– Do we really need planning days?

They will soon be here again – always as surprising and inconvenient. The kindergarten is closed. The school is closed. The employees plan.

Or “planner”.

As far as I know, there is no research that shows that planning days are decisive for the quality of kindergarten or school.

Planning days are actually the managers’ and middle managers’ own days. That’s when they can come out of the office and present meaningless gibberish about the municipality’s or county council’s investment areas.

It’s great for them, and considerably less great for everyone else.

Teachers are usually teachers because they prefer to be in the classroom and teach. A few become principals and deputy principals because they like meetings and decisions better than teaching and students.

Same in kindergarten. Kindergarten managers probably think that managing is more fun than little ones. That’s nice – we need people like that too. But do we really need planning days?

I have lived in several countries, but I have only experienced the phenomenon of planning days in Norway. In other countries, one clearly manages to plan well without closing down the entire business.

I don’t know many teachers who think planning days are important or useful. Nor have I met the parents who think that it fits so well with the kindergarten’s planning day right now.

On the contrary.

The planning days keep coming like Christmas Eve at the old woman’s house. They are always weekdays when people should have been at work and done what they really should and get paid for.

There is little you can do with a three-year-old in your lap – and not just in your lap, but everywhere.

When there are planning days at the school, a pedagogue from the college often comes to lecture on something distant but fashionable.

Right now the hip message is called “community-creating didactics”. The pedagogue is hired from the teacher training program or, yes – from the section for general pedagogy. It is where people study pedagogy and become nothing – beyond pedagogues at the colleges.

One can assume that these people were in the classroom last when they were students themselves. Nevertheless, they come with all the self-confidence that a master’s degree in pedagogy and a couple of decades at the university gives. And then they stand on the podium and tell how teachers should do their job.

The problem with planning days is that they steal valuable working time – from teachers, kindergarten teachers and not least from parents. It is of course not the fault of the hired pedagogues or the fault of the principals or kindergarten managers.

The latter are just trying to fill up all the time they are surely required to plan. The hired pedagogues accept because they are paid extra – and because they might get an opportunity to talk about what they are struggling with.

It is rarely successful. I have come across speakers who do not know what a development conversation is. It is not necessarily general knowledge, but it is, after all, somewhat basic when working with education.

In case you didn’t know: It’s the conversation the contact teacher has twice a year with the student and the parents. They probably hardly have such conversations in the pedagogy section at the college.

Rather, they fool around with concepts such as education and citizenship.

There is a reason to ask the question whether there is a real need for planning in the school system and in the kindergarten – and whether the real need is really as much as five or six days a year.

In fact, there are no other institutions or companies that close their operations for a whole week to plan what they are going to do. Both public bodies and private companies manage, amazingly enough, to plan within the working hours they have.

Why is it not possible in the upbringing and education sector? What about the nursing homes – how do they manage to take care of the patients without planning days?

And imagine if VG had closed its business for a whole week. Five days without news? People could possibly have survived a week without VG, but imagine if Aftenposten, NTB and Minerva had done the same?

How do the media houses even manage to create content around the clock without closing the shop for five days? When are they planning then? And why can’t the schools and kindergartens do the same?

Listen again to the interview with Sanna Sarromaa in the VG podcast Giæver & gängen (NB! from February 2022).

Soon it will be planning day in the kindergarten again. It’s so convenient and typically a day sandwiched between skyrocketing and the weekend. The problem is that I – and many others – have to go to work that day.

Recently, we have been debating declining fertility rates. There is probably no one who refrains from making a child because of the five or six planning days, but at least they do not contribute positively.

The author Helle Cecilie Palmer recently wrote about how, in recent decades, Norway has introduced a number of reforms with the intention of making it easier to combine children and work.

We have generous parental leave, full nursery cover, maximum price in nursery and free core time in after-school. These reforms do not harmonize well with the forced days off due to the planning of the upbringing and education sector.

Many of us do not have grandparents or other family who can stand up. We take leave without pay or use precious vacation days to cover something that a society concerned with the line of work should really provide for – namely, the opportunity to go to work on a normal weekday.

As a teacher, I often wondered what research or what kind of data was available to determine that planning days were at all decisive for the quality of what we were doing.

I don’t think any of the college educators have researched it. There is obviously a knowledge gap here.

And how much do planning days cost in a societal perspective? Yes, Norway can certainly afford it, because Norway can afford most things (even things that have no effect).

But it is true that quite a lot of productivity falls when employees are at home with healthy children on normal weekdays.

So can’t we just work instead?