What Have I Got Against PPA in Primary Schools?

(please note, this is a work in progress)

From the outset PPA in primary schools has been beset by issues of accountability, cancellation, postponement, calculation, and entitlement. It has become a focal point for tension and an additional thing for some of us to keep one’s eye upon – as if we didn’t have enough of those. These are all distractions from our business, the education of our children. In some schools it becomes an ongoing sore point – check the TES forums for confirmation of this.

Even more significant to me than this waste of time is the wedge PPA drives between the class teacher and their pupils: that all-day-every-day relationship is vital in so many ways and deliberately taking teachers away from their primary pupils is very damaging, NQTs end up with 20% of their contact spent elsewhere, ASTs with up to 30%. If the school organises management time during the school day that can also eat into the time teachers spend with their children. Most assessment systems are useless for determining individual or even group needs but the close relationship between the primary teacher and their class gives the teacher a unique, daily insight into the capabilities, achievement and needs of all their pupils. Most primary teachers have a good overview of their pupils precisely because they spend so much time with them, working in many different contexts, accessing so many different learning styles.

For some pupils a change of teacher, even on a predictable basis, can be very stressful and/or a great opportunity to explore the boundaries of the school’s behaviour management system.

The quality of work done by cover teachers can be very variable, especially when they have not planned the majority of the work themselves. If they do plan the work themselves they are not likely to be aware of links, weaknesses, points to emphasise, which might have come to light in other lessons conducted by the class teacher. No amount of careful planning and thorough evaluation of previous individual lessons can help the incoming teacher take as much advantage of learning opportunities as the class teacher.

In many primaries PPA involves the class teacher relinquishing part of the curriculum to either another regular teacher or even a random supply teacher. This can easily break the natural links and development opportunities which emerge during the delivery of any kind of joined-up curriculum. I can testify to this having been a specialist PPA cover teacher: if I am away, few of the teachers I provide cover for even attempt to teach the lessons I have planned, which disrupts the flow of the part of the curriculum I am charged with delivering. I work very hard at being aware of what classes in my school are doing on a weekly basis but am keenly aware of how impossible that is to do satisfactorily. The class teachers don’t bother keeping up with what I am doing because they are not responsible for that part of the curriculum and ignore it pretty much. Not teaching particular parts of the curriculum deskills class teachers, leaving them liable to poor performance or a steep learning curve in an area of little confidence when there is a change of personnel, in the case of absence or when they change school.

PPA was basically introduced as a sop by a government dead set against raising teachers’ pay in the light of their crippling workload and they would only discuss any Pay and Conditions issue with a group of unions mostly representing the interests of secondary teachers who wanted a more robust system to protect their non-contact time - quite rightly so, I have worked in the secondary sector and appreciate many of the issues surrounding impromptu cover, but the ‘rarely cover’ regulations should eventually deal with most of those.

What is really needed in our primary schools is a real effort to tackle the issues of workload and pay which have remained essentially unresolved in the last 20 years….. PPA is hardly the answer.