Teachers are leaving profession due to workload

Research conducted by the National Education Union (NEU) shows that workload is causing 80 per cent of teachers to consider leaving the profession.

The survey if 8,173 members revealed that 40 per cent of respondents are spending over 21 hours a week working at home at evening and weekends.

In addition, 81 per cent of teachers said they have considered leaving teaching in the last year because of pressures of workload.

Over 80 per cent are also teaching more hours than the average in 2016.

This is believed to be down to rising pupil numbers and the recruitment and retention crisis.

One-third of teachers responding to the NEU survey said that their workload had never been manageable during the past year.

Just over half said that it was only sometimes manageable, 15 per cent said that it was manageable all or most of the time. Less than 15 per cent of teachers said that they had a good work-life balance all or most of the time.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “The government cannot keep burying its head in the sand about the issue of workload.

It is clearly driving the majority of teachers to despair or out of the profession altogether.

“The continual long hours spent on unnecessary work such as data collection for arbitrary government targets is not only demoralising but is unsustainable mentally and physically. If the government does not act decisively and soon, the recruitment and retention crisis will seriously damage our children and young people’s education.”