Workload- a different name for the problem?

(SCENE: Prehistoric Earth.  Ford and Arthur have been stuck for two years.)

Arthur:  Have you got an answer?

Ford: No, but I’ve got a different name for the problem!

(The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Seventh)

Teacher workload has been a problem for more than two years, but discussion of it has become more intense recently.  The government has plans, the opposition has plans, and this is all fine as far as it goes.  Unfortunately, stories like the one shared by Debra Kidd aren’t that unusual.

Reducing the number of forms and spreadsheets flying around would help… a bit.  I’m not sure that it would get the job down to something that could really be done honestly.  So- for a bit of fun during the holidays- let’s give the workload problem a different name- If we assume that paying teachers a salary buys a certain amount of time, what can they get done in that time?

Some assumptions

My physics teacher nature is going to start to show here.  I’m going to make some assumptions, but I don’t think they’re crazy, and I don’t think that changing them much affects the answer much.

Assumption 1: A full time, main scale teacher teaches 21 hours of lessons per week.

Assumption 2: There aren’t any repeat lessons (same content to 2 or more equivalent classes- clearly that saves some planning time, but I don’t have that on my timetable, so there).

Assumption 3: There are lots of things that teachers do that aren’t planning, teaching or marking, and they’re important.  I’m not going to try to put numbers on the time for them, because they’re too variable.

What if a teacher has 30 minutes to plan and mark for each hour of teaching?

Time on planning, teaching and marking = 21 x 1.5 = 31.5 hours per week, so there’s definitely time for being a form tutor, duties, meetings and other things.

30 minutes for planning and marking is going to be tight.  I really like the Every Book, Every Lesson approach to marking, and it does make it possible to give meaningful feedback to a whole class with 15 minutes of marking.  That leaves 15 minutes to plan a lesson.  That doesn’t feel like enough.  I could get my head around a pre-planned lesson in that time (read it, understand it, decide if I need to tweak any of the explanations or references to make them work for my class), but that would be about it.

What if a teacher has 60 minutes to plan and mark for each hour of teaching?

Time on planning, teaching and marking = 21 x 2 = 42 hours per week, which is getting a bit high; remember that there are other core things to add.

If we stick with 15 minutes of marking, that leaves 45 minutes to plan.  That should be enough to think about the lesson objectives, select appropriate resources, and put them together in a lesson.  It probably isn’t enough time to create substantial new resources, or write a lesson plan with enough detail for someone else to follow.


Firstly, the sweet spot for lesson related work looks like it is somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes per lesson.  The reality is that there are plenty of schools where the baseline expectations of teachers don’t fit into 1 hour per lesson.  The result is the scenario described by Andrew Old as The Job that Never Ends:


Essentially, teachers do what they can off the list of essential jobs, and hope that the things left undone won’t lead to too much trouble.  That’s not fair on pupils (who can’t rely on what they will get) or conscientious teachers (who end up exhausted and guilty).

Secondly, the “30 minutes per lesson” scenario reminds me a lot of what I experienced as a pupil in the late 1980s.  Most academic subjects were taught from published resources, without much customisation.  Work was marked regularly, but written feedback was brief.

Finally, if teachers are really going to take control of their workload, the place where that has to happen has to be the way we approach planning and marking.  Streamlining the peripheral work can only achieve so much.  I don’t have an answer to the Workload Problem.  I do have a different name for it:

“If I’ve got 45 minutes per lesson to plan and mark, what can I do with that time?”

Any ideas?