School leaders could provide teachers with the flexibility to work from home to complete administrative tasks, a new report commissioned by the government has suggested.
The recommendation comes after the report found that teachers and middle leaders are spending around two hours a day on administration tasks.
Staff said “an upward trend” in the amount of administrative tasks that teachers and senior leaders are required to carry out has been driven by a number of factors, such as an increase in emails from parents or carers since the pandemic and pressures of the new Early Career Framework, the report carried out by CooperGibson Research found.
The report, commissioned by the Department for Education, recommended that “senior leaders might seek to review flexible working practices in schools, such as grouping planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time, to allow teachers to work from home on one occasion during the week”.
It added that the move “would not directly address the specific time-sensitive challenges” of many administrative tasks, but “it might contribute to reducing the overall effect of the workload burden”.
The recommendations and findings come as the government promised to convene a workload reduction task force as part of its response to recent teacher strike action over pay and conditions.
The research, published this week, was made up of in-depth interviews with 14 senior leaders, 14 middle leaders and 10 teachers in 14 primary and 20 secondary schools across England.
Another reason identified for the increase in administrative tasks was a shift towards a more pupil-focused role for teaching assistants, which was reducing their capacity for completing administrative tasks, the report said.
The research also found an increase in curriculum-focused tasks associated partly with the reduction in roles, such as the reprographic officer and curriculum support officer.
The research also recommended that the time required for administrative tasks should form part of any review of PPA time at a national level, and a curriculum support officer “could undertake many of the reported administrative tasks”.
Earlier this year, a Tes survey found that more than two-thirds of school staff (68 per cent) think their workload is unmanageable.
And more than two-fifths of school staff (43 per cent) said they lacked the resources to do their job, up from 41 per cent who said the same in 2022.
