Multiple education secretaries have pledged to tackle high workloads for teachers and school leaders.

They’ve established review groups, advisory groups and taskforces; they’ve commissioned research and provided toolkits.

But despite all of this, almost two-thirds of teachers around the world still say they are working nearly an extra day a week because of their high workload.

This is one of the findings from the Teacher Wellbeing Report 2026: Global, produced by Tes (which Tes magazine is part of), based on surveys of almost 3,000 educators working across 196 countries.

More than one in three teachers surveyed estimated they do more than nine additional hours per week, and the report suggests this kind of culture had become normalised in teaching.

So why hasn’t the dial moved on workload?

Policy churn and teacher workload

In a Tes webinar earlier this week, leaders from across the sector shared their thoughts.

Teachers and school leaders expect to work hard, particularly during term time, James Bowen, assistant general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said.

But what bothers them is having to spend time doing things like filling in forms “that you think is going to have no impact on the children whatsoever”.

“Successive governments have tried to tackle this,” he added.

“This has been going on a very, very long time.”

One of the main reasons for the lack of progress on workload is the policy churn that has resulted from education secretaries not staying in the job for long, Bowen said.

In the past decade, there have been 10 different education secretaries (five of whom famously served at least part of their tenure in 2022 alone) and three different Ofsted chief inspectors. This has meant new policies and new inspection frameworks.

“I think that lack of policy stability for schools definitely plays into this,” Bowen said. “It feels like you’re constantly trying to adapt and catch up with the latest government initiative.”

Schools plugging the gaps

Teachers and schools are also increasingly feeling that they have to step in to fill gaps caused by the erosion of wider social and support services, he added.

Research in 2024 found that schools had become the biggest source of charitable food and household aid to help families struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.

When the current academic year began, the Association of School and College Leaders warned that the burden placed on teachers had “never been higher”.

Charli Faux, subject lead for life skills and school mental health lead at Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School in Hertfordshire, said that when her school recently surveyed staff on workload, the areas where they were increasingly likely to say workload felt excessive were around meeting pastoral needs.

“As teachers, we are being expected to fill more of those roles,” Faux said during the Tes webinar discussion.

“The mental health of our young people is something we’re spending a lot more time on. Managing the needs of pupils with SEND also came up quite a lot.”

This is that “extra work around the teaching, the bits that we want to do, we need to do and we’re happy to do, but they do take a lot out of you”, she added.

Finally, Bowen said schools are in a state of constantly feeling they should be gathering evidence to have things ready for an Ofsted visit.

“I think that kind of low-trust accountability system, unfortunately, when you unpick it, generates a lot of workload in the system as well,” he said.

Kulvarn Atwal, principal learning leader at The Thinking School Federation, also highlighted the pressures of high-stakes accountability.

“And then all of a sudden you get a new inspection framework and the goalposts are moved, and you’re adapting for all the necessary requirements for that,” he said.

The international picture

The issue of heavy workload varies across international schools, Rhiannon Phillips-Bianco, head of wellbeing at the schools group Globeducate, said.

International schools are not as impacted by domestic policy churn, she said, but do often feel the effects of the lack of wider social services.

“Within different countries there are very different systems, and it’s very hard to access external services,” she said.

“Very often there are difficulties in terms of language and getting access to local services. I think international schools have stepped into that role for a very long time and are used to that challenge.”

In the UK, national interventions aiming to reduce staff workload have cut some things out, said Atwal.

But he added that “it’s almost as if that vacuum gets filled by other things”.

How can schools tackle long hours?

In some ways, teachers can also act against their own best interests, the webinar heard.

“I think culturally there’s this expectation that teachers do a significant number of hours over directed time every week,” Atwal said.

“And somewhere along the line, there’s some guilt built into that, like you can’t do the job without doing those hours. I think that’s where leaders have to come in.”

Structures and cultures in schools need to shift so that teachers are paid if they do overtime, he said.

A culture of overtime should not be normalised, Faux said, and leaders can help to tackle this.

“I know that what my school does really well is our headteacher and our leadership team really do set that standard,” she said.

“They model the expectations in terms of not sending emails in the evenings and weekends, and going on time and not staying late.

“I had certainly come from working in many schools where that wasn’t the case.”

Faux also said her school designates a week each term when no meetings are allowed to be scheduled after or before school.

“The leadership has to set that culture and it has to be high on their agenda,” she said.

“As a profession, we can be our own worst enemy here,” Bowen added. “Because there is that moral imperative, isn’t there? That sense of ‘you can never quite do enough’ and ultimately it’s for the children.”

Sometimes working long hours is worn as a badge of honour in teaching, he went on, when actually someone in the leadership team should probably go and speak to anyone staying late all the time and see how they can support them.

“I think often there’s a sense of ‘There’s all this stuff to be done and we just need to work the hours to get it done, whatever that takes’,” Bowen said.

“And perhaps sometimes we need to be a bit brave and do a bit of an experiment as a school and say, ‘Realistically, how many hours in a week do we think people have?’”

If we are seeing 8am to 5pm as a standard working day and for 80 per cent of that time teachers are in front of a class, they can’t then fit in three extra hours of non-teaching work, he said.

“I suspect, when we do that audit, we’ll go, ‘We can never fit that amount of work in that amount of time. That’s an impossible task.’”