressure on them because the only thing you can go off is a tick box at the end of the day. What can I see? Have I seen the waltz underlined? Yes. Have I seen the dates written down? Yes. Have I seen teacher marking? Yes. Have I seen verbal feedback? Yes, Pierce. Other than that, you're just getting a vibe and I think you should get a vibe. So in your school, like let's say you're the leader of this school right now.

51:22 So I really want to make sure I understand you properly here. You're not going to be doing those book scrutinies in that kind of isolated way that you're just saying. But you mentioned maybe you'll be going around the classrooms and just generally dropping in. That's where I see the books. Yeah. What would you, what would you look for? Like would what would you look for in a book? In a book, honestly, honestly, I just don't really care because in my what I'd what I'd be looking for is this culture of the classroom. OK, what am I worried about as a teacher that they're planning well structured lessons. OK, well, I can. I'm in the lessons a lot because I built. I'm going to my aim is to build that culture of when I'm SLT, I'm in a lesson. It's like a helpful thing, a, a productive thing. I can see what lessons are doing because I'm in the classroom all the time. OK, so I can see they're doing well structured lessons.

52:03 Are they giving feedback to the children? Well, I can see that in their lessons. I can see that when I go in and flick through their book, I can over their shoulder. No, you're completely I'm, I'm not saying don't look at books. I'm saying don't do books. Routines, waste of time. It should be embedded in the context of a wider picture, which is maybe I'm going around, I'm talking to a kid. What have you done for the last week? Show me. So what you've done for the last week. Oh, you did that, then you did that, and that's all awesome. Nice 10 you could do. Your presentation is not great though, is it? You can see you can do it here, but not here. And your teacher's not been doing much written marking in this one, have they? Loudly. That's. The point I just don't think, I think book scrutiny is where you you finish your week, you're absolutely knackered. You're done here and you've gone above and beyond as much as you can. You know, you've got planning at the weekend, you've got to do as well and you are absolutely knackered. Ping e-mail book scrutiny.

52:47 Your books aren't very good. Your books haven't got this, this and this. Come on and talk to me on Monday. I want to see an improvement by the next week when I do another book scrutiny cough. Like, honestly, like, honestly at that point, seriously, like, like I don't need to read that at that point. Yeah. And my point is just just just have a holistic approach. And it's like, it's so easy to be like, well, don't you think that books could be helpful in some way? Probably. But do you think that that's useful? Whatsoever you just sat at home like Lauren, dinner, dinner at the dinner table after work. And I was like, you're right, little bit down today. Well, I just wasn't enough peer assessment in my book and I got called out on it. I'm just cutting. I'm just I'm annoyed. I've never get down. Yeah, it's just I'm ready to move on, unless you got something to add on that just. Because you said quite bold and I think you kind of change what you said after you said I just don't care.

53:33 And I think you do what everything you said tells me that you care a little bit. You just don't care to the extent that people do book scrutinies like in the same way, like imagine the situation we talked about earlier, right? You've got a member of your staff, you've got, let's say you have a really progressive, a really nice marking policy in your school and it is like 80% about verbal feedback. And you have a little bit of written feedback, but it's really like you do expect to see something's written down in the book, but you've made your policy really clear. It's very progressive and then you get to the end of the year and and you haven't been looking at books all year because book scrutinies are a waste of time. And even when you're going around, you don't really care. You're just looking at all the other stuff. Yep. And then you've got teacher A who follows the policy perfectly, loads of loads of verbal feedback, a little bit written here and there in the books. And you've got teacher B who's not written a single thing in the book and it goes home and a parent complaints and says what? There's absolutely nothing written. I know we've got this progressive feedback.

54:14 But I've got, I've got this progressive feedback. It's within the policy. Yeah, the policy says have some written feedback, though. Yeah, there's nothing in this book. Would you be you? Kid made really good progress though, because throughout the year I've been dropping in and seeing the lessons. I've been fantastic lessons. I've looked at the assessment points all the way through the year. It is a picture of it. There is absolutely nothing that I don't think you can't do over a year where you're shocked at the end because a book looks different if you've got to the end of the year and a book looking slightly different to someone else is like a tipping point of oh God, you're a bad teacher now. What on earth have you been looking at for the whole year? I'd be looking at the whole picture and if that ever happened, I'd say firstly we don't cheque books because you know what I'm doing as a head teacher, I'm dropping into lessons every week for your child and your teacher is fantastic you.

54:56 Would be embarrassed about saying I didn't notice that I never looked. No, no, because because it bed embedded into my policy. I would look if it was policy, but it's not policy. That's what I'm saying. I don't care. I'm not going to do book scrutiny. I'm going to go in the lessons and I'll see the children working in their books all the time. I'll be able to see this. And if I see if there is something where after two months of me going round the school and seeing stuff I noticed there is never anything written, I'd say something to that teacher. I wouldn't get to the end point because what you're, it seems to me what you're suggesting there is like no book scrutinies at all. Can't see he gets to the end. Oh, crap. This is embarrassing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I would. I would know. That's a good point. I'd either be happy with it and be able to explain it or I would have fixed earlier on in the year. There's no point where just because there's not a book scrutiny that I can't give that feedback to my staff.

55:38 No, that's actually a really good point, because in my head I was kind of making an assumption that you'd also not go around and look in the books at all in the lessons either. But actually, by definition, in your way of doing it, you would absolutely have picked it up before the end of the year because you're always going around the looking exactly in the classrooms anyway and just generally flicking through and you would have, you just would have noticed. Yeah, I think that's more effective. And you see a lot of people say I don't want SLT snooping around my room while I'm teaching. Well, my point here would be you would, because I'm not going to be that person. The only reason you tend to not want that is because you think they're being judgy, moaning, looking for stuff, picking you up. My point is, I just want to help them. I want to be an extra pair of hands. I want to just go in and see what's happening with the kids in my school. These are my kids as well. You're teaching them. But I care for these kids, I care for you as a staff member. I want to make sure everything's working.

56:19 And if the kids aren't working for you, I'll tell them. If you aren't working for the kids, I'll tell you. But it's got to be as you go. It's got to be productive. It's got to be, what can we do to help? And if something's not happening, open that dialogue early rather than waiting for a book scrutiny and assuming something's not happening, which might be happening. And do you know what? By me going in, I see it instead of a book scrutiny every three weeks for maths or I'm like, well, there's no feedback. How on earth can the kids know what they're doing? If I just stepped into the lesson once, I might have seen, you know, at the start of every lesson, she's doing whole class feedback. Yeah. And I can see that now. And I don't need to write this shitty response that's just completely made-up that I've just guessed because I looked at a book. I just think it's ineffective. It's the least effective way of checking up on what your kids are doing. And what your teachers do is what's evidence in the book. And it just backs up everything we've ever said. And I just feel like such a hypocrite to then be like, but I've got to look at the books, though. But do I need to do a formal scrutiny? No, It's like it's one prong.

57:08 Yeah, that's good. I think you, I really try to like catch you out almost there and play devil advocate. But I think it's a very, I can't disagree at all. And I think you'd be a very good head teacher. Dylan, I think you should go back to teaching, climb the ladder, mate. Get back in there. Be a head teacher. Spend 8 years middle leadership getting completely abused. Yeah, I love it. Absolutely. Yeah, let's finish on this one. OK, so the last one and I'm going to throw it over to you because again, this is something you have spoken about so much and I don't think we need to spend longer on it. We've we've talked about this a lot before. Online specific assessment for every objective in all lessons. Oh yeah, Bennett, that's it. Done, Bennett, get rid of it. It's such a waste of time For maths and English not so much because it's extremely dense curriculum and and it's incredibly important. This is so this is I want to push you on this straight away because I should get to the meat of this discussion because you you always have a different view in English and maths and it just fascinates me.

57:57 And you said then because it's more dense and I was like, OK, that's something I can get behind because there's a lot more to get. That's all it is really. But like, you know, why is a progression in history for our six lessons or maybe the Anglo Saxons? Yeah. Why is that less important to to assess than a progression in shape name in maths over a / A? Week once it's done never come back to it shape names gets comes up every single year in the curriculum for well pretty much for all the kids. It's it's you need to track it across multiple year groups. I think core curriculum. I think that's if you're doing good assessment in history, you are absolutely assessing things that will come up frequently. You're assessing their ability to interpret sources. You're assessing their ability to argue pros and cons. You're assessing their ability to cause and consequence, for example. So if you're doing good assessment for history, absolutely it comes up again.

58:41 Yeah, that's fine. But we're talking about assessing each objective, aren't? We sure, but I think but but I think a good history assessment then let's just change it around to sure you've got today we did. Why did the Anglo Saxons invade Britain? But you're assessing against cause and consequence. You're assessing against interpretation of sources. You're assessing against everything. Some of it might be left blanks didn't do that lesson, but you're only assessing against core skills which do thread their way through the. Curriculum so is that a waste of time? It's not a waste of time take those core skills and at the end of the year give given us give an assessment you've taught the kids all year. You can see these core 6 strands whatever is going through and do that. What I have a problem with is 2 prongs to this. Let's take the worst case verse, which is so yeah, every single term you have to put an assessment versus each of the lesson objects as you did to how well those kids did in that class.

59:26 Completely pointless. What's what? Why do I need to know how well a kid remembered like the part of this Anglo-Saxon lesson on how how villages are formed? Yeah, Like what has no relevance to anything. It doesn't matter. It's not going to change like my next lessons and not going to change my next year's lesson. I'm not going to change my next unit or I better not teach that bit on Vikings now because they didn't really get the villages in. And what you're talking about, not even all of them, by the way. Yeah, because these six kids didn't get didn't weren't very good at the villages lesson. There's just such a waste of time. We're just writing stuff down for the sake of it because we think someone might need to check on it. Is it all about checking? We think it's the optic someone might want to see that we that we thought about. Them Ofsted never once asked to look at it when when we had Ofsted they didn't look at any We we had we would deep. I never get this wrong.

1:00:07 Deep dived. We were deep dive, whatever it was, in mass. Yeah. And he not wants us to look at any kind of data spreadsheet assessment stuff did not all. All he said was how do you do it? We do it like this. And that was, and that, you know, going back to what I said, that was a core subject. I think it is more important to be just a little bit more granular because there's so many more things to it. Yeah, there's so many more themes. Like the core themes of history. I think you can condense to like 6. There's like 6 things. The core themes of maths you can't condense to see. There's so many themes of maths that are like with equal importance, of course you need to assess them all and constantly be coming back to it because you come back to the same things over and over and. Over again, but I still think you can stream on it like like like number and place value, right? Yeah, I genuinely think you can just teach number and place value and then obviously do all of your in the stuff, live feedback, helping them as they go, intervention groups and stuff like that of course. But I still think that you can do at the end then if we're talking about formal assessment, summative assessment of teacher assessment, whatever it is at the end of that term, number in place value, give it a rating.

1:01:03 Yeah, honestly, and it's like the whole thing, same, to be fair. Like I say, all this forgetting that people don't know the exact thing that's in my brain, which is I also think mass. I just think there's more strands to it. I think that can also be done as like a yearly thing. Like almost literally at the end of the year. We just need a snapshot of the teacher opinion as well. By the way, we have all this data and all this summative data because they do three tests a year and basically every school level that clearly just identifies their strength behaviours already, the 20 individual parts of place value and see what you rated them on every single lesson and take the average. And then that's your teacher assessment. Yeah, why don't? Why no? I don't know. I I literally don't have to do that. You've made-up that I have to do that. And if I did that, all that would happen is I'd spend more time doing it. And the kids would have absolutely nothing different at the end of it. Absolutely nothing different.

1:01:44 And you know how I know that, Hayden, go on. I spent the last half of my career not doing any of this absolute nonsense. Yeah. And the kids made really good progress and they're really happy to be in school. And they constantly did well in my classroom and they had no impact on their outcomes whatsoever. Yeah, you had no impact on that sounds like. Yeah. So that's what you know, I'm not going to get too deep into it because it it's just that is as simple as that. In all honesty, it's a waste of time. When you got a school policy. I always remember we had the positive, some stupid hexagons. There was something right at the start of my career, there was a hexagon thing. I can't really remember exactly what it was, but it was it was some assessment to all a school but a fancy thing and then got replaced a year later where we had to against every objective of every single subject. So every single individual, single subject, every single lesson, we had to fill in these like hexagons and different colours meant it was like classic, like orange, green, red was and purple and gold or whatever agenda. And and I just remember getting to the end of the year of my first year of doing it and then being and then watching it just turned to dust.

1:02:38 Yeah. Like watching it just mean nothing and do nothing, inform nothing, inform nobody, help. No data. No, no. Sorry, no. Oh, I need to know how they did in their pronouns lesson in November. Yeah, I need to know that. So pointless and from so I basically one year of my career, I did this nine years I didn't do it all. Once, yeah, once you saw it could be completely ineffective. Once you're like. Whatever did not. Waste some time and, and and your kids obviously really suffered for that. They didn't make any progress ever. Big time. Oh, it was just, it's just so much a waste of time and it is at the end of the day, the majority of the time it is an optic. We're doing it 'cause we think we should be showing that we assess kids is, I forgot to say it, but it's the same way that I that I gave the kids feedback in the lesson. Obviously I thought to myself, can they do it or not?

1:03:19 Of course, I thought that before I moved on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mad madness, Absolutely. Madness of time. Last thing, waste of time listening to this whole podcast episode. What have you done? Honestly, why have you done this? It's a complete waste of your time. Yeah. Yeah, but if you didn't think it was a waste of time, you can leave us a lovely, lovely 540 on Spotify. It would be really nice if there's a lot of people. We've been saying this a lot recently. We've not been saying. The review, it's true, it's true. Please put them up, please. And we're uploading these to YouTube and they're getting a bit more traction on YouTube now. So if you're on YouTube, hello, like subscribe, I think that's the right term. Can we just say like subscribe, follow rate, share, share? Join the What's that community? Join the What's that? Community down below. Follow us on Instagram, go back to following. Yeah, teach it and pick podcast and all this socials. I'll just put more down there.

1:04:02 Just. Put more down there, don't forget Mona, US and TikTok. Bonas and TikTok yeah yeah, it could you context yeah. Could you please become someone who's never worked in education in their life take a real completely out of context not listen to the second-half of the real where I explain the point that you've just made and then Mona us that would be really cool yeah. That'd be really good. Yeah. I love. That should do that last things before we go ahead and. Can you really waste time if time doesn't exist? Yeah, you can think about that hope. We've just outlined how you can. Wait for thought. See you next time, yeah?