New government report shows high working hours and stress amongst teachers and leaders
A new research report titled ’Working lives of teachers and leaders – wave 1’ has been released by the Department for Education, this is the first report in a longitudinal study that will run annually for at least five years. The findings are from a survey carried out in Spring 2022 with over 11,000 responses from teachers and leaders across all sectors of education. The survey covered a variety of areas including workload, wellbeing, flexible working, pupil behaviour and pay.
The section on workload reports that leaders worked 56.8 hours per week on average and teachers worked 48.7 hours on average; both of which contravene the government’s own law on maximum weekly working hours. Interestingly, in the call for more flexible working being a solution to issues in teacher recruitment and retention, part-time leaders worked 48.8 hours on average and part-time teachers worked 37.3 hours; both higher than the full-time working week of most professions whilst only being paid part-time salaries. Given that the group with the highest figures leaving teaching are women between the age of 30-39, it is understandable that trying to raise a family and having these hours are a challenge with increasing childcare costs and exhaustion. Although flexible working was evident in 40% of the respondents, it was either part-time working or taking PPA time offsite. Most respondents (57%) thought that flexible working would affect their opportunities for career progression.
What was encouraging was that 62% of respondents rated pupil behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ with a further 22% rating it as ‘acceptable’. With 84% of respondents with teaching responsibilities being satisfied with classroom teaching all or most of the time, it would appear to indicate that other aspects of the job are what is causing dissatisfaction. The results indicate that teacher and leader wellbeing is lower than equivalent wellbeing scores for the UK population and that work has a negative impact. Possibly the view from respondents (69%) that the teaching profession is no longer valued by society has something to do with this or the fact that almost two-thirds did not think their salary reflected the work they did. Perhaps this is why a quarter of respondents were considering leaving in the next 12 months for reasons other than retirement with high workload (92%) cited as the main reason. Overall it is a sad reflection of the state of teaching is at currently and may go some way to explaining the current strike and balloting happening at every level, teachers and leaders.
