Nobody Has Ever Added It Up For You

You could probably tell me, roughly, how many hours you're in school this week. What you almost certainly can't tell me is whether that number, added up properly across duties, meetings, cover and parents' evenings, is inside or outside the 1,265 hours you're actually contracted for.

That's not a knock on you. It's not really possible to track in your head. Directed time isn't one big block you can see coming, it's a form tutor duty on Monday, a briefing on Tuesday, cover for a colleague's INSET on Wednesday, an open evening in November that eats three hours in one go. Each one gets agreed to on its own, in isolation, because on its own it's reasonable. Nobody sits down at any point and adds the whole year together.

Which means the moment most teachers find out they're over isn't a moment at all. It's a slow accumulation that just gets felt as "this term is heavier than last term," with no specific number attached to point at.

The 10% that's easy to miss

PPA is the one part of this that does have a hard number. Every teacher's timetable has to include planning, preparation and assessment time of at least 10% of timetabled teaching, in blocks of half an hour or more. It's paragraph 52.5 of the STPCD, and it's not negotiable the way duties and meetings technically are.

The reason it still gets missed isn't that schools are ignoring it outright, it's usually smaller than that: a timetable built before a change in teaching load, a temporary cover arrangement that became permanent, a part-time contract where the pro-rata maths never quite got redone. None of these look like a policy breach from the inside. They look like a normal, slightly-too-full week.

Why "reasonable" is doing a lot of work

Duties, meetings and cover don't have a fixed quota the way PPA does. They just have to be "reasonable" under paragraph 52.4, and fit inside the 1,265-hour annual cap. That word carries a lot of weight for something so vague. Reasonable according to whom, checked against what?

In practice, "reasonable" only becomes checkable once someone's actually added the numbers up. Without a total, every individual ask sounds fine in isolation, one more duty, one more meeting, one more evening. It's only once they're stacked against the 1,265-hour figure for the year that you can see whether the maths still works, or whether it quietly stopped working three requests ago.

Running the number is the whole point

This isn't really a workload rant, it's a maths problem that nobody's handed you the calculator for. Ironically, we've actually built one. The PPA and directed time calculator takes your timetabled hours, PPA, duties, meetings, cover and parents' evenings and checks the total against your statutory entitlement and the 1,265-hour cap, pro-rata if you're part-time. No sign-up, nothing saved, it runs in your browser and forgets everything the moment you close the tab.

It won't fix a school that's asking too much of its staff. But it turns "this term feels like a lot" into an actual figure you can put in front of someone, which is a considerably stronger position to argue from than a feeling.