Make the workload manageable

Maslach and Leiter (1997) identify increasing workloads with a decreasing lack of control given to employees. As more control is exercised by the leadership, school staff morale sinks because staff feel that they are being micromanaged and their professional opinion is being eroded or ignored.

One of the tasks that teachers identify as onerous is report writing. Could your school reduce or reformat report writing while still retaining parent feedback on their children’s progress?

Some schools have replaced written reports completely with continuous feedback. In one school, each teacher was asked to contact a number of parents each week and comment on something that their child had done well. Each child in the class had to be included during a specific time period. This included ‘small wins’ like trying harder and standing quietly in the lunch queue for children who struggled with classwork or behaviour. Parents were asked to reinforce the teacher’s comment by praising their children when they got home from school. The school found that behaviour and effort increased and that parent involvement in their children’s education increased.

Top tips

• One way of reducing report writing time is to use ‘Dictate’ in Word. Another is to use a voice reporting system where the teacher feeds back to parents, creating an audio file. The file is then saved in the cloud for the parent to listen to. 
• Consider a system that allows teachers to text parents instead of writing reports. This cuts down time spent calling parents and getting no reply and leaving voice messages.

Further resources

• Read Chapter 7 (There is Another Way) in Cultures of Staff Wellbeing and Mental Health in Schools by Waters, S. (ed.) (2021).
• Read Chapter 3 (What Causes Burnout?) in The Truth About Burnout by Maslach, C. and Leiter, M.P. (1997).

A pinch point is where a number of meetings and/or deadlines happen on the same day, week or month. The aim of this intention is to help distribute staff workload as evenly as possible throughout the year. To minimise pinch points, you should consider ‘auditing’ your school calendar.

Your school calendar will include:

• public/meetings deadlines, shared with parents and your school community, such as parents’ meetings
• the internal calendar, shared with staff, such as the schedule for staff meetings.

Some categories might overlap: parents’ meetings with teachers, for example, are both public and internal.

It is challenging for the senior leader or headteacher to devise your school calendar to ensure that the workload is distributed equally or fairly for every staff member. It is also impossible to create a teaching timetable that accommodates the personal circumstances of every member of staff. However, it is possible in most cases to move further towards a workable compromise between home and school demands.

Your school calendar will be more flexible than the timetable. When drawing up your school calendar:

• Ask staff about their home commitments and their school commitments, and also any other factors that they would like to be considered.
• Next, consider whether it is possible to accommodate staff requests and make a note where it is impossible to do so.
• Then send a draft of the calendar to the staff for comment and ask them to identify any deadlines that cause additional workload or are unworkable. There might be clashes of meetings or days or weeks where a number of deadlines create a difficult or impossible workload.
• When finalised, you can send a copy of your school calendar to all staff.

When considering meetings, be sure to ask the following questions:

• Have you reduced the number of meetings staff attend?
• If meetings are being used primarily for information sharing, is there another way this could be done?
• Do team meetings have a productive focus, such as collaborative planning or assessment?
• Do meetings have agendas?
• Do they finish on time?

Top tips

• Consider asking staff who are not members of SLT to work alongside you in drawing up the calendar. This is good CPD for aspiring senior leaders. It also underlines that the process is open and transparent.
• Keep staff informed about the stages the calendar will go through and actions that will be taken at each point.
• During the academic year, be prepared to make changes to the calendar. Unforeseen issues might emerge or other factors that were not in play when you consulted the staff.

Foreseeing and removing clashes of deadlines during planning, while helpful, is unlikely to identify competing deadlines for all members of staff in practice. The impact on individual staff caused by unintentional overlap between deadlines might only become evident during the academic year when the school calendar is practically implemented. In addition, dates and deadlines sometimes move in response to unforeseen events and create clashes.

The larger your school and the more complex your school calendar, the more difficult it is to predict competing staff deadlines that lead to work overload for any one member of staff. Furthermore, the impact on individual staff caused by the overlap between departmental or year group deadlines, combined with their timetables, might only become evident during the academic year.

Here are some actions you can take if a member of staff identifies a pinch point of work overload:

• Consider whether this pinch point affects a group of staff. Ask the person responsible for your school calendar to investigate this possibility.
• If a group of staff is affected, go back to your school calendar. Can the deadline be moved or modified without causing work overload elsewhere? If it can be modified without causing work overload elsewhere, amend the deadline. If it can’t be modified without causing work overload elsewhere, and it is only one or two members of staff who are affected, can you take action to address their concerns?
• Can the member of staff’s individual calendar of meetings and work in directed time outside the classroom be amended to remove the pinch point? If not, can the member of staff be compensated for the additional workload caused by the pinch point? For example, coming into school later or leaving earlier; removing the need to attend an internal meeting; reducing their marking load; removing a pupil supervision duty for a time.

Top tips

• Be prepared to make adjustments to the person’s individual workload.
• Avoid blaming the person responsible for your school calendar and taking the stance that nothing can be done.
• Even if there is no way of moving the individual teacher’s deadline, reducing their workload in other ways will reduce stress and pressure.

Marking is frequently mentioned by teachers as adversely impacting staff wellbeing. Together with planning, marking occupies most of the time teachers work outside the classroom and figures highly as a cause of teacher work overload.

Yet there is limited evidence that marking pupils’ individual books has a positive effect on their learning or progress. There are many strategies your school can consider when moving away from the practice of individually marking pupils’ work:

• Adopt a ‘no marking’ policy.
• Use verbal feedback.
• Eliminate deep marking.
• Only give written feedback in lessons.
• Use peer assessment and self-marking to involve children in their own progress and help them see for themselves what to do next to make progress.
• Using real-time assessment and technology (i.e. class polls, quizzes, surveys)
• Rotate in-depth marking – mark one group of children in depth each day, and light-touch mark the remaining groups. All will receive detailed marking over a week.
• Use a marking key across your school to reduce teachers’ written sentences in marking, using symbols instead.
• Use printed stickers for frequently used phrases and next steps.
• Build in time for whole-class feedback in the curriculum, such as once every two weeks.

The move away from marking exercise books towards verbal feedback, in particular, has been shown to both decrease teachers’ workload and increase the positive effect on pupils’ learning.

Verbal feedback involves the teacher reading the exercise books of the class when they have completed a piece of work on key learning of a topic or subject. The teacher looks for the level of understanding in the class as a whole and then makes a note of feedback that focuses on successful learning and identifies aspects of the topic which have not been well understood. The teacher then gives feedback to the whole class after returning the exercise books. Pupils can then make their own notes and repeat or revise aspects of their work which they have not learned as well or that they have misunderstood.

Top tips

• Have a marking policy that is agreed by all staff to clearly set out expectations and avoid unnecessary and unachievable levels of marking.
• Especially in large schools and in the secondary sector, you might decide to introduce verbal feedback as a pilot in several subject departments. Follow this with a survey or focus groups of staff and pupils to gather their views, reflecting on the difference between the impact on pupils’ progress and understanding and staff wellbeing, including workload.
• Your governing body needs to be on board with the reasons for any changes in the school marking processes. If your school is trialling verbal feedback, provide them with a copy of the report.
• Any switch in feedback might not be well understood by parents. An explanatory letter home, a note in the newsletter, a description stuck into each pupils’ exercise book – all will involve parents in the process, as well as informing pupils of the reasons for the change.

Further resources

• Read ‘Hunting and Gathering: Marking, assessment and feedback’ (pp. 101–143) in Stop Talking About Wellbeing by Howard, K. (2020).
• Find out more about marking and feedback in this blog by Kat Howard.
• Watch Dylan Wiliam discuss providing feedback that moves learning forward.
• Read this blog about boosting pupil engagement with good verbal feedback strategies.

One of the issues that teachers raise in relation to workload is information overload; in particular, the amount of information that they have to record and submit centrally on pupil progress and behaviour. This can be substantially increased by the requirement to keep extensive records of children with SEND and other children who have specific physical or mental health needs.

Often, the collection of data is linked to marking one-off assessments or controlled conditions assignments or class ‘exams’. In his article in The Guardian, ‘Assessment too often fails to prioritise learning – let’s change that’, Tom Sherrington made the point that ‘… there are books with beautiful, extensive marking comments that students don’t have time to read, may not fully understand and never respond to.’

Data can have the same limitations. Unless students are responding to the data that reports on their progress or summative assessment and the teacher is making adjustments to their teaching because of it, it has limited value and contributes to teacher work overload.

Here are some ideas for reducing the frequency and quantity of data:

• Ask teachers in departments, key stages or year groups (as appropriate) to discuss data drops or deadlines for submitting information and report back their conclusions to leadership.
• Set aside a staff meeting to look together at the number of times data is required from teachers. Identify whole-school issues related to information deadlines and the frequency with which data is required.
• Staff identify actions that will result from the collection of information. If it is difficult or impossible to identify actions that will lead to pupil progress or improvement in behaviour, question the need for the information.

Central to the review of staff providing information are key questions:

• Does the information lead students to take action to improve learning?
• Does the information lead to staff taking action to improve teaching and learning?
• Is the information a proxy for judging teachers, that is, to conclude that an insufficient number of students are not achieving their targets? If so, are there better ways of providing professional development for staff that is more transparent and less judgemental?
• To what extent does your current system of collecting information increase staff workload and decrease wellbeing? How can you ensure that the changes you make will improve staff wellbeing?

Be guided on how you might revise the processes and deadlines for information by taking answers to these questions into account.

Further resources

• Read this article by Tom Sherrington (2019) – ‘Assessment too often fails to prioritise learning: let’s change that’.

Ensuring your staff have capacity to take on any new task, whether individually or part of a larger school-wide initiative, is vital to both its success and their own personal wellbeing. So, before starting a new project or introducing a new policy, make sure you conduct a workload impact assessment and adjust your plans accordingly. Ensuring your staff have capacity to take on a new task is vital to its success and their wellbeing.

Download and use this workload impact assessment to monitor the impact on a teacher’s workload of the introduction of a new or revised policy. The impact assessment will:

• Take into account any duplication of work.
• Identify resources needed.
• Determine any training needs.