From the start of the new school year, Ofsted inspectors will routinely ask headteachers how they intend to reduce their teachers’ workload.

Sean Harford, the inspectorate’s national director of education, announced this in a tweet yesterday in which he called on headteachers to make a single pledge to reduce their staff workload.

He also said that Ofsted would be focusing on ensuring that senior leaders consider the workload implications of policies before introducing them.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, questioned whether this was the best way for Ofsted to announce new policy initiatives. “Twitter is for videos of cats doing something funny,” he said. “I’d prefer to hear policy announcements through the formal channels.

“If certain questions are going to be asked of school leaders, at the very least, we’d have liked to have some consultation about it. Questionnaires to staff in themselves generate workload. You can’t be using questionnaires to drill into every aspect of what a school is or isn’t doing.”

But the suggestion has inspired some teachers. Within a day, there were 90 responses to Mr Harford’s tweet.

Many said that the best way for headteachers to ensure that staff were not working excessively was to lead by example:

Others suggested that the best way to work out what teachers wanted was simply to ask them:

A number of teachers called for the removal (or at least the delegation to admin staff) of admin tasks. And they called for senior managers to consider carefully whether tasks would genuinely enhance teaching and learning in the school.

Several, meanwhile, homed in on homework, as one of the biggest sources of teacher workload.

Inevitably, many also identified the one single source of teacher workload that Mr Harford was in a singularly good position to tackle:

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