Friday January 5th

Workloads and the employer’s duty of care

“I’m contracted to do 24 hours teaching a week but I only work 21 hours. It’s not clear how this feat is to be achieved”

Lecturer, City College Norwich

I spent part of Friday with members at Norwich City College who face a management making quite impossible workload demands on staff following the attempt to impose a new contract. Despite the branch managing to remove some, but by no means all, of the worst aspects of the new contract, the Principal is interpreting words such as “normal” in the new contract in the most onerous way possible.

A lunchtime meeting discussed how to respond and unanimously passed a motion. As the vote approach strong winds and rain lashed the windows of the room we were in ; “God is very angry” joked one of the members. The motion said, inter alia,:

“This Branch is concerned that the workload implicit to the new contract is unachievable within a 36 hour week, and will therefore damage our students' education and staff health.

This Branch therefore instructs Branch Officers to seek the following:

a guaranteed minimum weekly preparation and marking time;
agreement that any work done over 36 hours in a week will be paid as overtime or can be accumulated as additional holiday;
remission for course leadership, Senior Lecturer duties, IVing, etc.”

Following the branch meeting I sat down with the excellent branch secretary Andy Cairns and helped prepare guidance to members on recording and reporting workload concerns. We used Section 7 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and the Health & Safety Executive Management Standards on tackling stress which state “the standard is that…employees indicate that they are able to cope with the demands of their jobs…” and that the employer should provide “…employees with adequate and achievable demands in relation to the agreed hours of work” (available at www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards).

Well done to our members at Norwich. They are not prepared to be trampled over. It’s about time we stopped being on the back foot across FE on workloads and used the employer’s duty of care and statutory responsibilities to halt some of the ridiculous workload demands being made on FE staff.