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Jeremy Hannay: ‘Provide teachers with alternatives to written feedback.’
Jeremy Hannay: ‘Provide teachers with alternatives to written feedback, so time spent writing in pupil books is almost zero.’ Photograph: Alamy
Jeremy Hannay: ‘Provide teachers with alternatives to written feedback, so time spent writing in pupil books is almost zero.’ Photograph: Alamy

Tips to help schools reduce teacher workload

This article is more than 6 years old

From asking teachers for feedback to rethinking lesson planning, there are ways for schools to lessen the burden. We asked our panel of experts for advice

With teacher workload on the up and educators leaving the profession as a result, work-life balance has become a very real issue for schools. So what can schools do to address the problem? In our recent online live chat, we brought a panel of specialists together to discuss possible solutions.

Here’s a roundup of their suggestions:

Ask teachers for feedback

Your governing body should be asking about school workload surveys – making sure that one is carried out and understanding the responses. And then helping the leadership team to find ways to help manage any unreasonable pressure, and working with the head to help them with their own workload.

Nansi Ellis, assistant general secretary at teaching union ATL and editor of Managing Teacher Workload.


It’s about raising awareness and having frank discussion – but keeping it as constructive and solution-focused as possible. I like Rodger Caseby’s idea about the school leaders conducting a ‘workload impact assessment’ when any initiative is introduced.

Jill Berry, educational consultant and former head of Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford.

John Higton, research director at CFE Research and lead author of the Department for Education-commissioned 2016 teacher workload survey, also made the point that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between surveying teachers and adding to their workload.

Set reasonable expectations

Decide what is reasonable to expect teachers to work each day beyond directed time – in Nottingham the unions see no more than two additional hours a day as a ‘step in the right direction’.

Review your policies to cut out unnecessary tasks or reduce the frequency of others so that what is expected of teachers is reasonably deliverable within the capped time. Try it out and monitor to see if it’s having the desired impact.

David Anstead, strategic lead for the Nottingham Education Improvement Board, which has produced a fair workload charter for local schools.

Simplify your processes

At Three Bridges, I designed a system where teachers have pre-populated Excel sheets to fill in, so the children who ‘got it’ are already input for them. All they have to do is change the ones that are ‘not getting it’ or are ‘working at a higher standard’. Everything else (analysis, parent reports, gap analysis, etc) is done from the data entry that takes about 15 minutes per half term.

Jeremy Hannay, headteacher at Three Bridges primary school in Southall, west London, nicknamed “the happiest school on earth”.

Hannay adds:

There are a number of areas that are fairly simple to manage:

• Marking (aka written feedback): create a feedback policy [read the Three Bridges policy] where teachers are in control of when it is most appropriate and provide teachers with alternatives to written feedback, so that feedback is high but time spent writing in pupil books is almost zero.

  • Planning: provide thinking frames for teachers (especially new ones) to wrap their heads around lessons elements or structures. Get rid of mandatory proformas and scrutinies. Planning should be helpful for the teacher, not me [heads].
  • Data entry: create systems where teachers enter data once and all of the analysis, reporting, etc is done for them.

Take the admin out of lessons

Planning [for lessons] is thinking, in my view. It’s about evaluating, adapting, improving. It isn’t about producing lengthy documents just to prove you’re doing your job. It doesn’t have to take a huge amount of time for it to be effective and to lead to good quality lessons. It’s about a mindset rather than endless admin.

Jill Berry

Ellis agreed, adding that effective planning is a long-term, rather than short-term, project:

We have to distinguish between writing lesson plans and planning learning. Teachers are fed up with pointless work and writing out a lesson plan that runs to many pages, just so that someone (school leader, Ofsted) can look at it, is a waste of time. David Didau (Learning Spy) says we need to get better at planning children’s learning over a period of time rather than splitting it into individual lessons. That’s best done collaboratively. Yes, it takes time, but it’s time well spent – and we should drop the mindless writing down and hours spent marking in order to find time for good quality planning.

More work isn’t always better work

Emma Kell, author of How to Survive in Teaching, has conducted doctoral research on teacher wellbeing and work-life balance. She suggested that schools encourage teachers to reflect on whether they are using their time in the most efficient way:

It’s less about the amount of work than about the focus of the work – when the work feels either pointless or like a repetition of tasks already done. There are by now millions of resources out there, so work smart. ‘Never spend longer planning an activity than it will take to deliver’ is good advice. But beware perfectionism – many of the most gifted teachers I’ve known have been plagued by it. It is not (or is rarely) our friend.

Track progress

One of the chapters in Managing Teacher Workload is from Robin Bevan, a headteacher, who writes about plotting the hours worked outside the classroom on a weekly basis to make sure that in weeks where workload will be high (report-writing, for example), other things can be cut – such as marking, setting homework, etc. It seems simple, but writing it down is powerful.

ATL has a workload tracker that you can use individually to log what’s taken the most time for you in any particular week, so one can see clearly what the issues are.

Nansi Ellis


The fair workload charter team in Nottingham are working on a toolkit to help schools reduce workload and/or adopt the charter. It includes a suggested staff survey and a spreadsheet for monitoring hours worked. We’ve found it is critical for senior leaders and union reps to work together on reducing workload. It benefits everyone and the children.

David Anstead.

For more insights and advice, see the full discussion on workload.

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