A teacher stays at school until 6 pm, brings work home for the evening, and spends Sunday planning the week ahead. Another maintains boundaries—leaving at contract time, not answering emails evenings and weekends—and faces both judgment and sustainability questions. A survey shows teachers working far more than contracted hours, with implications for wellbeing, effectiveness, and professional sustainability. Teacher workload has expanded while hours in the day have not, creating conditions that strain both teachers and the quality of education they provide.
What Teacher Workload Includes
Teacher work extends far beyond classroom instruction. Planning and preparation design lessons and gather materials. Assessment involves creating, administering, and evaluating student work. Communication with parents, colleagues, and administration takes increasing time. Documentation—report cards, IEPs, incident reports, attendance—creates paperwork demands. Supervision duties, meetings, and school activities add further obligations. Instruction time is a fraction of total work.
The expansion of workload is well-documented. Expectations have increased across multiple dimensions: more differentiation for diverse learners, more communication with families, more documentation for accountability, more meetings for collaboration, more curriculum changes to implement. Each addition makes sense in isolation; cumulatively they create unsustainable demands.
Workload varies by assignment. Elementary teachers with one class all day face different demands than secondary teachers seeing 100+ students daily. Teachers of subjects requiring extensive marking (English, humanities) have different grading loads than those in subjects with less written work. Special education teachers managing multiple IEPs face particular documentation demands. Not all teaching positions involve equal workload.
Hours Worked Versus Hours Contracted
Teacher contracts typically specify instruction time and school presence rather than total work hours. The assumption that work beyond instruction and meeting time will be required is embedded in professional expectation rather than explicit contract terms. This structure makes it difficult to establish clear boundaries around reasonable work hours.
Surveys consistently show teachers working well beyond contracted hours. Studies report average work weeks of 50-60 hours during school year, with some teachers working substantially more. The gap between what's contracted and what's worked represents substantial unpaid labor that teachers provide and systems depend on.
Comparison with other professions is complicated. Many professional positions involve work beyond standard hours. But teaching is unusual in having most work compressed into school months, with preparation and marking extending into evenings and weekends. The pattern of teacher work differs from typical professional work patterns.
The Sustainability Problem
Unsustainable workloads contribute to teacher burnout, turnover, and health problems. Teachers who work excessively eventually face exhaustion that affects their teaching, their wellbeing, and sometimes forces departure. The workload that systems depend on is not sustainable for many teachers over full careers.
Early career teachers face particular sustainability challenges. Lacking efficiency that comes with experience, they may need more time for preparation while also facing steep learning curves. The teachers most vulnerable to burnout may be those newest to the profession, whose departure wastes preparation investment.
Sustainability questions affect career decisions. Potential teachers may avoid the profession seeing its demands. Current teachers may leave for less demanding work. Those remaining may reduce families or other life dimensions to accommodate work demands. The sustainability crisis affects both who teaches and how they live.
Workload and Quality
Teacher workload affects educational quality. Teachers with time to plan thoughtfully deliver better instruction than those scrambling. Teachers who can reflect on practice improve; those too busy to reflect stagnate. Teachers who maintain wellbeing bring different energy than those who are depleted. The workload-quality connection argues for workload management as educational quality strategy.
But workload concerns can seem like complaints rather than quality arguments. The "work smarter not harder" response suggests teachers should be more efficient. The comparison to other demanding professions suggests teachers should expect long hours. These responses dismiss workload concerns without engaging the quality implications.
Some workload elements directly serve quality (planning, assessment); others less clearly (documentation, meetings). Distinguishing high-value from low-value time use could help prioritize. But systems often add requirements without corresponding analysis of whether additions improve outcomes or merely add burden.
Addressing Workload
Workload reduction could come from multiple sources. Reducing class sizes distributes student load. Providing more preparation time enables planning within school hours. Reducing non-teaching duties frees time for core work. Limiting meetings and bureaucratic requirements reduces low-value time demands. Each approach has resource implications that constrain implementation.
Efficiency improvements might help some workload challenges. Better systems for routine tasks could reduce time demands. Sharing planning among teachers could reduce individual preparation burden. Technology could streamline some communication and documentation. But efficiency gains have limits, and too often efficiency rhetoric blames teachers for system-created problems.
Collective agreement provisions address workload in some jurisdictions. Limits on meeting time, guaranteed preparation periods, and class size provisions attempt to bound demands. These provisions help but don't fully address workload expansion that occurs despite contractual protections.
Boundaries and Expectations
Individual teachers make choices about boundaries. Some accept extensive hours as the price of good teaching. Others maintain firmer limits, accepting that some tasks won't get done or won't get done well. These individual choices have professional and personal implications.
Collective norms around hours affect individual choices. In schools where working late is standard, those leaving earlier face judgment. In schools where boundaries are respected, sustainable practice is easier. The culture of work hours shapes what individuals feel able to do.
Student and parent expectations also matter. Teachers who don't respond to evening emails may face criticism. Those who don't provide extensive feedback may be seen as inadequate. Managing expectations while maintaining sustainability requires communication and, often, institutional support.
Questions for Consideration
How many hours do teachers you know actually work? What workload elements are most problematic—instruction time, preparation, assessment, communication, administration? What would reasonable teacher workload look like, and what prevents its achievement? If teacher workload is unsustainable, what changes would make it sustainable?