“Surprisingly few” academy trusts have a strategic focus on reducing teacher workload, a new DfE study has found.

Today’s research report by Toby Greany, a professor at the UCL Institute of Education/University of Nottingham, found that larger MATs were less likely to have standardised approaches to the issue.

It comes as the DfE continues to make tackling teacher workload a key priority in a bid to address the recruitment and retention strategy.

Today’s research included a national online survey of more than 500 core team members and headteachers in MATs and teaching school alliances, and 23 detailed case studies of MATs.

It concludes: “Surprisingly few MATs and federations have a strategic focus on reducing staff workloads.”

In the survey, 16 per cent of core team members and headteachers in MATs said their organisation has a “mostly standardised” approach to managing teacher workloads.

In contrast, 43 per cent of core team members and 63 per cent of heads said their academy trusts left the issue up to individual schools. 

Almost a third (32 per cent) of core team members and heads in MATs with one to three schools said their workload reduction approach was mostly standardised.

This fell to 13 per cent in MATs with four to six schools and just 6 per cent in MATs with seven or more schools.

The document says that in its interviews “very few of our case study MATs or federations appeared to have a defined strategy for monitoring or reducing staff workloads”.

However, it added: “That said, most could point to how they were working to streamline systems and processes in ways that they argued would support more efficient working and so reduce workloads.”

It says these could include efforts to reduce the burden of collecting data for the central MAT team and work to reduce the amount of marking teachers have to do.