Key takeaways
- Contracts set a capped total and protected non-teaching time; the numbers vary by jurisdiction.
- The contact ratio (teaching over available time) is the portable feasibility check.
- The curriculum audit and the staff-loading chart must ask for the same number of teaching hours.
- Pro-rate caps and entitlements for part-time contracts rather than scaling by feel.
What the contract actually fixes
Three things, in every jurisdiction that caps workload: the total that can be asked of a teacher, the time that must stay non-teaching, and by extension the amount left over for the timetable to allocate. Everything else (which periods, which days, which classes) is planning freedom inside those walls.
Read the actual agreement, not the folklore version of it. Carve-outs like planning time and contingency are commonly misremembered, and a baseline built on folklore fails its first audit.
Build the workload baseline
One pass per planning cycle, before any placement.
- Record each teacher's contracted total and protected non-teaching entitlement.
- Pro-rate both for part-time contracts.
- Compute the contact ratio per teacher: assigned teaching over available time.
- Compare the curriculum audit's demand against the staff-loading chart's supply.
- Reconcile until they match; a mismatch here becomes an overload later.
- Publish the baseline so department heads allocate against the same numbers.
How to do this in Smootables: hour limits and the workload view
Resources
Manage teachers, rooms, equipment and student groups
Teacher records carry the caps, and the planning view audits against them continuously.
- Set Weekly max hours and Yearly max hours on each teacher in Resources; the card shows both at a glance.
- Pro-rate the values for part-time contracts when you enter them.
- Watch the planning header: the workload indicator reads either Teacher Workload: All OK or the number of teachers over limit.
- Open the panel for the per-teacher table: assigned against maximum hours, per period and across the year, with over-limit cells highlighted.
- Cross-campus load is counted into the same totals, so a teacher shared between campuses is audited on the sum.
The audit that has to balance
The curriculum audit states how much teaching the school intends to run. The staff-loading chart states how much teaching the staff can legally carry. These are two sides of one ledger, and they must match before placement; the reconciliation is where early overload is actually prevented.
Staffing-side modelling (who is qualified for what, at which sites) is covered in resource and staff modeling. A quick way to sanity-check individual loads is the teaching load calculator.
Part-time caps are pro-rated, not improvised
A part-time contract scales the cap and the entitlements: directed-time budgets, non-contact time, and access to meetings and development on working days. Pro-rating them explicitly keeps the baseline honest; improvising them per case is how quiet inequity starts.
The placement side of part-time work (fixed days off, availability windows) has its own guide: timetabling part-time teachers.
Questions planners ask about contract hours
Why compute a contact ratio instead of just counting periods?
Counting periods tells you what someone teaches. The contact ratio tells you what fraction of their contracted time teaching consumes, which is what protects the remainder. Two teachers on equal periods can carry very different ratios once their contracts differ.
What breaks if the workload baseline is skipped?
The timetable becomes the audit, which is the most expensive place to discover an over-cap load. Planning the year so staff do not exhaust their obligatory hours early is explicitly a leadership task, and it needs the baseline to exist.
Do these caps apply to every school system?
The specific numbers do not; they are collective-agreement terms that differ by country and sector. The structure travels: capped total workload, protected non-teaching time, and equity of allocation are the three things to locate in whatever agreement covers your staff.