Despite everything, the work ethic among teachers remains high. That is the only explanation I have for the outrage and outright hostility facing me at a recent teachers’ conference. There, I proposed that demands imposed on teachers today no longer justify striving for efficiency, but that we need to approach workload more cheekily altogether: instead of trying to do things differently, let’s not do them at all.

Why not find out what little marking, homework-setting, feedback, emails, target definitions, differentiation, etc, we can really get away with? My audience wasn’t happy, accusing me of trivialising a necessary workload debate and belittling professional standards. They took the high road, while I was suggesting shortcuts.

My point of departure is a conundrum inherent in the teaching profession: work-overload is a real issue for many teachers (and maybe the biggest contributor to the substantial drop-out rate among new recruits), while there simultaneously seems to be little appreciation for good professional performance. In the 2016 Teacher Workload Survey, over half of those surveyed cited workload as a very serious problem and most staff disagreed that they can achieve a good balance between their work and private life.

Why work so hard if you get no appreciation?

Elsewhere, the 2009 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Teaching and Learning International Survey briefed that “most teachers work in schools that offer no rewards or recognition for their efforts. Three-quarters reported that they would receive no recognition for improving the quality of their work.” This begs the question: why do teachers work so hard if there’s no appreciation for their hard work? And why do many teachers lack the confidence to put their own needs first?

Workload debates are a staple of Tes, with regular appeals for help on how to cut corners efficiently, while SLTs’ stick of downgrading teachers in observations and putting them on capability seems a real worry. Still, one desperate teacher on the Tes Community website suspects that “there must be tips everyone has, but colleagues would never share because they’d see it as a sign of weakness or wrongdoing”.

This is worrying as it suggests that corner-cutting is happening in shameful secrecy, rather than where it should be happening: out in the open for the benefit of NQTs. It is the less experienced teachers who need pragmatic strategies the most, since they are more likely to contemplate resigning from the profession or adopt a bad attitude of “actively being less caring, less proud of my work, less involved”.

I desperately want teachers to be caring, proud and involved, but I don’t want them to be exploitable perfectionists. In the words of Emma Kell, author of How to Survive in Teaching and a Tes columnist: “Beware of perfectionism - many of the most gifted teachers I’ve known have been plagued by it. It is not (or is rarely) our friend.”

Maybe the workload crisis has reached a point at which self-help books, with mantras about working smarter, not harder, will not resolve matters. Jim Smith’s classic Really Lazy Teacher’s Handbook and similar publications can alleviate some of that pain, but his proposed shift from putting all the energy into learning rather than teaching stops short of my more rebellious approach: if your choice is between giving up or giving in, then please lower your bar. Teachers are subject to unreasonable expectations at the best of times. And these are desperate times, so permit yourself to slip into emergency survival mode now and again.

Teachers face unreasonable expectations

I have seen (and, let’s face it, done) terrible teaching: marking only those exercise books of students with parents who care about that sort of thing, changing most class tests to multiple choice (including those on poetry), creating a marking chain of Year 9 students marking the test papers of Year 7 and Lower Sixth students marking those from Year 9, showing films just to create the breathing space to plan upcoming lessons, not giving homework ever and selling this to the PTA as Montessori, teaching the same lesson in different year groups with slightly increased expectation levels, teaching the same lesson repeatedly to the same lower set until they finally noticed. Are you outraged yet?

Before you judge, consider that the question here is not whether teachers could do better, but if they stay in the profession and achieve a half-decent work-life balance at all. The examples above belong to passionate teachers who value their students’ progress. The only thing they did is to accept that, even unprepared and lacklustre, they have more to offer to their students than if they weren’t there at all (because of burn out, fatigue or cushy private sector jobs). And we, as SLT, support that.

Our support receives constant validation in the vague and contradictory nature of educational research. If you want to question received wisdom in education, there’s a lot of ammunition out there. Take the classic workload factors marking and homework; neither has been proven to universally contribute to students’ progress, but both remain yardsticks for teacher performance. When a worried mother asked about a complete absence of marking and comments in her child’s exercise book on mumsnet.com, even other teachers came out to berate their colleagues as “being somewhat underwhelming”.

However, teachers ratting out each other should consider that evidence is not (yet) on their side. In 2016 HMI national director for education Sean Harford clarified that “there is remarkably little high-quality, relevant research evidence to suggest that detailed or extensive marking has any significant impact on pupils’ learning”. Former King Edward VI Grammar School headteacher Tom Sherrington thus recommends that “if you ever feel that you are only marking to satisfy your head of department, rather than because it will actually help your students to improve within the flow of your lessons, then stop”.

Maybe we should also stop giving homework. John Buell reported in Australian Teacher Magazine that “for a practice as solidly entrenched as homework, the scholarly case on its behalf is surprisingly weak and even contradictory,” while an American study reported in Psychology Today came to the interesting conclusion that more experienced teachers assigned less homework. Maybe neither marking nor homework deserve to be status symbols for teacher conscientiousness.

Yes, it might be that we tenured German teachers with all our civil service perks are more willing to bend the rules in order to pursue our own professional goals, regardless of bureaucrats’ pressure. And maybe the anachronistic English duality of private and sink schools makes for a very different work environment, but in all European countries, it is a sellers’ market for teachers.

Educators are in short supply and should rightly be courted by schools, SLT and local authorities. At any given time, there are more than 2,000 teaching vacancies in England on Tes jobs alone. Teachers should start to feel like the scarce resource they are.

It is a great job and, in the words of Tom Sherrington, “teachers do actually have a lot of autonomy and they need to use it. Make your lessons enjoyable for yourself as well as your students; teach the fun stuff, tell the stories you want to tell, do things the way you want to.” And if cutting corners enables you to do just that, then cut some corners. You’d still be a better teacher than if you weren’t a teacher at all. Keeping you should be our main worry.

Dr Niko Gaertner is a UCL-trained historian of education and deputy headteacher of Hansa-Gymnasium Grammar School Hamburg, Germany.