Frequently Asked Questions Archive

This includes any meeting which you are directed to attend outside of the normal pupil day. Members may attend meetings during the normal pupil day, where cover arrangements have been made, and where the duration of the meeting does not cause members to exceed their contracted contact time. Teachers can continue to work with colleagues if they wish to do so outside the normal teaching day but cannot be directed to as opposed to volunteer to do so.

Simply the answer to this is yes, provided the members have been consulted and are in agreement. Any arrangements already agreed before the third phase began in January 2023 should be honoured.

Historically some schools routinely offer an additional day’s holiday in lieu of two additional sessions. This means that teachers are still working 195 days per academic year, albeit they are doing the equivalent of 1½ day’s work on two separate occasions.

In reference to the second part of the question, a local arrangement which is both agreed and beneficial to our members is not in breach of our industrial action.

Where PPA time is accounted for in the normal school day, teachers should, where appropriate, revisit their directed time budget and move their personal PPA time outside the normal teaching day. This will allow PPA time to be facilitated at a time and place of the teacher’s choosing. Where morning duty is accounted for as supervision, this should be seen as a health and safety requirement and should therefore continue.

In relation to lunchtime supervision, all teachers are entitled to 30-minute break between 12 and 2, where they cannot be directed to supervise pupils. It is to these 30 minutes that the action refers.

Members may continue to engage in the ongoing review of the inspection process, and where a school is in Formal Intervention may take part in formal inspections with a view to moving the school out of Formal Intervention.

This action refers to training that has originated outside individual schools or is part of any new initiative that has not been agreed.

Simply you will no longer be required to upload the data on to SIMS or any similar platform except the data linked to the session required to complete the one formal written report in line with the 2007 Regulation.

INTO advise that you should only carry out the assessments needed to fulfil your own personal planning. Members should continue to assess as they normally would on an ongoing basis but should not upload any data to the SIMS system or any other platforms, except for data relating to external moderation i.e.  GCSE and A Levels, which may be uploaded to SIMS or other platforms as necessary.

No, members should not submit short or medium-term planners. These will still be created as personal planners including schemes of work but should not be submitted to the principal or other members of the school/senior management team or anyone acting on their behalf.

A principal may request them to be submitted but teachers following the industrial action will not be obliged to hand them in.

If your departmental action plan forms part of a new Whole School Development Plan, then no you should not submit a departmental action plan.

If the departmental action plan does not form part of the Whole School Development Plan, then we advise that you continue to complete such a plan but you are under no obligation to submit it to school leadership.

This includes any meeting which you are directed to attend outside of the normal pupil day. Members may attend meetings during the normal pupil day, where cover arrangements have been made, and where the duration of the meeting does not cause members to exceed their contracted contact time. Teachers can continue to work with colleagues if they wish to do so outside the normal teaching day but cannot be directed to as opposed to volunteer to do so.

To comply with both the 1987 and 2007 education focused regulations, all teachers are required to communicate and consult with parents once per year. In light of this, INTO advises that all members should continue to report to parents, both in writing and in person, once per annum.  To comply with this INTO’s expectation is that the normal weekly directed time must be used to accommodate the PTM and the PTM will substitute for the one weekly meeting cited within our action short of strike. The PTM should be accounted for within the individually agreed Directed Time Budgets.

Members should also be aware that, irrespective of how long a PTM lasts, they should not be expected to work for any more than 32½ hours per week.  Also, for example, if the PTM last 3 hours then the school would have to agree one of two options:

1. One hour would come from ‘directed time’ and the other two would have to come from contact time, which means a school would have to close early to accommodate a PTM.
2. The hourly meeting would have to be cancelled for three consecutive weeks including the week of the PTM.

A new initiative is any change to the normal professional and working practices in school. Any new initiative to be brought into school, either by the individual school management or originating from outside the school, must be subject to an agreed workload impact assessment by both management side and trade union side. Any outworking from any new initiative must be reflected in members’ individual Directed Time Budgets.

If an attempt to bring in a new initiative is made, the school representative should contact Northern Office. An Official from Northern Office will contact the school directly and request the workload impact assessment. If the office is unhappy with the assessment, members in the school will be instructed to boycott the initiative.

Yes, it does and INTO is advising members not to engage in anything outside of the agreed observations.

Principals should only provide data where a failure to do so has the potential to negatively impact the payment of teacher and support staff wages. Principals should continue to facilitate the sending of the annual census and the monthly returns and the signing-off of supply teachers through NISTR.

Where a school is in formal intervention, and a member needs to supply information in contravention to their union’s lawful, legitimate industrial action, they should contact their union and request an exemption from the action for that specific issue. The union can, where it deems such an exemption to be appropriate, inform the party requesting the information that it will be made available and members in the school may then submit the requested information with due regard to other ongoing action.

Yes. ALL members, remunerated or not, are instructed not to complete any part of the School Development Plan.