Fewer than one in 10 senior leaders have found the Department for Education’s workload reduction toolkit useful, according to new research.
Just 9 per cent of senior leaders said that they had heard of the DfE toolkit, read it and found it useful, a new poll by Teacher Tapp has found.
Almost a third (31 per cent) said they had not heard of the toolkit - which includes materials to support schools on data management and curriculum planning - when asked by Teacher Tapp.
The findings come following the formation of a workload reduction task force by the DfE in a bid to reduce teachers’ working hours by five hours per week.
The toolkit was published in the summer of 2018 when recently appointed minister Damian Hinds was then education secretary.
The findings of the Teacher Tapp poll were shared with the Commons Education Select Committee today.
Of the senior leaders who responded to the Teacher Tapp survey asking if they had heard of the workload reduction toolkit, 31 per cent said they had not heard of it, 36 per cent said they had heard of it but not read it, 23 per cent said they had heard of it, read it and not found it useful, and just 9 per cent said that they heard of it, read it and found it useful.
Furthermore, just 4 per cent of senior leaders said that they had looked at and found the DfE’s flexible working toolkit - published this year - useful.
‘Unrealistic’ for leaders to find time
MPs were told today that it was “unrealistic” to expect school leaders to find the time to reduce workload.
Speaking at the Commons Education Select Committee as part of its inquiry into teacher recruitment and retention, Professor Becky Allen, co-founder and chief analyst at Teacher Tapp, said that the toolkit is a big document and leaders need to invest about 100 hours to work through it.
She said that “it’s kind of unrealistic, I think, for school leaders to find the time to focus on school workload reduction”.
Professor Allen added that the priority of reducing workload is “intrinsically a priority that is in tension with [others]”.
She also said that the pressure of a lot of external accountability is placed on school leaders “who when they’re being asked to improve their schools and ensure that they’re good, necessarily, impose a lot of internal accountability on the staff themselves”.
‘Big gaps’ in workload toolkit
Sinéad Mc Brearty, chief executive officer of Education Support, said that the workload toolkit may be able to reduce some hours but “there are big gaps in what it’s able to cover or what it has covered historically”.
Two areas that are outside of the toolkit are “accountability-driven workload” and the “spill-over from wider public services not able to manage”.
Earlier this year, school leaders warned that they are being left to deal with a “tsunami of pressures” hitting pupils’ wellbeing post-pandemic.
Professor Allen added that it is in the “gift to materially change the workload of their teachers but, on the other hand, they would be shooting themselves metaphorically in the foot if they were to do it because they would be undermining their own efforts to lead and run and improve their school”.
In the Tes Schools Wellbeing Report earlier this year, more than two-thirds of school staff (68 per cent) said that their workload is unmanageable.
The DfE has been approached for a comment.
