EXPERIENCE
Teaching ParT-Time: an alTernaTive viewPoinT Teaching part-time can have its advantages and disadvantages. In this piece, Hannah Pinkham explores an alternative viewpoint to the one presented in the May 2022 edition of HWRK Magazine. Would this model of part-time work for you though? Let’s take a look… By Hannah Pinkham
Like Sherish Osman (Is Teaching Part-Time Really Such A Good Idea? May 2022), when I first qualified as a teacher, I had no children. During this stage of my career, I stayed at work until around 6pm and when I got home, I’d do a Joe Wicks workout and my partner would cook dinner. My colleagues were my friends and life was all about work, which was fine with me. Fast forward to the present: I am still living with the same partner; we have a toddler and I work 4 days per week. Unlike Sherish, my decision to go parttime wasn’t based on a desire to find work-life balance. After maternity leave, I went back to work on 3 days per week. The decision to reduce my working days was based on a combination of exorbitant childcare costs in London’s Zone 2 and a desire to spend time with our son while he was very small. I am fully aware of how privileged I am to have been able to make that decision and I am enormously grateful to my partner for shouldering the household financial burden (and cooking). I read Sherish’s excellent article with excitement. I wish I had read it when I was trying to figure out my own part-time working arrangements. Back then, I struggled to know where to look for advice and ended up mirroring
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the model provided by other part-time teachers in my school. However, I wanted to address the representation of part-time working in the article. Initially, Sherish presents part-time working as a positive step. She says, “to try to balance work and life, I decided to go part-time”. But she later says: “Mothers all over the country are having to compromise their jobs in order to have a better work-life balance”. I am worried that this is framing the decision to work part-time as an inherently negative one. As part-time workers I believe we need to rigorously interrogate our own biases towards parttime work if we are ever to change the way it is perceived by others.
Some examples: In my current role, I am surrounded by exceptional female leaders working part-time at all levels, from executive to novice teachers. Nobody could say any of these impressive women have compromised their careers by reducing their working hours. When I initially returned to work after maternity leave, I was a Head of Department working Wednesday to Friday. Since then, I have been promoted to an SLT role in a new organisation, now working Tuesday-
Friday. Again, I would challenge anybody to say that I have compromised my career by working part-time. Despite these experiences, the view that part-time workers are only partially invested in their jobs pervades the teaching profession. Recently, I was participating in some training on the GROW coaching model. I was roleplaying a coaching conversation with a woman who was due to return to work full-time after having her first child. She was very worried about having to leave “early” for childcare pickups. Over the course of the conversation, she came to the realisation that a lot of her anxiety about this came from how she had perceived other women doing the same before she became a parent herself. In this scenario, she was her own worst enemy. Again, we need to rigorously interrogate our own biases to ensure we are not perpetuating an unsatisfactory status quo for all teachers. Policies that reduce workload and encourage flexible working benefit everyone whether you have children or not. We shouldn’t begrudge those who are successfully making use of the arrangements available to them. A while ago I was discussing with a Headteacher the profile of teachers in a
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