Now! Let’s Start Talking About Teacher’s Workload Intensity

  By Anna Hogan and Greg Thompson

For decades, teachers have told us their work is increasingly unsustainable.

Curriculum expectations have increased and administrative tasks have multiplied. Dealing with more complex student/family behaviours and needs, and the emotional effects of that work, is taking a toll on their wellbeing. Teachers and school leaders report these expectations are eroding their satisfaction and belief that the demands of their work are sustainable.

These concerns surrounding wellbeing, sustainability and emotional effects are often framed as part of the “workload” issue. Workload is defined by the number of hours teachers and school leaders work each week. But many of the challenges teachers and school leaders are facing can’t be explained by hours of work alone. Our time poverty project argues that to really understand why so many teachers and school leaders view their work as unsustainable, we need to understand the intensity of the work that is done.

This got us thinking, when did workload become the problem in understanding teachers’ and school leaders’ work?

To answer this, in our new paper, we traced how teacher workload became a measurable and governable policy issue in Australia by examining more than sixty years of teacher workforce surveys.

Australian workforce surveys from 1963 to 2023

The earliest comprehensive teacher workforce survey was conducted by the Australian College of Educators (ACE) in the 1960s on behalf of the Federal Government. The 1963 survey focused on uneven teacher training, qualifications and supply in the post-World War II era. The second survey was also administered by ACE in 1979. It added new questions that asked about teacher multicultural competence and difficulties educating a more diverse society. The third iteration of the survey, conducted in 1989 asked new questions about workforce planning. Policymakers were interested in demographics, subject specialisation and career intentions. These surveys are useful in that they shed light on the problems that policymakers and the profession saw as important. The development of the surveys show new ideas and emphases in education.

By the 1999 survey, still conducted by ACE (with the assistance of ACER for the first time), teachers were not being asked many hours per week they spent doing their jobs. This suggests that even in 1999 workload was not yet an object of policy concern. Instead, the problem was framed as a need to build a capable, professional workforce.

Critical contributor

This changed in 2007 with the launch of ACER’s Staff in Australia’s Schools (SiAS) workforce survey. With the demise of ACE, the survey of Australian teachers on behalf of the Federal Government was wholly undertaken by ACER. In the SiAS survey, teachers were asked explicitly about their total working hours per week. It is interesting to follow the creation of this item. A critical contributor to this was the consultant research ACER did in New Zealand. It evaluated the Tomorrows Schools reforms. That survey found a spike in the work school leaders had to do as a result of greater school ‘autonomy’. By introducing a numerical measure, the survey gave workload a new policy reality. Workload could now be tracked and compared. It became the way that governments could understand why teachers were leaving the profession, and subsequently something they could design policies to fix.

This is what policy scholars call problem representation. A problem isn’t just discovered, it’s constructed through the language and measures that are chosen. Once workload was defined as “too many hours” the solutions logically became about policies that produce time dividends for teachers and school leaders, or at least policies that appear to.

Time, but not intensity

Since 2007, successive national workforce surveys, including AITSL’s Australian Teacher Workforce Data, have kept hours worked per week as the key indicator. The policy problem is now routinely expressed as excessive hours worked. Governments have responded with time-saving measures: most recently, curriculum resource banks and AI tools that promise efficiency.

These interventions may reduce the time spent on some tasks. But they are unlikely to ease the intensity that makes work seem unsustainable. Teachers describe fragmented days, persistent interruptions, the need to continually switch between tasks, an ever increasing list of urgent tasks that must be prioritised and escalating emotional demands. None of these fit neatly into the number of hours a teacher is working.

In other words, by defining the problem of teachers’ and school leaders’ work narrowly as hours worked, we’ve closed off a more complex understanding of what’s actually making teachers’ and school leaders’ jobs unsustainable.

Why this matters 

Australia is debating how to keep teachers in the profession. Workload has become the headline explanation for teacher shortages and burnout. But if our definition of workload is incomplete, so too are the solutions.

Workforce surveys are often seen as neutral tools, but they do powerful discursive work. By asking particular questions, and not others, they shape how governments, media, researchers and the public think about teacher and school leader work. When the problem is too many hours, the policy focus becomes technical and managerial. The harder questions about system structure get pushed aside.

If we want to address the real pressures on teachers and school leaders, we need to measure more than hours. We need to capture intensity. That means rethinking the questions we ask in workforce surveys. It means rethinking the way we use that data in designing policy interventions.

This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.

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