#edutwitter

Here is my latest hit ‘Excessive Emailing’, from my recent album ‘Now That’s What I Call Workload!’. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, you can’t go far on EduTwitter without finding some sort of post about work/life balance and *insert horrifying teacher retention statistic here*. Most of these articles are quite rightly arguing for change to marking, planning and assessment. But, lately, I’ve seen a lot of articles about emailing. This is probably due to Damien Hinds wanting technology to help address workload issues rather than add to them. In fact, he called for teachers to stop checking their inboxes when out of hours.From this, spurred more calls to address emailing workload, with statistics saying that nearly half of teachers feel their home life is invaded by emailing.

I’ll be honest, I was surprised that there was such an outcry about emailing. Personally, I find emailing to be useful and time saving. There are bigger problems causing workload. But if it’s a problem for others, it’s worth doing some research into to see if it really is a concern.

I surveyed ten teachers from different educational settings to analyse both the benefits and cons of emailing. I acknowledge that due to the small amount of participants, my conclusions are limited and can’t create a completely accurate picture of teachers’ views. But, we’ll still look at the results and see what they mean, in the hopes this creates a snippet of what is happening nationally.

The main purpose of emailing is to contact other members of staff. Many teachers mentioned how helpful the efficiency of emailing is; passing information to many people, very quickly, including to those offsite. This also included external agencies involved with SEN and to colleagues within a MAT or federation. Although, this led to some teachers feeling the amount of emails was unmanageable as too many people use the system to be efficient. Some schools address this by having a email protocol in place whereby day to day issues are matched to a suitable communication method and suggested staff, minimising unnecessary emails where possible. But, the amount of emails might not be the main issue here. @CantabKitty argued that ‘Simplistic solutions to merely reduce the *number* of emails just move the problem elsewhere.’ and that teachers need to have a system in place for handling their inbox, such as the 4Ds system. This means you either 1) Delete it 2. Do it 3. Delegate it 4. Defer it. 

Some also mentioned that their schools had an expectation emails should be replied to as soon as possible, including within the teacher’s own time. This is worrying considering UK teachers can be working up to 50.9 hours per week.

It might be patronising of me to suggest that the easiest way to resolve this is to simply not check your emails or not reply. But, teacher guilt is an issue here. Some educators, regardless of their school’s policy, might feel obliged to reply, to keep up their own high standards and to manage their workload. Or perhaps on a positive note, some people work better at home and choose to complete this type of task there.

The most contentious issue within email workload was parent communication. It wasn’t  common amongst my participants but broadly speaking, it is. Some schools share teachers’ emails with parents, without teachers’ permission with the expectation staff should have email alerts in place to respond to these messages at home. Damien Hinds suggests the solution to this is to not reply but we all know how important it is to communicate with families. And I’ll be honest, I find it much easier to email companies etc rather than call, as I have a clear record of what I’ve said. A better way of allowing parents to communicate through a preferred option as well as minimising teacher’s workload is to have emails centralised and filtered before reaching a teacher’s inbox.

On average, my participants said that emailing neither increased or decreased their workload. Only 55.56% thought it was an issue worth addressing. Seemingly, the benefits of quickly spreading information comes at the cost of being overloaded with similar information. I was going to suggest here that a way of addressing the issue is to have a clear email policy in place, with examples of what should and shouldn’t be emailed, as previously mentioned. But there was no decrease in workload for those who mentioned having an email policy in place or for those who mentioned no cons of emailing. Moreover, even the participants who noted replying to emails out of hours as a con, didn’t necessarily believe emailing was an issue that needs addressing or that it negatively impacted their workload.

In summary, for those I surveyed, emailing is something that both increased and decreased workload. Participants who were mainly positive about emailing, still felt it increased their workload but equally, participants who were negative about emailing, didn’t always feel it was an issue that needed addressing, or that it severely increased their workload. This may be because we all have ways of managing our inboxes, like the aforementioned 4Ds. Or, some of us might struggle even with an effective email protocol in place, because of the pressure we put on ourselves. Perhaps, some teachers find it useful to manage emailing in their own time, away from the classroom so it doesn’t feel like a negative impact on workload.

I made a series of newsletters to hand out to students next year. It shares information beyond the textbook. If you're interested, you'll find it here: