The government made workload reduction a priority in its 2019 Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy and has produced practical resources for schools such as the school workload reduction toolkit. In spite of this, high workload continues to be the main factor causing teachers to consider leaving the profession in England. In response, the Government also recently announced a new workload reduction taskforce to support their ambition to knock five hours from the current average of 48.7 hours per week for teachers within three years.
We have seen some improvement in reducing teacher workload in recent years, yet teacher working hours remain higher than their peers outside of teaching and this does not seem to be for want of effort from school leaders.
Our new study, commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and published today, finds that most schools are already using a wide range of approaches to tackle the problem, to the extent that there are very few strategies in the workload reduction toolkit that many schools have not already implemented.
Most commonly, this involves giving teachers at least the statutory time for planning and marking, providing access to existing schemes of work and lesson plans, using efficient methods of marking and feedback and encouraging collaborative lesson planning.
