6th March 2009
DCELLS REVIEW OF SWAP
These are NAHT Cymru’s responses to the questions.
i. NAHT Cymru members have been encouraged to engage with SWAP from its inception, in the belief that that the panel had enormous potential to reduce workload – or at the very least make the demands on school leaders more coherent and manageable. Some NAHT Cymru members were energetic members of the first SWAP panel. It is probably fair to say that individual school leaders’ knowledge of the panel’s work is largely due to information circulated by this energetic few.
ii. Headteachers who are aware of SWAP and its remit find that this knowledge is not shared by, for example, local government officers. While SWAP guidance and advice on dealing with workload issues for school leaders is known to Directors of Education, officers who deal directly with schools are often entirely ignorant of proposed good practice and gate keeping systems.
There is a difficulty in gauging this because members will naturally not know about any matters that SWAP has successfully prevented or amended that might otherwise have had an adverse effect on workload. However:
i. Intelligent spacing of demands on school leaders was not successfully achieved.
ii. While DCELLS eventually became practiced at referring matters to SWAP, much of the initiatives that affect school leader workload originate in other departments – health and social services for example. These matters were never referred to SWAP.
iii. The termly notification was simply ineffective. It merely listed what schools might have to deal with over a certain period. It made no attempt to space them sensibly. The dates quoted in the notification, ostensibly to give schools time to plan, were rarely accurate.
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Experience, if any, of engaging with SWAP on specific issues – communication, liaison, resolution of issues etc.
i. Members who have engaged with SWAP through their website or who have contacted them in other ways have found them helpful.
ii. Members feel however that any substantial influence has been possible only through NAHT Cymru members serving on the panel.
i. SWAP will only be effective if it can influence when, how, and what eventually appears on a school leader’s desk. While it is obviously not its role to circumvent or delay government policy, it is its role to make the load manageable, to influence the spacing of initiatives and other demands sensibly, and avoid unnecessary burdens.
ii. Limiting the work of SWAP to the activities of DCELLS prevents the panel having a sufficiently significant impact on school leader workload. All other departments and government bodies, including local government, must also be included.
i. NAHT Cymru members were initially enthusiastic about SWAP’s potential to make a difference to the one issue which affects school leader morale more than ay other – the extent and nature of the workload. Much of our members’ frustration stems from having no control over the workload nor any influence over the timeframes involved. This is demoralising because school leaders feel unable to concentrate on what is truly important – leading the teaching and learning in their schools.
If SWAP is to help, it must have influence. We have been told that because SWAP is an independent panel, it has no place in the organisational structure of DCELLS. That independence is crucial. It is however equally important that SWAP’s work is given sufficient priority and status that it is genuinely able to influence school leader workload and that it is taken seriously by policy makers and administrators.
