Time Management – More about ideological control than stress reduction?

It’s National Stress Awareness Day – I was alerted to this fact by a blog post on ’10 ways to cope with stress’ from the equality and diversity blog.  I generally like this blog, and some of the ten suggestions for dealing with stress are perfectly legitimate, but, based on 10 years of working within education,  I had to take issue with the number one suggestion – ‘Learn to manage your time more effectively’ – in fairness, the blog author presents this as part of a ‘package of soultions’ to stress – but this isn’t how ‘time management’ as a solution is always presented to us at work.

This has to be my number one most despised solution to dealing with stress – while effective time management skills are obviously going to give you an easier life at work, they are in no way sufficient for dealing with the root causes of stress at work – one of which, in my profession (teaching) at least, is what I call ‘mission creep’ – or the gradual, drip-drip-drip increase of workload over the years. Nothing ever gets taken away, things only get added on – Just a few examples –

  • Most obviously, we’ve seen an increase in teaching hours through changes to the timetable and tutorial system.
  • Class sizes have expanded – although some subjects have it lighter than mine, which causes me massive stress internally whinging about the injustice of my ‘carrying’ other members of staff with perpetually lighter workloads
  • The introduction and expanded use of Emailing has meant more contact with both students and parents
  • Extra support for students has, ironically, meant more time spent liasing with study and support
  • We’ve had an increase in evening duties – parents evening has expanded and one open evening added

To my mind instead of asking ‘how can I manage my time more effectively’ – we should (also?) be asking ‘what is it that’s putting us in a position of needing to manage our time more effectively’, in other words, ‘why do we have an ever increasing work-load year on year?

In the case of education – it’s ultimately because our funding is linked to the amount of pupils we attract, and the amount of pupils we attract is in turn linked to our results (no one wants to go to a failing college) – This is what leads to management forcing more and more work onto staff, and then providing those staff with ‘advice’ and ‘support’ to help them ‘manage’ the increasing workload.

The real problem with all of this is that there is no end to this ‘continual improvement’- there is never going to be a time when ‘enough is enough’ – because colleges’ exam results are judged relative to each other (and displayed in league tables) and exam grades are also scaled relative to each other in one year rather than relative to previous years – thus we will never have a situation where everyone is getting straight As at A level. There will never be a time when we will say ‘let’s relax for a year, that’s good enough.

For example, since we became a ‘Beacon College’ – with ‘outstanding results’ we are now motivated by ‘fear of falling from grace’ (rather than the ‘desire to become great’)  through slipping down the league tables  – and slip we might because most other colleges and schools in the area are trying to improve their results, which leads to all of these institutions trying to get more and more work out of their staff.

Of course this was the whole idea of the 1988 education act – marketisation to drive up standards, but there are also unintended negative consequences for students of this urge to drive up standards – such as ‘teaching the test’ and ‘narrowing the curriculum’ – but most insidious of all is that students also end up getting stressed – as teachers push more work on them – even more so because what’s increasingly occurring in our college is an ‘internal market’ – where each department tries to get as much work as possible out of their students – ‘exams are just around the corner’…

This system is one in which atomized individual colleges, departments and students compete against each-other – it is thoroughly indivdualised – which maybe explains why we – staff and students alike – accept ‘better time management’ skills (an individualized solution – how can I manage my time more effectively) as a solution to the ever increasing pressures of work and study.

But better time management is not going to stop the systemic-inducement towards an ever increasing workload caused by competing in a marketised education system is it? – Eventually we’ll all be better at managing our time – and still competitive pressures will induce us to work harder to beat the competition.

So this is why I’m not a fan of individualized solutions to solving increasing stress levels at work – the only solutions to increasing stress are ultimately social – and this may well necessitate a long term ‘demarketisation’ of the education system and a reimaging education so it isn’t so obsessed with competition, exams and results, but instead is more creative, critical and flexible. In other words – If we want to beat stress at work – we need to maybe get back to the work of Ivan Illach and Rudolph Steiner!

You may call be an idealist – but what the hell – We need some optimism for a sustainable working education system rather than one in which we just put in place strategies to cope in one that’s suffering from perpetual stress.

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