Teacher Workload in England: What the 2025 Data Shows

The headline number: how many hours are teachers actually working?

The government’s current answer comes from the “Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders” study, a large annual survey run for the Department for Education by IFF Research and UCL’s Institute of Education. It’s worth being precise about what this is, because the survey most people still search for — the “Teacher Workload Survey” — hasn’t been run under that name since 2019. The DfE replaced it with this broader annual study, which began in 2022 and is now in its fourth year. Wave 4 fieldwork ran between January and May 2025, drew on responses from more than 10,800 teachers and leaders in state schools in England, and the summary report was published in November 2025. That makes it the most recent official workload data available, even though the name has changed.

Here’s what it found. Full-time teachers worked an average of 50.1 hours a week in 2025, down from 51.2 hours in 2024. Break that down by phase and the picture is a bit more uneven: primary teachers averaged 51.4 hours (down from 52.5), while secondary teachers averaged 49.3 hours (down from 50.3). Leaders, unsurprisingly, carry more. Full-time leaders averaged 56.5 hours a week, down from 57.6 in 2024, 58.2 in 2023 and 57.5 in 2022 — so leader hours have now fallen for two years running after climbing in the early waves of the survey.

What teachers actually think of that number

Hours worked are only half the story, because two teachers doing the same 50 hours can experience it completely differently depending on how much control they feel they have. The survey also asks people to rate their own workload directly. In 2025, 43% said their workload was not acceptable, down from 49% in 2024 and 57% in 2022. Meanwhile 26% said their workload was acceptable, up from 22% the year before and just 17% in 2022 and 2023. Read those two numbers together and the trend is real: things have eased since the sharpest point of the post-pandemic squeeze. But a plurality of the profession still doesn’t think their workload is acceptable, and that’s worth sitting with rather than smoothing over.

The same survey found 86% of teachers and leaders reported experiencing work-related stress (down from 89% in 2024), and 64% said they didn’t have sufficient personal time (down from 70%). Retention intentions moved the same direction: 29% said they were considering leaving the profession within 12 months, down from 34% in 2024 and 36% in 2023, though still above the 25% recorded when the survey began in 2022.

Contracted hours versus actual hours: where does 50 come from?

One of the most common sources of confusion, and genuine grievance, is what a teacher’s contract actually requires versus what the job takes in practice. Under the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, teachers in England can be directed to work a maximum of 1,265 hours across 195 days a year. Spread across the roughly 39 teaching weeks of the school year, that works out to around 32 hours a week of “directed time” — the hours a headteacher can formally require you to be in school doing specific things: teaching, PPA, briefings, parents’ evenings, INSET.

What directed time deliberately doesn’t cover is marking, lesson preparation and general professional duties. Teachers are still required to do “such other reasonable time as may be necessary” for these, but that time isn’t capped, isn’t directed, and in practice isn’t tracked by anyone but the teacher doing it. That’s the gap between the 32-hour contractual figure and the roughly 50-hour reality the DfE survey keeps finding: somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week of undirected, largely unpaid, largely evening-and-weekend work that the system assumes will simply happen. It’s not a loophole so much as a structural feature of how teaching contracts were written, and it’s why “just work your contracted hours” is not, in practice, advice anyone can follow and still do the job properly.

What’s actually driving the hours: marking, planning and data

The DfE’s own workload reduction work, going back to the 2016 independent review groups and the 2018 workload advisory group, identified the same three culprits that still dominate teachers’ own accounts of where their evening goes: marking and feedback, planning and resourcing, and data collection and entry. That’s also the structure the DfE’s Workload Reduction Toolkit is built around, and it’s why it exists in the first place.

The last survey to break time down by task in detail was the 2019 Teacher Workload Survey, the final one run under the old name. It found real improvement on the 2016 baseline: primary teachers and middle leaders had gone from a 55.5-hour week in 2016 down to 50 hours in 2019, and secondary from 53.5 down to 49.1. Time spent on marking, planning, pupil supervision and admin had all fallen. But the same survey found that despite those falls, over half of both primary and secondary teachers and middle leaders still said they were spending too much time on administration, marking and data management specifically — and seven in ten primary respondents, rising to nine in ten in secondary, still rated workload a “fairly” or “very” serious problem. Fewer hours on a task doesn’t automatically mean it stops feeling unmanageable, particularly when the hours that remain are squeezed into evenings.

International data backs up that these three areas are genuinely the pressure points, not just a British perception. The OECD’s TALIS 2024 study, published in 2025, found teachers in England among the most stressed in the survey, alongside Portugal, Hungary and Belgium’s Flemish community, with the main drivers being excessive administrative work, marking, and lesson preparation. TALIS also found that time spent on admin, marking and communicating with parents has a disproportionately large negative effect on teacher wellbeing compared with time spent teaching itself — a finding that matches what most teachers would tell you anecdotally: it’s not the lessons that wear you down, it’s everything wrapped around them.

Behaviour is now a workload issue too

A driver that gets less attention in the hours-and-minutes data but shows up strongly elsewhere is pupil behaviour. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025, its ninth annual survey and based on responses from more than 3,000 education staff, found 82% of respondents reported that challenging behaviour had increased and had negatively affected their own mental health and wellbeing. The same report found 70% of staff were providing emotional regulation support to pupils on a weekly basis, a 31% increase on pre-pandemic levels. None of that shows up as “workload” in a timesheet, but it’s real load all the same, and it’s part of why a shorter working week doesn’t automatically translate into a more sustainable one.

Is any of this actually improving?

Cautiously, yes, on the headline hours and stress figures, and it’s worth naming that honestly rather than either dismissing it or overselling it. The direction of travel across the DfE’s own annual survey since 2022 has been consistently downward on hours and on the proportion calling their workload unacceptable. Government evidence pointed to unnecessary hours — work that adds no value to teaching or pupil outcomes — falling from an estimated 8.75 hours a week around the time the Workload Reduction Toolkit launched in 2018 to just over 7 hours a week more recently. The toolkit itself, still freely available on GOV.UK, is built around a simple test for data collection specifically: if a piece of data isn’t going to be used to inform a teaching decision, it shouldn’t be collected. That’s a genuinely useful filter to apply to your own school’s tracking sheets, not just a policy slogan.

The new Ofsted inspection framework, which came into effect in November 2025, has also written workload considerations directly into the inspection handbook. It states that inspectors should consider whether a school’s data collections are “proportionate, represent an efficient use of school resources, and are sustainable for staff,” and that assessment “should support the teaching of the curriculum, but not substantially increase teachers’ workloads.” Whether that survives contact with real inspections is a fair thing to be sceptical about, and plenty of school leaders already are: the accompanying inspection toolkit itself runs to around 80 pages, and Teacher Tapp polling found only 5% of teachers felt positive about the new framework overall, against 27% negative. A policy that names workload as a concern isn’t the same as one that reduces it, and it will take a few inspection cycles before anyone can say with confidence which this turns out to be.

It’s also worth being honest about how thin the progress still is. A workload survey noted that a classroom teacher’s working week had reduced by less than an hour over three years, while leaders were, at one point, working longer on average than they had been back in 2019. And take-up of the DfE’s own toolkit has never been universal: in the first year it was available, only 46% of school leaders surveyed said they’d actually used it. Reduction, where it’s happening, is real but slow, and it isn’t evenly felt across every school or every role.

What you can actually control

None of the system-level context above is an excuse to do nothing at the individual level, because there is real room to claw back hours without waiting for a policy to change. A few things that consistently make a genuine difference, according to both the DfE’s own toolkit guidance and what workload-focused school leaders report:

• Mark for impact, not for evidence. The DfE’s own workload guidance is explicit that marking should be meaningful to pupils’ learning, not a paper trail for someone else to check later. Whole-class verbal feedback, live marking during the lesson, and “one deep mark per unit rather than every piece” are all approaches schools have used to cut marking hours without cutting the feedback pupils actually act on.
• Build a resource bank you reuse, not one you recreate. Planning from scratch every year is one of the biggest avoidable time costs in teaching. Saving, tagging and adapting rather than rebuilding is the single highest-leverage habit most teachers can adopt, and it’s a big part of why platforms like Learnaroo Hub exist at all — ready-made, adaptable resources exist precisely to take the “start from a blank page” tax out of planning and marking, so you’re adapting rather than authoring from zero.
• Get comfortable saying no to non-essential asks. Not every optional working party, non-teaching duty or extra data request needs your yes. Protecting your PPA time and your evenings from things that aren’t contractually required is a skill, and it’s one many teachers were never explicitly taught was allowed.
• Batch admin instead of letting it interrupt you. Checking email or a behaviour system constantly through the day fragments attention and adds hidden time. Two or three fixed windows a day tends to beat “always on.”
• Use directed time for what it’s actually for. If your school allows PPA to be used flexibly, use it for the task that’s genuinely eating your evenings, not whatever feels most urgent in the moment.

What needs whole-school or system-level change

The strategies above help, but they have a ceiling, and it’s important not to pretend individual time management can fix what is, in large part, a structural problem. Some things genuinely need a leadership or policy decision behind them:

• A real audit of data collection. The DfE’s own test — will this data change a teaching decision? — only works if someone with authority applies it school-wide, not just to their own tracking. Individual teachers can’t unilaterally stop filling in a spreadsheet a senior leader has asked for.
• A marking policy that’s actually followed. Plenty of schools have a workload-friendly marking policy on paper that gets quietly overridden by informal expectations at department level. Alignment between what’s written and what’s actually rewarded in book scrutiny matters more than the policy document itself.
• Meeting discipline. Cancelling meetings that could be an email, and protecting the time that’s freed up rather than letting it get colonised by something else, is a leadership call.
• Behaviour systems that are consistently applied. Given how strongly Education Support’s data links pupil behaviour to staff wellbeing, a behaviour policy that’s genuinely backed at every level of the school does more for workload than most timetabling changes.
• Honest engagement with Ofsted’s stated workload commitments. Where inspection or curriculum planning is generating data that has no clear teaching purpose, that’s worth challenging at leadership level, using the framework’s own language about proportionality and sustainability.

Where to get real support

If workload has tipped from “hard but manageable” into something affecting your health, that’s not a personal failing and it’s not something a better to-do list fixes. Education Support is the only UK charity dedicated specifically to the mental health and wellbeing of teachers and education staff, and its free, confidential helpline (08000 562 561) is staffed 24 hours a day, every day, by trained counsellors. You don’t need to be in crisis to call; plenty of people use it simply because term has become unmanageable.

Your union is also worth using well before things reach breaking point, not just when there’s a formal grievance. The NEU, NASUWT, NAHT and ASCL all publish workload-specific guidance, including on directed time and how to raise a workload concern formally with a headteacher, and union reps can often mediate conversations that feel difficult to raise alone.

The honest summary

The most recent data does show real, measured improvement: hours are down for the second year running, fewer teachers call their workload unacceptable, and stress levels, while still very high, have eased slightly. That’s genuine progress and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried under caveats. But 43% still rating their workload unacceptable, 86% still reporting work-related stress, and nearly three in ten still considering leaving within the year are not numbers that describe a solved problem. Individual strategies can claw back real hours. They can’t, on their own, close a gap that starts with a contract written for 32 hours covering a job that consistently takes 50.