They work at home on non-contact tasks including planning coherent sequences of lessons, and 'differentiating' the approach within each lesson for lower quartile, median and upper quartile students. There may also be discrete special learning needs (e.g a deaf student who communicates exclusively by sign language and who will have an interpreter and a note taker present, a student with Asperger's, a student with type 1 diabetes and significant eyesight impairment, a student with pronounced dyslexia).

Within the planning process, you often have to allow for significant changes in the syllabus content and mode of assessment.

There is usually staff training provided by school management, and career progression in teaching is linked to taking on extra responsibility.

Now, a very interesting question is why do we have the long summer holidays still? Lets face it, a very small proportion of the population work on farms these days. Changing that would have to be a big bang change of course. The whole system would need to move over to a new school year in one go, which is probably why no government has done it yet.

I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? In the UK we have the national curriculum bit but teachers are still scrabbling around for resources and activities.