Rethinking Daily and Weekly Planning in Scottish Primary Schools

In the whirlwind of a primary classroom, lesson planning is our roadmap. But somewhere along the way, planning evolved from a functional teaching tool into a demanding bureaucratic task. With teacher workload firmly at the centre of national debate, it is time to recalibrate what daily and weekly planning should actually look like in Scotland.

Planning is Personal

If your Sunday night planning routine is driven by the dread of creating a comprehensive plan that will be scrutinised, then it’s time to push back. The Curriculum for Excellence Working Group on Tackling Bureaucracy has long established that personal planning should be just that — personal.

Teachers are under no contractual obligation to use a rigid, mandated template for daily or weekly planning, nor should these plans be routinely submitted to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) for auditing or monitoring.

When SLTs require daily or weekly plans to be uploaded to a shared drive or dropped on a desk every Friday, it fundamentally misinterprets the purpose of planning. Planning (longer-term overviews) exists to spark professional dialogue and map out the learning journey for your learners. In contrast, short-term daily and weekly notes exist solely to help you teach.

Collecting and monitoring a teacher’s personal daily or weekly planning is not good practice. It is micro-management that drives the average teacher workload well beyond the contractual 35-hour week.

Striking the Balance

Good daily or weekly planning doesn’t look like a multi-page document filled with copy-and-pasted Curriculum for Excellence statements. It should be lean, dynamic and focused on impact rather than paperwork.

Daily or weekly planning needs to be a quick-reference guide that you can glance at mid-lesson. It might be a rough visual map or bulleted flow of the day. It might focus on the hook, the core activity and the resources needed.

It should not be a script that requires you to write down exactly what you will say or detail every minor transition. If detailing the learning intentions and success criteria, then include them. Go with what helps you keep the day flowing.

Weekly planning looks at the arc of learning across the week. It allows you to pace your blocks of Numeracy, Literacy, Interdisciplinary Learning (IDL) and other curricular areas. It should be a flexible skeleton rather than a static document.

If your class does not grasp a Literacy concept on a Tuesday or they understand a concept quicker than you expected, a good weekly plan has the breathing room to adapt. You should not have to rewrite a lengthy document simply because learning has taken a natural detour.

Formats That Work

Because there is no mandated format, you have the professional autonomy to choose a system that works for your brain.

The A3 Visual Mat/Timetable

Best for visual thinkers who like to see the whole week at a glance. It can be divided into a structure such as morning, middle and afternoon. You can bullet-point the week’s flow on a single sheet with space to record observations, notes and reminders.

PowerPoint Slides

This format works well if you like to display your plan for the day on a smartboard. Learning intentions, prompts and tasks can be displayed directly on the slides for both you and your learners to see.

Diary/Academic Planner

A diary or academic planner provides a simple way to structure your day. You can keep notes on groupings in the same document and make links to progression pathways used within your school.

Use of Time

To protect professional time, teachers should evaluate their planning against a single question: “‘Is this helping me teach tomorrow or am I writing this to prove to someone else that I am teaching?”

If it is the latter, consider stripping it out. Trust your professional judgment, lean on your school’s progression pathways and keep your planning short, sharp and useful.

What About Absences?

It is a scenario every primary teacher recognises. You wake up at 6 a.m. feeling unwell. Alongside the physical misery comes a wave of professional guilt: What is my class going to do today? Is my planning clear enough for a supply teacher? Are my resources ready?

Both the EIS and the broader SNCT conditions of service are crystal clear when it comes to sickness absence. When you are declared unfit for work due to illness, you are unfit for work. There is no contractual obligation for you to undertake any of your normal duties while off sick.

If an absence is unplanned and sudden, you should never feel pressured to log into your work laptop and write a detailed day plan for a supply teacher while you are unwell.

Your daily or weekly planning being available on your desk can enable someone covering your class to quickly see your structure, what was covered the day before and the outline of the current day.

By keeping this information easily accessible on your desk, you support the smooth running of your class during your absence while fully protecting your right to switch off, rest and recover when you are unwell.

Final Thoughts

To get this right, we have to separate the different layers of our planning.

Planning and progression pathways are there to outline your long-term structure, the overall pace of learning and how you will gather evidence of progress. That macro-level work is already done.

Your daily and weekly planning has a completely different job. It is simply there to help you transfer that long-term structure into a day-to-day, workable solution for your classroom.

Excellent learning and teaching are not born out of a neatly typed grid in a folder; it happens in the live, unpredictable interactions between you and your learners. We need to reclaim short-term planning for what it was always meant to be. It is a supportive scaffolding for your practice, not a tool for surveillance.