The teaching profession had the most workers doing unpaid overtime in the past year, a TUC study has found.
The federation of trade unions found that teachers topped a list of occupations putting in more than four hours of unpaid overtime a week, costing them an estimated £15,000 in lost earnings.
The analysis also found that two in five teaching professionals were doing unpaid overtime. The average weekly overtime across all employees was 4.4 hours. When looking just at the teachers doing unpaid overtime, the weekly figure rose to 26.3 hours.
Other professions with high rates of unpaid overtime include health and social services managers.
The TUC said its analysis is based on the latest Labour Force Survey data from the second quarter of 2023 for the whole of the UK.
Responding to the findings, school leaders said workload is a “key factor” in fuelling the “severe recruitment and retention crisis”.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT, said the “line between hard work and truly crushing levels of workload” is increasingly being crossed.
“This is harming the wellbeing and mental health of dedicated professionals who have, at the same time, faced a decade of real-terms pay cuts, and is a key factor in fuelling the severe recruitment and retention crisis,” he added.
The government missed its target for the recruitment of secondary teacher trainees by 50 per cent this year, according to data published last month.
And the number of state-school teachers leaving the profession hit its highest rate for four years in the academic year 2021-22, with one in 10 (43,997) recorded as having quit the classroom.
Workload reduction task force
Last month, the Department for Education accepted most of the initial recommendations from a newly formed workload task force.
These included scrapping the requirement for schools to operate performance-related pay progression and reinstating a revised list of administrative tasks that teachers should not have to do.
The task force was commissioned to look at how to cut five hours from teachers’ working week, with final recommendations to be made to the government in March.
Mr Whiteman said it is vital that the task force “agrees further tangible action to ease workload and reduce working hours, and that its proposals are implemented by ministers”.
“Immediate action to reduce workload and stress associated with a broken inspection system is an urgent priority.”
Government ‘failed to tackle working hours’
Also commenting on the findings published by the TUC, Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: “The fact that teachers are at the top of the list of professions working unpaid overtime is yet further shameful evidence of the government’s failure to invest properly in our schools and colleges.”
Meanwhile, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the teaching union NEU, said that the government had “shot itself in the foot by failing to tackle working hours for so long”.
Overall, the research by TUC - marking Work Your Proper Hours Day tomorrow - found that UK employees worked £26 billion worth of unpaid overtime in the past year.
The TUC said 3.8 million people did unpaid overtime in 2023, worth thousands of pounds a year for every worker.
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