Teachers

Weekly Planning for Teachers

Teaching is unusual in that the working week has two completely different layers running simultaneously. There is the timetabled work: lessons, cover, form time, duties. These happen whether or not you planned them and they take up the majority of the school day. Then there is everything else: marking, planning, emails, pastoral responsibilities, meetings, reports, displays, communication with parents. That second layer has no natural boundary and no built-in end point.

The difficulty for most teachers is not managing the first layer. They have been doing that since their first week. The difficulty is managing the second layer without it consuming every evening and weekend until the term eventually ends and something like rest becomes possible again.

Start with what is fixed before you plan the rest

At the beginning of each week, look at the timetable and note any changes from the usual pattern: cover lessons, parents' evenings, CPD sessions, staff meetings, anything that will absorb time you might otherwise have counted on. These are the constraints within which everything else has to fit.

Only once you can see the fixed commitments clearly does it make sense to think about the discretionary time. How many free periods do you actually have this week? Which ones fall in your most productive part of the day? What is realistically achievable in that space?

Choose your two or three teaching priorities for the week

Every teacher has more to do than they can possibly get done in a term, let alone a week. The risk of treating everything as equally urgent is that the most pressing administrative tasks fill every available slot while the things that most directly affect the quality of teaching get pushed to whenever time allows, which is often never.

Deciding on two or three things that most need your attention this week, whether that is a particular class whose marking is overdue, a lesson sequence that needs more careful planning or a pastoral concern that requires a conversation, and protecting time for those specifically, tends to produce better outcomes than working through a list in order of arrival.

Batch the marking rather than spreading it

Marking spread across the week in small amounts feels like it takes less time than it does and rarely produces the quality of feedback a proper session allows. A concentrated marking session, when you can get into a rhythm and give each piece of work genuine attention, tends to be both faster and more useful.

This works better for some subjects than others, and the volume varies enormously depending on the year group and subject. But as a general principle, batching marking into one or two dedicated slots rather than carrying it as a constant low-level obligation throughout the week reduces the psychological weight of it considerably.

Protect at least one evening completely

The expectation in many schools, often implicit rather than stated, is that evenings are available for work. During busy periods of term this can become every evening, which is not sustainable for more than a few weeks at a time without the quality of work and wellbeing both suffering.

Protecting one evening a week as genuinely off, not available to school work in any form, is not an indulgence. It is maintenance. The difference in energy and patience across the rest of the week when you have had one proper evening is usually noticeable within a term of making it a habit.

End Friday with a clear handoff to the following week

The end of the school week tends to be chaotic. Leaving things scattered across desks, bags and mental lists means the weekend carries the weight of knowing that unfinished work is waiting without knowing exactly what it is. Ten minutes at the end of Friday to write down what is outstanding and what the priority will be on Monday clears that background noise and makes the weekend feel genuinely separate from the week.