Teaching and preparation
The working hours agreement does not stipulate any fixed relationship between teaching hours and preparation. However, you are entitled to a reasonable balance between teaching and preparation. In the following, we review the provisions of the working hours agreement. Please note, however, that the school’s administrator and the teachers’ trade union representative can reach local agreements that deviate from the following provisions.
There must be a connection between the quality of teaching the school desires, and the time granted to teachers to prepare their teaching. This is stated in the working hours agreement.
The working hours agreement does not include a fixed factor or a time pool for preparation. The school’s administration determines the balance between teaching and preparation. However, the working hours agreement requires that the school’s administration account for its priorities, including the prioritisation of teaching quality, teaching hours and preparation. The working hours agreement also emphasises that, in its priorities, the school’s administration must take into account the balance between tasks and time allotted to perform those tasks.
Planning of preparation
Your preparation time must be planned in a way that gives you coherent and effective time for preparation. Therefore, the individual preparation cannot be planned in student breaks where you have teaching both before and after the break.
If you experience a reduction in your individual preparation time, you can request the scheduling of your preparation time. You can only be assigned to other tasks during scheduled preparation time if a completely unforeseen and urgent need arises.
Teaching hours
The time planned for teaching is stated in your task overview. In the determination of your total teaching hours, the school’s administrator must take into account whether you are part-time employed, have an age-related reduction in hours, are in the process of continuing education, have expanded responsibilities and functions, or are a new employee.
Teaching is defined as follows:
“The targeted activity performed by employees in order to increase the students’ competencies based on the educational objectives or for the purpose of supporting the development of competencies that takes place.” The definition is unchanged from the previous working hours agreement.
The definition suggests that teaching is more than just classroom or group teaching. Group work, advising/counselling, ongoing assessment, student interviews, school camps, field trips and social and cultural events can also be defined as teaching.