This study for the Education Endowment Foundation explores current practices on managing workload in English schools.
The study shows that most schools appear to be using multiple strategies to manage teacher workload, to the extent that there are few strategies that are not being widely adopted. Planning, Preparation and Assessment (PPA) time is the most commonly reported strategy, followed by access to existing schemes of work/lesson plans, and collaborative lesson planning.
Some of the main drivers of workload come from outside the school – primarily from the government and Ofsted, but also from parents/carers. Insufficient funding and staff capacity is the top barrier to workload reduction.
Teachers whose schools have more workload reduction strategies in place are significantly more likely to have positive views on manageability of their workload, autonomy and job satisfaction.
School leadership is one of the few mediating factors of workload reduction found in this research. Over a quarter (28%) of teachers identified a ‘lack of support from the senior leadership team (SLT)’ as a barrier to workload reduction in their school. This suggests that it is the whole-school approach to reducing workload that is important, in addition to the efficacy of specific strategies.