The resources in the school workload reduction toolkit are mostly strategies for senior leaders to read and think about and templates to help them implement those strategies. Alongside these resources there are workshops to help senior leaders engage with school staff. These workshops play a key role in the success of school wide changes.
##What we did
We looked through the workshops and the facilitator notes across the toolkit and highlighted:
*who the workshop is aimed at
*how long it takes to do
*information we could use elsewhere
*what we are using to convince them
*what we are asking them to do to save time
##What we found out
In our analysis we found:
*9 workshops
*9,822 words in facilitator notes
*the impact graphs workshop appears 4 times across the zip files
*it would take over 11 hours to do all the workshops, over 14 hours if you did the impact graphs 4 times
*7 of the 9 workshops should be led by SLT, 1 by governors with SLT involvement
*only the feedback and marking workshop says it can be carried out by whole school, teams or departments without mention of SLT
##How the workshops engage school staff
We found that the same techniques are used across the workshops to convince attendees, they are:
*case studies
*quotes
*evidence from workload advisory or review group or the national teacher workload survey, in 1 case, an excerpt from a book
*clarifying what Ofsted want
In part, this aligns with the mid-discovery findings on what information helps senior leaders to make decisions, where social proof and examples in a similar school setting were key.
We also found that there is a pattern to the advice given in all the workshops. Essentially, you use the workshops to:
*review how you currently do something
*get input from your staff
*identify what you can stop, change or introduce
*decide on a plan, designate responsibility, communicate the change
*decide when and how to measure impact and agree to evaluate the impact you’ve had
We will take this information from the facilitator notes and test where in the user journey it will be most useful for our users.