“Clattering, sorting and shifting noises were coming from the shed as Custard passed the time of day with Rookie…”
Roobarb and Custard. When Roobarb went on a fitness drive
The think1265 team have done little but think about and talk about Directed Time budgets for three months now, so it is the least we can do to try and offer up our own version of a DTB calculator for school leaders and staff to use. So Brian went into his shed for a few weeks, and came up with a v1.0 prototype for a smart DTB planner.
There are a number of templates and guides out there for DTBs, including the recently released detailed guide from the Education Authority (available here.) In general these all use a spreadsheet for Principals to assign times to various directions, and to monitor how these add up to 1265 hours.
Why is our DTB planner different?
think1265 was founded on trying to answer the simple question “why do teacher workload reduction agreements not work?” and one of the key things we came to understand was that there was a fundamental flaw in Directed Time budgeting. Central to DTB planning is the idea that a Direction must have a time allocated to it, and most DTBs do that. But that Direction must then be given a home in a time slot on the calendar, otherwise the planned activity may well not happen, and something else fills that time.
Because school environments are often fluid when it comes to non-contact time, it turns out to be quite difficult to be sure that a lump of directed time (say 3 periods of PPA each week) actually take place during working hours. Often another, sudden, demand upon a teachers’ time pops up, and the planned session is diverted into another task.
But since the work that was timetabled for that block still needs to be done, it overflows into the personal time of teachers, and the workload starts to rise once again.
Our Planner gives a time slot to each chunk of Directed Time a Principal has planned out.
Our DTB Planner includes a facility to assign time to various blocks of available time. These are: time-tabled sessions (when school is open for students), after-school sessions (the “old-skool” understanding of Directed Time), Baker and SDD sessions (when teachers are in, but children are not), and periodic exceptional sessions (such as evening parents’ meetings, or prize evenings.) Every block of planned Directed Time is then given a “home”, and it ensures that there is (at least in theory) a secure block of time within working hours that a teacher can carry out a given Direction. (NB: it will be up to teachers to ensure they track these blocks of time, and ensure they ring-fence the planned time to do particular jobs.)
A simple example of why assigning time slots to calendars is the use of SDD / Baker Days. In the most recent guidance from EA, SDDs are treated as a big block of time (up to 65 hours) and simply “Directed” as such. The Direction is essentially to “have a Staff Development Day.”
But 65 hours can account for almost 25% of the remaining available Directed Time for a teacher on a FT timetable, with 10% PPA assigned. With school leaders regularly telling us that there isn’t enough time in the 1265 hours to do all the tasks necessary, how can we then afford to block out a quarter of the available additional hours for “TBC” activities which – in most schools – will be planned for whole school or whole department activities?
think1265 believe that opening this time block for individual Directions gives school leaders considerably more flexibility to get more done with the available time, without leaving a massive planning headache every time an SDD comes around, and allowing a significant portion of SDDs to be employed by teachers to complete other Directions.
“Traded Time” offers Principals important flexibility.
Additionally – and crucially – we have also included a new time block called “Traded Time (owed later).”
This means that some of the Directions planned in the DTB can be earmarked as “Traded Time”, and time slots for staff to do this will be provided later in the year. This would allow Principals to nominally go over the 1265 hours by including some additional Directions (such as heavy exam marking time), but then to trade that time off against another Direction (usually classroom teaching time.)
For example, a particular department has staff on a full DTB allocation, but it is known that there will be 10 hours of moderation work necessary per teacher to complete a particular course. This happens in the early Summer term. So the Principal includes this time as a Direction, but assigns the time to “Traded Time (owed later)”. As the moderation time approaches the Principal then plans for an enrichment activity to take place when the moderation is due, taking students off timetable for the enrichment days, thus freeing these staff members to do their two days of moderation.
This is, of course, a “hack”, but the alternative is to throw this marking time into a SDD, which takes away from other activities. From a planning point of view, the need for this time is clearly laid out and organised. From a teacher point of view their workload demands have been taken into full consideration, and from the Principal’s point of view they are fully compliant with their obligations under TNC workload agreements, while still keeping workloads within the 1265 hours.
(Many good leaders do this already, but this just quantifies this time in the DTB.)
Click here to plan a DTB!
Summer break in:
(Note – you’re not paid for summer holidays, so leave your work on your desk.)
Designed and produced by teachers and trade unionists. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information on this site, teacher and union representatives are advised to contact their own trade union reps before taking action which might leave them in breach of contract. Think1265 uses WordPress, which uses cookies for functionality. Think1265 does not use any cookies for any purpose other than those used by WordPress for site functionality, and no personal information is retained or processed by think1265 without users’ specific permission. © 2025 think1265