Should teachers be expected to run after school clubs?

When I started my teaching career it was expected that every teacher ran an after school club for one day a week. I can clearly remember this coming up at interview, when of course you said yes and then desperately tried to think of a club that you were at least vaguely qualified for running. Over my time as a teacher I ran sports clubs, computer clubs, cooking clubs and even art clubs. It was just accepted that it was what you did. Your club night was by no means your favourite night of the week as it meant that you couldn't get on with any admin after school that day unless you wanted to stay late, but it was just part of the job.

This was the norm, up to fairly recently, when we started to see the growth of external providers taking on clubs and freeing up teachers. Obviously this was a popular move with the teachers, and although my school resisted introducing externally provided paid clubs for fear of poor uptake from our families I was pleasantly surprised how this went down with parents.

Other than freeing up the teachers, there were more benefits to be reaped from making this change. Admin for starters, this was something that previously took up a huge amount of office time. We were also able to offer a wider variety of well resourced clubs to the children, rather than having to make do with what we could offer before.

The relatively new, for us, problem of children dropping out of clubs after a few weeks was removed too, as for some parents 'free childcare' becoming 'paid childcare' meant that they chose either not to sign up or to ensure that their children did not drop out when the weather was bad or they had something more exciting to do at home etc.

There were downsides though, as quality control was at times an issue. Quality of activities and also quality of staff running them. If you get a poor presenter then you are left with no real option but to put a member of staff in to help manage behaviour, or to do it yourself as head teacher.

So, back to the question in the title of this post. Should teachers be expected to run after school clubs? I would say no, the expectation should not be there as teachers are expected to work really hard on their actual contracted jobs then forcing them to work longer is not going to be conducive to good school moral. Obviously, if a teacher is keen to run a club then they should be encouraged to do so, and compensated in some way, not financially of course. Perhaps removing them from playground duty would be adequate as a thank you?

The fact that Ofsted include a question about after school clubs in their Parentview questionnaire shows that it is still considered important, and I know that some parents use the provision of after school clubs to help them make a decision about where to enrol their children, so schools should first and foremost be looking at external providers. Getting feedback from other local schools is vital to ensure quality provision, of course. Whatever you choose to do, it is important to do your research for the provision to be succesful in the long term and not cause you hours of problems, and even lose you children.