Dropping on ATL and NUT members’ doormats this week will be a ballot paper asking whether they will vote yes to the ATL and the NUT amalgamating to form a new union - the National Education Union.

There could not be a better time to put forward to teachers, school leaders and other educational professionals the exciting possibility of a new union, one with over 450,000 members. We need a game-changer. Six unions, speaking with separate voices, have not been able to solve the most pressing crisis facing the profession - excessive workload. It is this, more than anything else, that is driving good teachers from the classroom at ever earlier stages of their career and is contributing to the growing number of teachers taking a significant pay cut, choosing to work part time, so that they can reclaim their weekend. This means, of course, that they work for free - 40 per cent of part-time teachers’ work takes place in their own time.

The publication, yesterday, of the 2016 Teacher Workload Survey gives further proof, if it were needed, that for many teachers and school leaders, what should be an empowering and uplifting profession has become a prison of overwork, stress and exhaustion.

The profession is working insane hours - teachers more than 54 hours a week and school leaders 60 hours a week. The vast majority of teachers (93 per cent) find workload to be a fairly or very serious problem that prevents them from achieving a good balance between their work and private life.

So what is causing this workload epidemic? It is not the hours that teachers spend doing what it says on the tin - teaching. The average teaching timetable of 21.6 hours is no longer than that in other OECD countries. The tasks that pile on the hours in England and cause the pressure, exhaustion and stress are those undertaken to “support” teaching, and, in particular, lesson preparation and marking. These take the “average” teacher more than eight hours a week each to complete - the equivalent, per week, of two full working days.

I have thought long and hard about the fundamental drivers of the teacher and school leader workload crisis. I conclude that, at its heart, is an accountability system that drives the profession to believe it has to document everything it does. Put bluntly, Ofsted inspection judgements, school league tables and floor standards rule the roost. School leaders have become, justifiably, terrified of a poor inspection judgement, or of a fall in the league tables, and their fear is passed down in the school to their teaching staff, who labour to prove, by reams of useless documentation, that they are doing their job properly. 

And while Ofsted has made welcome moves to publicise that it does not expect to see lesson plans or marking in any particular format, it is not able to give the profession a clear idea of what it does want to see. If inspectors are not wedded to particular lesson plan formats or marking frameworks, then just what is required of school leaders and teachers? They are left scratching their heads, anxious and insecure of whether their documentation will be acceptable to the inspection team walking through their school door.

The accountability framework for England’s schools drives perverse outcomes - the worst being an under-confident, empirically impoverished teaching profession. The sad truth is that teachers, with their noses to the planning and marking grindstone, desperately trying to prove that they are teaching effectively, have no time to access effective CPD. It is this that would give them the confidence, based on good evidence, to ask difficult questions and, if necessary, to stand up and be counted, and refuse to implement the latest daft idea dreamt up by politicians in their endless drive to demonstrate that they are fearlessly driving forward their agenda.

The government’s action plan in response to its own workload survey is weak. It focuses on more guidance to schools to reduce non-teaching workload - guidance that has been available for some time and has shown no signs of tackling the problem effectively.  

So here, gratis, I give politicians two solutions to the workload crisis:

1. Conduct thorough, independent and impartial research into Ofsted. How reliable and valid are Ofsted’s judgements of school quality? Does inspection, in its current form, raise standards of teaching and learning? There is growing evidence that the answers to these key questions are not “yes”. And if impartial, independent evidence suggests that Ofsted does not fulfil its mission to raise standards of education for the nation’s pupils, then there must be radical change in the way we account for school quality. ATL has done serious work on this key issue (https://www.atl.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/policy-posts/vision-inspection)
2. Politicians should commit to undertake independent evaluation of their own policy reforms. Is the new national curriculum raising standards? Are the new GCSE and A levels fit for purpose? Is performance-related pay working to raise the quality of the teaching profession? I know what I think are the answers to these questions.  Politicians think that they do too - but where is the evidence to determine who is right?

There can be no more powerful investment that a country can make than in its education system.  As Kevin Courtney, general secretary of the NUT, says: “If you think education is expensive, try the alternative.” No education system can thrive when it drives its teaches out of the profession. 
Without teachers,  pupils fail. 

I finish with a conversation I had last week with a maths teacher who was giving up a day of her half-term to attend the launch of the Charterd College of Teaching. I asked her how things were going. Her eyes filled with tears. “Things are terrible,” she said. She is second in maths in a large comprehensive school. There are 12 members of the department, some SLT members and some part-timers, and at the start of this school year it was fully staffed. Now, two teachers are on long-term sick with stress and one, an NQT, has left the profession because he “could not face 40 years of working every hour God sends”. 

The maths teacher told me that she was planning work for the supply teachers, who themselves were educated in maths only to GCSE level.  She described how she had pupils clinging to her desk at break and lunch times asking to be taught by her. Then she turned and said: “But why should I be in my classroom every break and lunch time and evening? Why can’t I have a break in my working day to catch my breath and to think about what I have to do next?”

There’s no answer to that, is there?

Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of the ATL union. She tweets as @MaryBoustedATL