Four-day weeks won’t solve the teaching crisis in schools

When it comes to recruiting and retaining teachers, the report cards of successive governments show a litany of failures worthy of a special measures downgrade. In 2015, David Cameron launched the short-lived ‘Return to Teaching’ programme, which intended to tempt ex-teachers back into service but only managed to recruit 350 teachers at a cost of £600,000. Then in 2016, the Tories launched the ‘National Teaching Service’, intending to place 1,500 teachers in underperforming schools in disadvantaged areas, but it was scrapped the same year having recruited only 54 staff.

The same year the government also trialled the ‘Troops to Teachers’ scheme, which offered ex-service personnel £40,000 to retrain as teachers, but only managed to recruit 28 veterans. Governments have tried other direct measures: new routes into teaching (such as school-led and employment-based training); bursaries and scholarships; student loan reimbursement; funding for charities such as NowTeach and marketing campaigns such as ‘Every lesson shapes a life’.

Yet none of them have worked. In 2023-2024, the government spent £196 million in payments for prospective teachers, including grants worth up to £29,000 per person to attract physics teachers. But they only managed to recruit 17 per cent of the target number needed. The problem is that, once again, politicians have no idea how to address this problem Since then, both Labour and the Tories have tried throwing more money at the issue. The Conservatives increased starting salaries to £30,000, while Labour, rather uninspiringly, promised to give a ‘golden hello’ of £2,400 to teachers who completed two years of training.

However, the situation is worse than ever: teacher vacancies are at a record high; over a third of those who qualified in the last decade have left the profession, and new research suggests that nearly half of teachers are planning to quit in the next five years. Most popular Gavin Mortimer The spectre of civil war haunts France Peter Frankopan The great storm: What the ‘Godzilla’ El Niño means for Britain Arnout Nuijt Lula has broken Brazil In desperation, Labour have now suggested dangling a different kind of carrot: flexible working arrangements.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell has asked an independent pay review body to recommend how ministers could relax rules so that teachers could be allowed to work four-day weeks, whilst ensuring the five-day week for students remains. It is unclear whether this would mean teachers simply work compressed hours or use the fifth day to work from home doing planning, preparation and assessment. Either way, this is unlikely to be popular with teachers, because this proposal is fundamentally a reallocation of workload, not a reduction in it.

A survey of 12,000 teachers by Teacher Tapp has already predicted that teachers would reject plans for a four-day working week because effectively schools would once again just be expecting teachers to do more with less. Currently, teachers report working on average 52 hours a week (hardly an advert for a supposedly ‘family-friendly’ profession). This equates to 8 a.m. to 6.25 p.m. Monday to Friday: to compress this into four days would mean working 13-hour days, which would be completely unsustainable for most, especially working parents.

Redistributing these hours so that they work from home on the fifth day adds huge logistical challenges to schools but makes little difference to how hard teachers are working. It does not change the fact that two in five teachers effectively work an extra 26 hours a week for free: the highest unpaid overtime of any UK profession. (To make the numbers add up, teachers should be earning around £15,000 a year more than they currently are).

Let’s be clear: if governments want to make any difference to the teacher recruitment crisis, then they need to fix workload, not reshuffle it. A 2024 NEU survey revealed that 41 per cent of teachers currently describe their workload as ‘unmanageable’, with a mere 1 per cent saying it is manageable ‘all of the time’. 95 per cent say the top cause of stress is poor work-life balance, and out of the third of teachers who say they are considering leaving the profession in the next 12 months, 94 per cent report that high workload is the most important factor.

The problem is that, once again, politicians have no idea how to address this problem. Schools can try and set policies that reduce the burden on teachers – for example, reworking marking expectations or setting boundaries around when staff are expected to check their emails – but ultimately, workload will not drastically improve unless staffing levels increase. The only way to truly alleviate the pressures on teachers is to do the one thing policymakers consistently fail to do: recruit more.

If schools were able to hire enough staff that each teacher had one fewer class or one hour less of directed teaching a day, then this could be transformative for teacher wellbeing. Instead, policymakers rely on short-term quick-fix schemes while ignoring the systemic pressures that drive teachers away. Even the cash injection from charging VAT on private school fees has made no difference at all, meaning thousands of families are being penalised for no reason.

Where are the promised 6,500 extra teachers? This is already a pitifully small number given around 40,000 teachers leave the profession every year. Since the introduction of VAT on private schools, state schools actually have 1,900 fewer teachers than a year ago, the second fall in a row – and yet Lucy Powell wants to fix the rota, not the shortage.