Time in lieu in primary schools: what counts, how to record it, and how to give it back.

Time in lieu is provided where the principal requires an employee to perform duties beyond 38 hours in a week for a full-time employee, or beyond their normal hours for a part-time employee. It accrues hour for hour for the time over that line. That is the whole rule, and every other part of the Department of Education's Time in lieu Guidelines for the Victorian Government Schools Agreement 2022 follows from it.

Two words in the rule do most of the work. "Requires" means the principal asked for the attendance and gave written notice of the date, the time and, wherever possible, the hours. "Beyond" means the week as a whole, not the evening on its own: a full-time teacher's attendance is organised as three 8-hour days and two 7-hour days, and only the hours that push the week past 38 count.

The guidelines are just as clear about what does not count. Planning, assessment and report writing that fit inside the 38 hours do not accrue time in lieu. Neither does an activity a teacher runs because they want to: the guidelines' own example is a chess club proposed by a teacher and agreed by the principal on the basis that it happens in the teacher's own time.

For teachers, time in lieu applies to a school activity: a structured activity organised by the school. The agreement lists parent-teacher meetings, camps, excursions, concerts, parent information sessions and after-hours sport. Which of these attract time in lieu at your school is decided through the school's consultative arrangements, not activity by activity on the night.

The same activity can accrue time for one teacher and not another. In the guidelines' debating example, the teacher required to run the competition from 6:30pm to 9:30pm accrues those hours if they take the week past 38; two colleagues who choose to come along do not. A PE teacher required at an after-school sporting event accrues the event, the set-up and the pack-up, and the two training sessions the principal asked for in the lead-up, but not extra sessions the teacher chose to add.

Parent-teacher interviews from 3:30pm to 6:30pm are the case most primary schools meet. That evening is about two hours beyond the day's normal attendance. If nothing else in the week changes, those two hours accrue. If the school adjusts attendance elsewhere in that week, for example by dropping the staff meeting, nothing accrues. Both are correct; the difference is whether anyone planned it.

The guidelines describe three phases: plan and approve, accrue, acquit. The planning phase belongs to the year before. Through the consultative committee, the school lists the activities that will require attendance beyond 38 hours, how many staff each needs, and the estimated hours per person. Camps in particular are to be planned the year before so that staff get reasonable notice, and the Department publishes an Activity Roster Planner spreadsheet for exactly this.

Planning also decides whether time accrues at all. In the guidelines' end-of-year concert example, the school moves rehearsals into class time, gives the organisers a time allowance inside their 38 hours, and lightens the meeting load in concert week so the 3:30pm to 5:00pm concert does not push anyone over. No time in lieu, no acquittal, and nobody feels short-changed, because the plan was visible in February.

An employee can ask not to attend where the attendance would unreasonably affect their personal or family commitments, and the principal may only refuse on reasonable grounds. Written notice is what makes that conversation possible early rather than the week before.

A school camp attracts time in lieu for any employee the principal requires to attend, and the guidelines split each day at camp into three kinds of time. Normal hours are the hours the teacher would have attended had they been at school, and they accrue nothing. On-duty hours outside normal hours, such as evening activities until lights out and corridor checks, accrue at 100 per cent. On-call hours, when the employee is at camp and available but not performing duties, accrue at 50 per cent.

The overnight period from 11pm to 7am is treated as on call. Eight hours at 50 per cent is four hours, and since 1 January 2023 the school pays that four hours at the teacher's normal hourly rate (150 per cent for education support employees) as soon as possible after the camp, unless the employee chooses to take it as time instead. A teacher woken to attend to a sick child is on duty, at 100 per cent, for the time it takes.

Overseas camps and any part of a camp that falls in the school holidays sit outside these arrangements: the principal and the employee agree the approach in advance, and if they cannot agree, the employee does not attend.

A worked example makes the three kinds of time concrete. A full-time classroom teacher goes on a Tuesday-to-Thursday camp with two nights away. Their normal attendance across those three days is 23 hours, and Monday and Friday are ordinary days.

After the activity, the employee submits a time in lieu accrual request in eduPay for the actual hours worked. The principal reviews and approves it, and eduPay keeps the running balance. Where the hours claimed exceed the written notice, the employee needs to explain the difference, and the principal can hold the request until they do. Camp overnight payments are processed by the school rather than entered as accrual, unless the employee elected time.

eduPay holds the balance, but it does not hold the plan. The school still needs its own record of who is owed what and when it will be taken, because the acquittal options below need a person to choose one and a date. A whiteboard in the principal's office is not that record; the November discovery that six teachers are owed a day each is what happens when the balance is the only thing anyone kept.

Part-time staff are the most common recording mistake. Their time in lieu is measured against their normal hours, not against 38. A teacher on three days who is required at a Wednesday-evening information session accrues from the first hour past her normal Wednesday, not from the 38th hour of a week she does not work.

Accrued time is to be acquitted at a time that causes the least disruption to the school's program, decided by the principal after genuine consideration of the employee's wishes. The guidelines say it should be taken in the fortnight it was accrued where possible, and otherwise at any time before the end of the school year in which it accrued. Four mechanisms are allowed.

If a teacher's time in lieu has not been acquitted by 1 December in the year it was accrued, the teacher may vary their attendance on any school day before the end of that year by the amount owed, provided they give the principal at least three working days' notice. Where several teachers want the same day, the principal decides the timing so that students are not sent home.

If the time is still not acquitted by 1 March of the following school year, it must, unless otherwise agreed, be granted immediately or paid out at 150 per cent of the employee's normal hourly rate. Any balance also has to be settled before a person transfers, is promoted to another workplace or leaves.

Read together, the dates say what the guidelines say in every other section: this is a term-by-term job, not an end-of-year one. A balance that is checked at the start of each term and acquitted inside it never reaches December.

The pattern behind almost every time in lieu dispute is the same: the time was real, the requirement was real, and the record was verbal.

Bell Path keeps a time in lieu ledger beside the timetable. When daily cover takes a teacher's planning time or hands them an extra duty, the time is recorded against them at the moment it happens rather than reconstructed later. A planner can add approved time for any other activity with the date, the minutes and the reason, such as supervising the concert after hours.

Each staff member sees their own balance in the staff portal and can claim time in lieu from there with a note. Claims wait for the planner's approval when the school's policy asks for it, and the balances page shows approved time still waiting to be used. The record survives a staff member leaving, because the entitlement outlives the staff record. For Victorian government schools, eduPay remains the Department's system of record; Bell Path is the working ledger the plan is run from.