Best Practice

Six steps for lowering your teachers’ workload

One secret to reducing workload is teacher agency and autonomy as part of a culture of trust. Ben Levinson considers six steps for achieving this in your primary school
Image: Adobe Stock

For teachers, just standing in front of a class of children is a full-time job. But when you add in the hours of planning, CPD, marking and building relationships with families – among everything else – it goes way beyond a standard 9am to 5pm working week.

It came as no surprise when the annual School Report (Pearson, 2023) revealed that teacher and school leader workload and teacher recruitment and retention were two of the top three challenges for schools during 2023/24. And workload research from the Department for Education finds that working hours are increasing. It shows that primary school teachers clocked 53.9 hours a week in 2023.

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