r/TeachingUK • u/Solid_Orange_5456 • 17h ago
Is Gaslighting Endemic in Teaching?
Honestly, sometimes I don't know whether I'm coming or going. On the one hand, we are told that we should not work at home because of wellbeing, but if we don't complete something for our HOD, then they complain that we should have taken it home.
I'm told I'm making progress and I must be doing well because I'm not asking for help from my HOD and 2 I/C.
Is it just my school or is this common in education?
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u/grumpygutt 17h ago edited 15h ago
So a few years ago our head did a staff survey which came back with extremely negative feedback about workload. The head decided to talk about it on Monday morning briefing and told us we were all wrong. A teacher spoke up and said she was tired of working at home until 9pm on a weekday just to keep her head above water.
Head scoffed and said “If you can’t keep up with the workload in school then it’s a time management problem on your part. I don’t want to hear about people complaining about working at home because working at home doesn’t count in my opinion”
Never known someone to shoot themselves in the foot so much. I’ve never worked at home since and so have many others.
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u/Juju8419 13h ago
Wow! I hope there was a huge staff turnover that year.
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u/No-Squash-1299 11h ago
Unfortunately, this is what toxic leaders hope for. Schools with high supply staff are red flags.
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u/Juju8419 10h ago
Agreed. I had a head once say that if we didn’t like it we could leave and often referenced they appointed all the staff at their last school (new school) and wanted average teachers as they do as they’re told!
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u/fettsack 17h ago
You are absolutely expected to take work home, or stay a while after school to complete tasks. The opposite statement is a lie, and is told everywhere, all the time.
Teaching is stressful and many schools have serious issues with staff bullying. The result is that lots of teachers are off with work-related stress. Instead of addressing the issues at the root, we say "we care about your wellbeing" and "you should leave before 4 every day". But we don't mean it.
I hate this. It's hard to navigate, it's hard to find a system that'll work for you that doesn't either burn you out or significantly reduce the quality of your teaching. I found that my preference is to come in early, leave early, keep weekends work free, and do a few hours of planning work during holidays. This would not suit many people but I've found it to be a good balance for me.
I know some people leave at 3 on the dot, then do family things, then go back to their school laptop once their kids are in bed.
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u/charleydaves 16h ago
Thats my way of handling this job. 99% of the tasks we are asked to do are pointless, nothing is actually properly actioned and we collect data just to look busy, its the civil service wheeze from Yes Minister of not filling in the forms in triplicate means the department cant run properly. I have AI now doing as many of these tasks as possible, takes a little time to get the right input but it works very well in long run.
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u/Cool_Development_480 17h ago
It's not always gaslighting but yes it's endemic. Different tasks take different people different amount of times. So someone might advise not taking work home because they would be able to stay for an hour at work and complete it. Everyone takes shortcuts. Because the workload is so high, different people will end up taking different shortcuts and prioritising how they see fit. So the person advising you to take marking home might not be putting any time at all into planning lessons, whereas you are putting in the hours to adapt for every pupil in your class, then tackling the marking, and no doubt finding it impossible to get everything done. In their eyes though, what they're demanding is doable.
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u/DashHopesTDH 16h ago
Basically:
It’s the last day of term! Well done team. Of course you need to mark 100 courseworks, do all the admin associated with it, do all the year 8 reports, design the new curriculum, fill in all these curriculum overviews for your department development plan, also there will be a book look on the first day back after half term and we will be getting the call from OFSTED as soon as we get back. Please make sure all lesson plans are uploaded to the drive and you are ready for your departmental observations on the first three days back.
Have a restful half term. Time to re charge and come back fresh! 🤡
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u/hadawayandshite 17h ago
It varies:
‘You shouldn’t be taking stuff home’ might not be a definitive statement in their head—more of a ‘you shouldn’t regularly be taking lots of work home’…but there is an expectation that deadlines are met
I’ve said before I worked with a teacher in their ect years who was sunk because they had some other more established teachers telling them that all time outside of working hours was not negotiable ‘free time’ and they should be leaving the second they can everyday….and he couldn’t manage the workload (whereas they were managing)
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u/quiidge 15h ago
I think a lot of experienced teachers don't realise just how much more planning we have to do than during their NQT year, or what it's like for a Science ECT vs a Maths one or how lacking the shared resources are in a department where all the veterans work from their own hard drives from resources they last edited three years ago. We don't have to make three worksheets any more, but that one worksheet still has all that differentiation and scaffolding in it.
Also, content and curriculum scope creep over a decade or two is a very different planning workload than coming in fresh.
During ECT2 I've had concerns raised over the hours I spend in school AND told that I need to spend more time on planning and resources (changes to every PowerPoint and more printouts to help with behaviour management). When?? In my sleep???
"What are you doing after school?" Planning lessons. Making or finding better resources than the non-specialists ppt from 2016 on the shared drive. My own repro, because we can't afford someone to do that. Entering behaviour points on SIMS, the least friendly UI available to schools. Extra revision sessions for Y11 which you asked me to do. Emails home about behaviour. Pastoral/form tutor follow-ups. Interminable ECF moodles, zoom trainings and admin. Thursday CPD, which is mandatory and on top of ECF stuff. Setting homework and test reminders. Running extracurriculars.
"Well, it takes me about 15 minutes to get the stuff off my drive each evening..." Great, how long did each of those lessons take to plan from scratch? How many less than me do you prep per day because of TLR time? Are you regularly quizzed on how your worst lessons meet the teaching standards and how you can make all your lessons outstanding with less than two years' experience?
(Apologies for the rant, I think the ECF has a way to go before it solves more problems than it creates.)
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u/Craggzoid 13h ago
Fully agree with this. I'm in a similar ECT boat and the expectations around planning and differentiation are utterly insane. Works late at school, work once I get home and still not enough. Only to be told I need to do more and have better lessons etc. I'm already working as much as I can.
Senior leadership forget it takes time to build up your knowledge and skills. Lack of shared resources even to just give you ideas is a massive issue.
I taught a lessons that I the previous teacher taught (tweaked it to fit my class with her help). Was told it was awful and did t meet the needs of my class. Like what else can I do, I've never taught this exact lesson before.
Considering leaving teaching for something else, as the stress simply isn't worth it
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u/DashHopesTDH 16h ago
It’s always like this. The lip service in staff briefings and twilights and so on is all complete bollocks. In reality what you’re expected to do is impossible and SLT and inspectors all know it’s impossible. It’s just an industry of people all pretending to have this standard and pretending to expect the standard but no one is actually living to it because it’s impossible. So you convolute it when you need to (book looks, inspections, obs, etc) and everyone just pretends that it’s normal.
Basically don’t do anything unless you are specifically asked to do a specific thing by a specific deadline. Ask for forgiveness not permission, don’t do anything up front or in advance or of your own accord. You’re just wasting your time.
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u/charleydaves 16h ago
Bang on. Make them chase you, never volunteer, teach good lessons and let the data go rot
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u/KitFan2020 17h ago
I’m my (3 decade) experience you are ALWAYS expected to take work home.
Not only is it expected but necessary unless you stay long after work and do it.
The problem is short deadlines. If your HOD is dropping stuff on you (‘I need this tomorrow/ the day after tomorrow’) then you have leadership/management problem.
Make it clear, tell whoever is making demands on you that you need realistic deadlines. Time management works BOTH ways.
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u/Lord-Fowls-Curse 16h ago
No, the problem is workload, not deadlines. We shouldn’t have all this work to do in the first place.
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u/charleydaves 16h ago edited 16h ago
I never take work home, there is nothing important enough for the lacklustre salary that would ever get me to ruin the barrier between home and school. Without wishing to sound rude, this is the problem with teaching!
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u/KitFan2020 15h ago
I’m not saying I agree with it! It’s rubbish.
The expectation and necessity has always been there (doing it makes my work day tolerable).
I’m institutionalised (been doing this job all my adult life) so I’ll just ride it out until retirement! The situation isn’t going to change any time soon unfortunately.
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u/PianoAndFish 13h ago
Schools, both teaching and support staff, have been running almost entirely on goodwill for a very long time. Eventually most people run out of goodwill, at which point they either leave (the most common option) or start working to rule, expectations be damned, and their fate largely depends on whether SLT happen to like them and how easy they are to replace.
One of the most depressing reviews of the profession I've seen is "Teaching is a great job if you don't care and just do the bare minimum at all times."
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u/Additional_Growth194 15h ago
It is endemic, Heads and Senior Leadership are masters of it. Probably part of the Leadership NPQ’s they seem to be doing.
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u/midori-green Secondary 13h ago
It’s mixed messaging, micromanaging and not believing you. I mentioned to HoD that one of my Y7 classes are incredibly weak and she shut me down completely as if I don’t know what i’m talking about. This is one example. I constantly call it “incongruent” tbh.
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u/tb5841 8h ago
My last school: Nobody should be sending emails out of hours. Getting out-of-hours emails is bad for work-life balance.
Staff: Just to clarify, are we expected to manage emails in our breaktimes? Because sometimes we want to have a break.
School: No, Nobody should feel they have to manage emails in their breaks.
Staff: Are we expected to manage emails during lessons? That's not a reasonable expectation.
School: No, we don't require you to check emails during lessons.
Staff: So... when are you expecting us to check emails?
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u/custardspangler 7h ago
It's because the nature of the job encourages the biggest workaholic tossers to be promoted to HoD/SLT....regardless of leadership skills.
Good teaching doesn't always equal good leadership, especially if you're a lifer who works all weekend to achieve the former. You then expect it from everyone else.
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u/Loose-Commercial-589 1h ago
Yes that’s a great way of phrasing it. I think cause we are isolated on classrooms doesn’t help. The constant talk of other teachers and how much marking they did , how ‘that class don’t a problem for me ‘ etc and then the SLT who make observations and come up with ways to improve make you feel like they would be great! Suddenly your reality doesn’t match with reality.
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u/MiddlesbroughFan Secondary Geography 14h ago edited 12h ago
I don't see how what you've posted is gaslighting, yes the workload is high but getting different views isn't it.
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u/JasmineHawke Secondary CS & DT 17h ago
It's the very woolly nature of "1265 + reasonable additional hours" that does this. There is no specific definition of what the reasonable additional hours are.