School leader says guidelines will not reduce teachers’ workload

Nõmme Basic School principal Õnnela Leedo-Küngas told ERR that the growing workload of Estonian teachers is caused by the constant addition of new tasks, and cannot be solved through another set of guidelines or instructions.

The Ministry of Education has commissioned a study to identify teachers’ duties and the time they spend on them. Based on the findings, recommendations will be prepared for teachers, school leaders, school owners and policymakers on how to organise teachers’ work more effectively.

Leedo-Küngas, who also chairs the Tallinn School Leaders’ Association, said the ministry’s statements suggested that teachers were not capable of managing their own work.

“What is this supposed to mean? Let’s create a guide on how teachers should do their work and once again give instructions to municipalities, school leaders and teachers on how to work so that teachers do not have too much to do,” she said. “That is absurd, because looking at teachers’ duties and a 35-hour working week, this cannot be solved with a guide or a wagging finger.”

According to Leedo-Küngas, the main problem is the additional responsibilities that have been placed on schools but should be handled by other sectors. There is a shortage of child psychologists and mental health counsellors, she said, leaving much of the related workload to schools.

“We need to remove tasks from schools’ workload,” Leedo-Küngas said. “If teachers dealt only with subject lessons and teaching general competences, the situation would be completely different.”

Extra work behind Estonia’s education results

Leedo-Küngas said it was fair to say that Estonian teachers, support specialists, heads of studies and principals were working beyond their hours.

“The amount of work keeps increasing, including because of numerous reforms. None of them is necessarily a bad idea, but are all of them needed?” she said. “The way they are managed also creates extra work. Decisions are made and implementation begins immediately, even though it would be sensible to first prepare a model, test it and then move forward.”

Leedo-Küngas said Estonian schools provide education that ranks among the best in the world, thanks to good and supportive families and children. However, she added that this also came at the expense of teachers’ overtime.

She said teachers were not incapable of organising their work, and criticised the ministry’s message for suggesting that, after reviewing the situation, it would explain how teachers should work more effectively.

“A teacher is a master of their field,” she said. “It has been suggested that solutions could be created so that a lesson is prepared once and then used with the same preparation for years. But that is not possible. Classes and children are different, times change, and the same topic may no longer be relevant two years later. We all want children’s lessons to be interesting, and that takes time.”

Leedo-Küngas said school leaders also supported an audit of teachers’ workloads that would show the ministry everything teachers dealt with, allowing some duties to be removed from their workload.

She said the study now being commissioned appeared to have a different focus. However, if she was mistaken and the study led to a genuine solution, she would be pleased, she added.

The Estonian School Leaders’ Association has said the data collected through the study is nevertheless very important.