Every teacher knows the answer is “less than people think”, and almost nobody can say by how much.That vagueness matters, because workload debates in education are conducted almost entirely with adjectives. Staff say the administrative burden is unsustainable. Leadership says it’s being managed Both are arguing from impression, and impressions lose to budget pressure every time.
The unglamorous alternative is to count.
What fills the non teaching hours
Contact time is the visible part and it’s rarely the problem. Around it sits everything else: planning and resource preparation, marking, data entry for whatever tracking system the institution uses, parent or learner communication, meetings, cover arrangements, reporting cycles, and the compliance paperwork attached to safeguarding, inclusion or accreditation.
Some of this is unavoidable and valuable. Some of it exists because a process was designed without anyone calculating the hours it would consume across thirty staff members. The distinction between those two categories is impossible to make without data, which is why most workload reduction initiatives cut the wrong things.
A common pattern: an institution removes a reporting requirement that took forty minutes a term and keeps a weekly data entry task that takes twenty minutes a week. The second one costs roughly ten times more. Nobody knew, because nobody measured.
Measuring teacher workload without turning it into surveillance
This is the objection, and it’s a legitimate one. Asking teachers to log their hours sounds like a precursor to performance monitoring, and in some institutions it would be.
Two distinctions keep it useful rather than corrosive.
First, the unit of analysis should be the activity, not the person. The question is how many hours the marking policy consumes across the department, not which teacher is slow at marking. Reported in aggregate, by activity, the data arms staff rather than exposing them.
Second, it should be time limited. A term of recording to establish a baseline is a project. Permanent timesheets for salaried teaching staff are a different proposition entirely and will be resisted for good reason.
Staff workload data in schools and colleges
For institutions that do want this on an ongoing basis, usually because programmes are grant funded or because staff are sessional and paid hourly, the requirements are specific.
Hours need to attach to a programme, department or funding source rather than to a week, because the questions being asked are about programmes. Software built for education organisations handles that by letting work levels be renamed to match your schools, programmes or departments, with separate time and cost budgets at each level and a progress indicator as hours accumulate against them. There’s an approval step before data reaches payroll, which matters when staff are part time or paid by the session, and reporting that shows how hours divide across programmes and what they cost.
That ongoing version answers institutional questions: what a programme costs to run, whether a department is resourced for what it’s been asked to deliver, how staff time splits between teaching, support and administration.
What it doesn’t do is hold student attendance or academic records. Those stay in whatever system already has them, which is worth knowing because it means this sits alongside your existing setup rather than replacing anything.
If you just want your own number
Many teachers reading this don’t want an institutional project. They want to know their own figure, usually because they’re trying to decide whether to raise it with a line manager or whether they’re simply disorganised.
For that, a free app is entirely adequate and the free plans vary more than you’d expect. This comparison of free time tracking apps covers user caps, project limits and whether you can export your data, which matters if you want to look at a full term rather than a single week.
Record four weeks, split by activity rather than by day. Then compare the total against your contracted hours and the breakdown against what you’d have guessed.
The useful outcome is rarely the headline number. It’s identifying the one or two activities consuming far more than anyone intended, because those are specific enough to raise with someone who can change them. “I’m overloaded” invites sympathy. “The weekly data entry takes six hours a term per teacher and the information is used once” invites a decision.
Count before the next review
Workload conversations happen on a cycle, usually around budget or inspection.
Arriving at one with a term of activity level data, reported in aggregate, puts the discussion on different ground than arriving with a shared sense that things have become unmanageable. The data may not get you the outcome you want. It will stop the conversation being about whether the problem is real.
