Ranked: The school tasks teachers think they are spending too much time on

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  • Both primary (65%) and secondary (78%) school teachers think general administrative work is the non-teaching task they are spending too much time on
  • Equally primary (52%) and secondary (41%) school teachers place organising resources and premises, setting up displays, setting up/tidying classrooms as the support/management activity they are spending too much time on
  • Interestingly, 53% of primary and 61% of second school teachers believe they are spending too many hours on marking and correcting pupils’ work

In the backdrop of constant budget cuts, teachers are under huge pressure to provide students the best possible educational experience with the resources available to them.

This challenge can be signified by recent research by UCL’s Institute of Education (IOE), who found that one in four teachers worryingly work more than 60 hours a week.

Interested in teachers’ workloads, TheKnowledgeAcademy.com analysed the latest findings from Gov.uk, who surveyed 4,329 primary and secondary school teachers across the UK to discover the non-teaching tasks as well as the support/management activities they think they are currently spending too much time on. 

The Knowledge Academy found that both primary (65%) and secondary (78%) school teachers think they are spending too much time on general administrative work.

Thereafter, primary school teachers believe they are spending too much time on individual planning/preparation of lessons (56%).

Whilst, secondary school teachers rank marking/correcting pupils’ work (61%) as the second non-teaching task they are spending too much time on.

Contrastingly, only 11% of primary school teachers think they are spending too much time on pupil counselling. On the other hand, just 9% of secondary school teachers equally state they are spending too much time on engaging in extracurricular activities as well as on teamwork/dialogue with fellow colleagues.

Both primary (52%) and secondary (41%) school teachers place organising resources and premises, setting up displays, setting up/tidying classrooms as the support/management activity they primarily perceive to be spending more time on than they would like to. 

Although 41% of secondary school teachers also feel they are spending too much time on staff meetings. Interestingly, 33% of primary school teachers say the same thing about staff meetings.

Opposingly, just 10% of primary school teachers believe they are spending too much time on appraising, monitoring, coaching, mentoring and training other teaching staff.

Whilst only 9% of secondary school’s teachers think they are spending too much time contacting people or organisations outside of school other than parents.