Quarter of teachers in England report 60-hour working week

One in four teachers work more than 60 hours a week and many work in the evenings, despite successive government promises to reduce their hours, according to a new UCL-led study. The paper, published today and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is the first piece of research to look at data from more than 40,000 primary and secondary teachers in England collected between 1992 and 2017. The findings show that teachers work around 47 hours per week on average during term-time. This includes the time they spend on marking, lesson planning and administration, with there being little change in this figure over time. In the summer term the average working week was nearer to 50 hours. Additionally, teachers in England worked on average eight hours more a week compared to teachers in comparable industrialised OECD countries. For example, in 2018, while the average full-time secondary teacher in England worked 49 hours per week the OECD average was 41 hours.