Many teachers find their workload unacceptable

According to the Department for Education's Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey, most teachers and leaders disagreed that their workload was acceptable (72%) and that they had sufficient control over it (62%).

Combined, over half (56%) of teachers and leaders thought both that their workload was unacceptable and that they did not have sufficient control over it.

Two-thirds of teachers (66%) reported that they spent over half of their working time on tasks other than teaching, rising to 77% of secondary teachers. Among all teachers, general administrative work was the task most commonly cited as taking up ‘too much’ of their time (75% of teachers reported this). Around half of all teachers also said that data recording, inputting, and analysis, behaviour and incident follow up, individual lesson planning, and marking took up ‘too much’ of their time.

Most teachers and leaders indicated that their school had revised their policies and approaches to try to improve workload over the last year, although views on the effect of these revisions were mixed. The most successful revisions related to marking and feedback policy; almost three in ten (29%) reported that revisions made to marking and feedback had reduced their workload. Other teachers and leaders reported that revisions had added to their workload. This was most clearly evidenced for revisions around data tracking and monitoring student progress, where a larger proportion (26%) reported that it had added to the workload than said it had reduced it (15%).

In terms of wellbeing, the survey indicated that teacher and leader wellbeing in English state schools is lower than equivalent wellbeing scores for the UK population.

Commenting on the publication survey, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “These findings are a damning indictment of government policies which have neglected schools for over a decade, and with them, the futures of our children.

“Anyone questioning why ourselves and other teaching unions are in dispute with the government only has to look at these survey results.

“They lay bare the unacceptable hours worked by school leaders who have lost nearly a fifth of their real-terms pay since 2010 and overwhelmingly feel that their views are not valued by policy-makers including the government."