Rethinking workforce design: our nine-day fortnight

In education, conversations about workload, retention, and recruitment are often treated as separate challenges. But in reality, they are symptoms of the same underlying issue: how we design work.

At Dixons, we explored one response through our OpenSource series on our nine-day fortnight. Not as a standalone initiative, but as part of a wider question: what would it take to make teaching truly sustainable again?

In the cities and complex communities we serve, recruitment is becoming harder every year. Fewer applicants. More burnout. More colleagues quietly questioning whether teaching is sustainable long term. We started with a simple question: what would make this profession sustainable again?

The answer was not just pay. It was agency, trust, and flexibility.

Teaching remains one of the most rigid professions in the economy at exactly the moment when flexibility has become the norm everywhere else. So we made a deliberate decision to challenge that.

This was not about working less. We had already made significant progress in reducing workload across planning, marking, and meetings. This was about working differently, treating teachers as professionals who can be trusted with their time, and designing a system that reflects that trust.

But if you get the design wrong, the concept collapses.

A nine-day fortnight does not work if you simply compress ten days of work into nine. That was non-negotiable. So we approached it like a system redesign, not a timetable adjustment.

We introduced anchor days to create structure while preserving flexibility, Mondays in primary, Thursdays in secondary. This allowed us to protect collaboration and consistency, while still enabling autonomy elsewhere in the week.

We protected student contact time, ensured meaningful non-contact time remained in place, and accepted from the outset that the first phase would require iteration. Innovation always does.

Timetabling was the hardest part. It required senior leadership ownership, new staffing models, and honest conversations about trade-offs. But we learned quickly, shared openly, and adapted in real time.

And crucially, this only works in a high-trust culture where intent is believed and leadership is aligned.

Alongside this, we were clear about language. This is not a “day off”. It is professional flexibility, designed to recognise that rested, trusted, and motivated teachers do better work—and stay longer.

But structure alone is not enough. The real shift is cultural.

At the centre of this model is a simple principle: radical transparency.

Better information leads to better decisions. So instead of controlling access to knowledge, we focus on making it available to those who need it, when they need it. Leadership becomes less about gatekeeping and more about stewardship.

That shift is not easy. It requires leaders to let go of control and accept that expertise, not hierarchy, should drive decisions. But when you do, things move faster, and decisions get better.

We also learned that design matters more than intention.

Start with principles, not timetables. Be explicit about what you are optimising for, student experience and staff sustainability. Accept structural reality early rather than forcing artificial constraints. Be intentional about how time off is organised, because flexibility without structure creates instability. And treat staff time with the same seriousness as teaching time itself.

Then test, iterate, and be willing to abandon what does not work. This is not a linear process, it is a continuous refinement of design under real-world conditions.

The impact has been clear.

Teacher turnover has fallen significantly, meaning more than 50 additional teachers staying in our schools. Sickness absence has reduced, equating to hundreds of additional teaching days in classrooms. Applications for teaching roles have increased, with candidates explicitly referencing flexibility as a reason for applying.

But perhaps the most important impact is less numerical and more human.

Colleagues describe better balance. More energy. Greater trust. The ability to attend to life outside of school without guilt, and return to the classroom more present and effective.

This is not a finished model. It is a step in a longer journey to redesign how work in education functions.

And importantly, it cannot stop with teachers.

From the outset, associate staff told us something important: they did not expect identical solutions, but they did expect fairness. So we extended structured flexibility across operational roles too, through additional paid personal days, increased annual leave, protected time away from site-based roles, and expanded hybrid working where roles allow.

Because flexibility only works if it feels fair.

Across all of this, one idea keeps coming back to the surface: if you want different outcomes, you have to design different systems.

This is not about doing less. It is about designing work that is more intentional, more human, and more sustainable, without losing ambition for impact.

We are still learning. Still iterating. Still refining.

But the direction is clear.

Towards a system that trusts professionals, values time, and is built for long-term sustainability in education.

Watch the full OpenSource series here.